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Dante
“She wore one, too,”I say. “My sister. A bracelet. It tracked her. So I could keep an eye on her. Keep her safe.”
Dahlia stills.
“But they hacked it. Catalogued her patterns. Used my own protocol against me. Against us.”
Lia’s mouth tightens. “You’re saying—my collar does the same. And they did the same tonight.”
“I reprogrammed the chip. I swear. It was supposed to be failsafe. Ironveil is unhackable. Or so I thought. Hell, even you couldn’t get in. Fuck!”
Silence. Except her breath is shaky and sharp with fear.
I look down. She swallows, and the movement shifts the collar that could very easily have ended her tonight, but her eyes don’t waver from mine.
My fingers find the leather. Caress her throat. Wonder why she hasn’t taken it off. Grateful that she hasn’t.
“For a while, after she was gone, I hated her for not stopping when I asked her to. She wouldn’t stop,” I say. A reward for her continuing trust? Or an unburdening of my guilt? Who the fuck knows anymore. “Guilt drove me to pick up her crusade. To keep going.”
Dahlia’s eyes burn. “Then we keep going. We don’t run. We finish this.”
Dahlia
I don’t even realizeI’m climbing into his lap until I’m there—knees on either side of his hips, arms around his neck.
“No more half-truths,” I whisper. “No more pushing me away.”
His throat works. “This ends with them gone.”
“And then what?” I ask softly, opposite of the hard, desperate push inside. “What happens to us?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he kisses me—slow, reverent, hungry.
A kiss that says he doesn’t know, but he wants to.
And that’s enough.
For now.
Two hours later…
The monitor flickers.
I sit cross-legged, laptop open. Dante’s pacing.
“We hit them in seventy-two hours,” he says. “The Gilded Cage. That’s where their servers are. Buried in the basement. That’s why Varric is always there. He was a stooge three years ago. Looks like he’s graduated to watchdog. If we can get in there, we destroy them.”
I nod. “We’ll need two access points. Dual-layer breach. I can ghost my way in digitally, but we’ll need a physical breach too.”
“You and me,” he says. “Just us.” His voiceisharsh, the spikes of betrayal sharp and deadly.
I glance up, into his face, at the arm his assistant shot at. “Because we can’t trust anyone else.”
“Exactly.”
We stare at each other. And for the first time, there’s no wall between us.
No roles. No masks. No seduction.