The quantum processor didn't just decrypt Marcus Thorne's drive; it devoured it.
What would have taken my old botnet three weeks to brute-force, Julian's monolithic black tower cracked in exactly forty-two minutes. I sat back in the ergonomic chair, watching the cascading lines of code translate into readable financial ledgers across the curved OLED display.
Thorne was good. He hadn't just moved the money; he had washed it through a labyrinth of phantom corporations, shell companies in the Caymans, and decentralized crypto-tumblers. It was a digital masterpiece of embezzlement.
But a masterpiece always leaves a signature. And I was the best art critic in the dark web.
My fingers flew across the blank keys. The mechanical clack-clack-clack was the only sound in the sterile, chilled room. I didn't need to look at my hands; the layout was burned into my muscle memory. I isolated a repeating algorithmic pattern in the timestamp of the crypto transfers.
"Got you, you greedy bastard," I muttered to the empty room.
I traced the pattern. It didn't point to a bank account. It pointed to a heavily fortified, hidden server IP located somewhere in Eastern Europe. Thorne wasn't just stealing money; he was funding something else.
As I began to write a custom script to tunnel into the Eastern European server, a sudden, primal prickle crawled up the back of my neck.
It was the instinct of a prey animal sensing the predator in the tall grass.
I stopped typing. The silence in the room suddenly felt heavy, thick with an unseen presence. I glanced up at the reflective surface of the black monitor bezel.
Through the faint reflection, I saw the glass door to my cage was open. He was leaning against the doorframe, bathed in the dim hallway light, a shadow observing his captive.
Julian Sterling.
How long had he been standing there? Minutes? The entire forty-two minutes?
He wasn't looking at the screens. He wasn't looking at the billions of dollars of data I had just unspooled. He was looking exclusively at me. At my hands. At the way my eyes darted across the monitors.
The voyeur had become the viewed.
"You type like you're going to war," Julian's voice drifted into the room, smooth as dark velvet and twice as dangerous.
I spun the chair around to face him, my heart doing a traitorous flutter against my ribs. He pushed off the doorframe and walked slowly toward the obsidian desk, his movements fluid and entirely silent, like a panther stalking its enclosure.
"It is a war," I replied, forcing my chin up. "And your board member, Thorne, is heavily armed. He isn't just embezzling your R&D funds, Julian."
Julian stopped at the edge of the desk, his towering frame casting a long shadow over me. "Enlighten me."
"He's not hoarding the cash," I said, pointing a thumb over my shoulder at the monitors. "He's laundering it through a specific sequence and routing it to an IP in Eastern Europe. I'm currently tunneling into that server, but based on the packet sizes... he's not buying yachts. He's transferring massive, encrypted data files."
Julian's eyes darkened, the temperature in the room seemingly dropping ten degrees. "The R&D blueprints. The automated drone targeting systems."
"He's selling your proprietary weapons tech," I confirmed, my voice grim. "He's committing corporate treason, and likely international espionage."
For a long moment, Julian didn't speak. He stared down at me, his gaze so intense I felt like he was peeling back the layers of my skin, examining the circuitry of my brain. He didn't look angry. He looked... fascinated.
He reached out. Not toward the keyboard, but toward me.
I froze as his long, cool fingers brushed against my cheek, tucking a stray lock of my messy hair behind my ear. The touch was agonizingly slow, a deliberate violation of my personal space that sent a jolt of electricity straight to my core.
"I knew you were the right weapon to buy," Julian whispered, his thumb lightly grazing the sensitive skin just below my jaw. "You see the threads everyone else misses."
"I wasn't for sale," I breathed, hating how weak my voice sounded when he touched me.
Julian leaned down, his face inches from mine, his dark eyes entirely eclipsing my vision. The scent of cedarwood and power was intoxicating.
"Everything has a price, Anya," he murmured, his lips brushing dangerously close to mine as he spoke. "You just haven't realized what yours is yet. Crack that Eastern European server. Find out who he's selling my tech to."
He straightened up, severing the physical connection that left my skin burning, and turned his back on me.
"And Anya?" he paused at the door.
"What?" I managed to say, my pulse hammering in my throat.
Julian looked over his shoulder, a lethal smirk playing on his lips. "I enjoy watching you work. Keep the hoodie. It suits you."
The glass door slid shut.
I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding, my hands shaking slightly as I turned back to the screens. The devil wasn't just holding me hostage; he was getting inside my head. And God help me, I was starting to let him.