The silence in the server room was a living thing, a cold, heavy pressure that had settled between them after the kiss. It was worse than the hum of the cooling fans, worse than the frantic clatter of keys during the cyber-attack.
It was a silence filled with unspoken words, a vacuum where the warmth of the previous night had been.
Elias had retreated so far into himself he was practically a ghost. He sat hunched over his terminal, his shoulders tight, the elegant line of his back curved into a defensive question mark.
His fingers moved across the keyboard with their usual fluid grace, but the energy was different. It wasn’t the creative fire of a master at work; it was the frantic, repetitive motion of a man building a wall, one line of code at a time.
He hadn’t spoken a full sentence to her since morning, communicating only in terse, monosyllabic grunts or, more often, by simply pointing at a line of code on her screen via their shared interface.
Anya’s chest ached with a confusion so sharp it felt like a physical wound. She had allowed herself a moment of vulnerability, of hope, and in return, she’d been handed this suffocating quiet.
She replayed the kiss in her mind—the hesitant touch, the surprising intensity, the raw confession in his eyes. It had felt real, a breakthrough not just in their work but in the very architecture of the man himself.
Now, it felt like she had triggered a system error, causing him to reboot to his default, isolated state. The fortress hadn’t just been rebuilt; its walls were higher and colder than before.
She tried to focus on the code, on the elegant mess of Aegis’s core programming, but her own thoughts were a jumble of buggy syntax. Frustration warred with a pang of empathy.
She knew this was his anxiety, his defense mechanism against an emotional overload he couldn’t process. But knowing didn’t make the rejection sting any less.
She couldn’t take it anymore. The tension was a frayed wire, sparking with every passing second.
She needed a problem to solve, a tangible enemy to fight, something other than the ghost of a man sitting ten feet away.
Pushing back from her chair, she stood and walked to the room’s central console, its holographic display dormant. “I can’t work like this,” she said, her voice cutting through the hum.
Elias’s hands stilled on his keyboard. He didn’t turn around.
On his screen, a cursor blinked in the middle of a half-finished function.
“The code can wait,” she continued, forcing a brisk, professional tone.
“There’s a question that’s been bothering me. A loose thread.”
He finally swiveled his chair, his expression guarded, his eyes—the same eyes that had looked at her with such unguarded intensity—now shielded and distant. “What thread?” he typed onto the shared comms screen, even though she was standing right there.
Anya resisted the urge to scream. Instead, she took a breath and engaged him on his own terms, typing her reply on the console’s projected keyboard.
How did they find me?
Elias’s brow furrowed slightly. He typed back.
Professional mercenaries. They’re good at finding people.
They’re not that good, Anya countered, her fingers flying across the holographic keys. The familiar rhythm of a digital investigation began to soothe her frayed nerves.
I’m a security analyst. My digital footprint is microscopic. My physical address isn’t tied to any public records. I use shell corps for my apartment lease and utilities. They didn’t just find the city I was in; they knew my apartment number, my floor plan. They came prepared for my specific layout.
The logic was undeniable. It was the first thing she would have investigated if she hadn’t been running for her life.
The hunt, the fortress, their work on the patch, and then… him. It had all pushed this fundamental question to the side.
Now, it was the only thing that mattered.
Elias seemed to consider this, his gaze shifting from her to the screen and back. The analytical part of his brain was engaging, overriding the anxious static.
He typed, What’s your theory?
“My theory,” she said aloud, abandoning the keyboard, “is that they didn’t find me on their own. They were given the information.”
She began pacing, the motion channeling her restless energy.
“Think about it. Who had my exact, current home address? The most up-to-date, secure file? My employer.”
The words hung in the air. Thorne Industries. His company.
Elias’s face remained impassive, but a flicker of something—disbelief, denial—crossed his features.
Our HR database is one of the most secure in the world. Triple-encrypted, air-gapped from public networks. Access is logged, monitored, and flagged.
“Exactly,” Anya said, stopping in front of him. “It’s logged. So let’s look at the logs.”
For the first time all day, a spark of shared purpose ignited between them. The awkwardness didn’t vanish, but it receded, pushed aside by the familiar thrill of the hunt.
