I satin Killian’s apartment in the half-dark, the only light coming from the streetlight outside that spilled through the blinds in thin stripes. His place smelled of him, all expensive cedar cologne and coffee, which did nothing to settle the way my pulse jumped every time a floorboard creaked or a car passed.
I should’ve left after dismantling his security, but I didn’t. Not with the scent of burned lacquer still clinging to my clothes, sweet, acrid, and thick in my lungs. Not with the image of the back rooms at the club lit up in orange and gold, flames licking through shadows as if they were hungry for secrets. I’d watched until the fire caught the bodies of the two guards and Ricardo, and then, I’d joined the millingcrowd of shocked partygoers and waited for the arrival of the firefighters.
The blaze I’d started had been perfectly controlled, surgical, and beautiful. It calmed something in me that hadn’t settled in weeks and stirred something else. I was still hard, the tension in my gut wrapped tight with the memory of heat and light. That feeling—arousal and peace, blood and fire—was always strongest after I burned something that needed to go.
The front door clicked. I stilled. It was too quiet to be Killian—he’d come in loud, furious with what had happened at The Bonehook. This was stealthy, intentional.
A man stepped into view—not Killian—gun drawn, his movements smooth and calculated. He swept the space with sharp eyes, posture tight but fluid, cautious, practiced. Trained. Military, maybe. Special Forces, more likely. He didn’t just enter a room; he cleared it and catalogued every angle as if it might bite him. His finger rested near the trigger, not on it, and his stance told me he knew how many exits the room had—and how quickly he could use them all.
Average height, wiry, dark hair, and glasses that screamedI file taxes for fun.The security detail hadarrived. Unless this was Killian’s boyfriend. My gut turned sour at the thought.
“Five minutes, not bad,” I said, and the man’s arm snapped in my direction fast. A Glock 19, matte black, pointed right at me, no hesitation.
“Hands where I can see them,” he barked. I didn’t flinch. I raised my hands, my fingers spread. “Cops are on their way.” Ah, yeah, there was a bluff.
“No, they’re not.” I said with a smirk, and he stiffened.
”Everything in this room is being recorded and sent to off-site servers.” He stepped closer. His voice was calm, clinical. Not scared. Not bluffing, either.
I smiled, slow and sharp. “You mean your systemusedto transfer to off-site servers,” I said, and flicked on a light as I gestured at the innocuous-looking panel on the far wall, wires hanging from the bottom like guts from a corpse. “I fixed that.”
The man with the gun hesitated a beat, then stepped closer so he could see me fully, his eyes widening. “Jesus. Jamie freaking Maddox,” he said.
I nodded once. He lowered the Glock, tension shifting in his shoulders. Still wary, but not ready to shoot me in the face anymore. Progress.
“What the fuck did you do to my system?” heasked, glancing back at the board as if I’d killed something precious.
“Not that this means anything to a rent-a-cop, but I reprogrammed the root subroutine to kill the transfer protocol,” I said. “Oh, and looped the internal surveillance with a deepfake overlay.”
“And I’m supposed to be impressed?” he asked.
I examined my nails with practiced indifference. “I worked through the biometric lock as well.”
That got a reaction.
His eyebrows shot up, and for a heartbeat, he froze like a program glitching mid-run. The soldier melted away with startling speed, shoulders loosening as the tension drained from his stance. In its place was something quieter and more intelligent. The edge of military precision gave way to academic curiosity, and he holstered his weapon with a distracted flick, like it no longer mattered.
There he was. The nerd under the combat shit. The analyst masquerading as muscle. Eyes sharp behind his glasses, now lit up as if I was a rare exhibit in a zoo. And for the first time, he was intrigued.
“How the hell did you bypass the vascular print scanner?”
“Usual shit,” I said, voice even. “Condensation from Killian’s coffee mug gave me enough for athermal imprint. I mirrored that data against a bluff profile, created a synthetic vascular map, and layered it over a subroutine loop that mimicked pulse detection.”
He blinked. “But that shouldn’t have worked. The scanner’s designed to detect spoofing?—”
“Not when you decouple the real-time feedback buffer and rewrite the confirmation delay protocol. By the time it realized something was off, I was already inside.”
His lips parted as if he were about to argue, then closed again as he considered what I’d said.
“You added a rollback kill-switch, too, didn’t you?”
I smiled. “Made it look impenetrable. And when I was done, it was.”
He gave a low whistle, impressed despite himself. “All that, but you still tripped the backup perimeter,” he pointed out. “Rookie error.”
I shrugged. “Nah, I wanted to see what the response time was.” I checked his watch. “Five minutes. Good thing I’m not here to take out Killian.”
That earned the ghost of a smile. “Killian’s a hard man to shut down.” He sat opposite me, folding his hands in his lap as though we were about to negotiatea ceasefire. “I’m Caleb,” he said. “I work with Killian.”
