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Teresa groaned, scrubbing a hand down her face.
“You’re going to do something reckless, aren’t you?”
I shot her a wicked smile over my shoulder.
“Probably.”
I wandered back into the empty studio, the rubber soles of my sneakers whispering across the floor. The morning sunwas inching higher now, throwing long beams through the high windows, catching dust motes in golden streams.
I sank down onto the worn bench along the wall, stretching my legs out, and let my head fall back against the mirror.
How exactly did a girl get the attention of a man who lived behind a dozen screens and a hundred walls? Not with polite conversation, that was for damn sure.
He wasn’t the type to be impressed by small talk or batting my lashes across a dinner table. Elias Dane was a man who understood adrenaline. Who respected danger.
Maybe not in the same way I chased it—but he knew the stakes. He just hid from them. Maybe what he needed wasn’t a gentle knock at the door. Maybe he needed the door kicked in.
I smiled slowly, tapping the back of my head against the mirror in a lazy rhythm.
If I wanted him to look away from his precious screens, I’d have to become more interesting than the codes he obsessed over. More unpredictable than the firewalls he built.
Lucky for him, unpredictability was my specialty.
A hundred ideas sparked in my mind.
Some stupid. Some reckless. Some ... delicious.
I could show up wherever he was working, poke at him until that cool mask cracked again.
I could make him chase me the way he clearly didn’t want to.
Or—
I could push harder. Make him have to come find me.
The memory of last night—the fury in his voice, the way his body had tensed like he was ready to dive straight into the harbor after me—sent a shiver racing down my spine.
Elias Dane liked control.
He wasn’t going to give it up.
I was going to make him lose it.
On purpose.
And I was going to enjoy every second of the fall.
6
ELIAS
The morning sun bled through the high windows of my suite, a watery gold that did nothing to warm the cold steel and glass around me. I hadn’t slept. Not a wink. My body was wired, my mind a jagged mess of blood and jasmine, the ghost of Vivienne Laveau haunting every corner of my skull.
I sat at my desk, the screens glowing with lines of code I hadn’t touched since I’d stumbled back to Dominion Hall in the small hours, my hands still tingling from the lives I’d ended. The hackers were gone, their apartment a tomb, their data erased. But the weight of what I’d done clung to me like damp Charleston heat, heavy and unrelenting.
I scrubbed a hand over my face, the stubble rough under my palm. My cologne—once woodsy, sharp—was now overwhelmed by the faint tang of sweat, but it couldn’t drown out her scent, burned into my memory from that cramped ballet office. Sweat and jasmine, raw and alive, like she’d left a piece of herself behind to torment me.
I’d killed for her last night, snapped three necks because they’d dared to touch her world, her data, her safety. And theworst part? I didn’t regret it. Not one fucking bit. The demon inside me was quiet now, sated, but I was unraveling, and she was the reason.