Elias nodded, a single, sharp dip of his chin, and turned back to his terminal. He pulled up a secure portal to the Thorne Industries corporate mainframe, his credentials granting him god-level access.
“I need the date and time of the break-in,” he said, his voice quiet but clear. Actually speaking.
Anya rattled it off, her memory of that night seared into her brain.
“The attack was at 22:47 Pacific Time. Look for any access to my employee file in the seventy-two hours prior.”
They worked in a new kind of silence now, a collaborative one. Anya stood behind him, watching the lines of data scroll across his screen.
It was an intimate position, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from his body, to smell the faint, clean scent of his soap. She pushed the thought away, focusing on the data.
Elias’s fingers were a blur as he filtered terabytes of logs. “There’s the usual automated system pings from payroll, network permissions… nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Filter for privileged user access,” Anya instructed. “Someone who wouldn’t need to request permission, someone who could just pull the file directly.”
The query refined. The list shrank.
Most of the entries were from HR administrators performing routine tasks. Then, Anya saw it. Her breath caught in her throat.
“There. Stop.”
Elias froze the scroll. On the screen, a single line of text glowed.
`ACCESS: USER.ID=THORNE_EXEC_PRV_7 | FILE.REF=SHARMA.A_EMPL_77B3 | TIMESTAMP=21:12 PT`
The timestamp was ninety-five minutes before the mercenaries kicked in her door. The user ID was a high-level executive credential.
But it was the access point of origin that made Anya’s blood run cold.
`SOURCE.IP=10.1.1.1 | NODE=CORP_HQ_EXEC_FLR`
“That’s from inside headquarters,” she whispered. “The executive floor.”
Elias stared at the line of code as if it were a venomous snake. His entire body went rigid.
“It’s not possible,” he murmured, his voice strained.
“That credential level… it’s firewalled. It can’t be spoofed from outside the network. That request came from a physical terminal in the C-suite.”
“Someone on your executive team,” Anya stated, the reality landing with the force of a physical blow. “Someone with top-level security clearance walked into their office, logged into the system, and pulled my address for the men who tried to kill me.”
The primary conflict, which she had always pictured as a shadowy organization hunting them from the outside, suddenly inverted. The call was coming from inside the house.
The enemy wasn’t just at the gates; they were already in the throne room.
“It could be a stolen credential,” Elias said, his voice thin, desperate to find another explanation. “Someone could have compromised an executive’s account.”
“Look at the login pattern,” Anya urged, her mind racing.
“Is it anomalous? Was it off-hours? Did it trigger any secondary alerts?”
Elias’s hands shook slightly as he typed. He pulled the session data.
The login was authenticated via biometrics—a fingerprint scan tied to the terminal. It had been initiated during work hours.
No flags were raised because, according to the most secure system in the world, it was a perfectly legitimate request from a trusted user.
The system had performed flawlessly. The flaw wasn’t in the code; it was in the person using it.
Elias leaned back in his chair, the color draining from his face. The fortress he had built around himself wasn’t just the island; it was his company, his code, the small, carefully curated circle of people he trusted.
The log on the screen was a betrayal of all of it. He looked utterly lost, like a navigator whose stars had suddenly rearranged themselves into a meaningless pattern.
“Who?” he whispered, the single word raw with dawning horror. “Who has that level of clearance?”
“Your board members,” Anya began, ticking them off mentally. “Your COO, your CFO… your top legal counsel.”
She trailed off, realizing the implication. The list was short. These weren’t strangers.
These were people he had known for years, people he had built his empire with.
One of them had signed her death warrant.
The realization settled over him, and Anya could see the devastating impact. This wasn’t a technical problem he could solve with an algorithm.
This was a human problem, rooted in greed and deceit. For a man who understood the logic of machines far better than the chaotic motivations of people, this was a vulnerability he had no patch for.
The awkward silence from the morning was gone, replaced by something far heavier. The threat was no longer just about a piece of code or a team of mercenaries.
It was a conspiracy, an inside job. And Elias was being forced to confront the terrifying possibility that one of the people he trusted was pointing a knife at his back.