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Let him feel what it’s like when I’m the one slipping through his fingers.
From somewhere below, a siren started to wail. Police or Coast Guard or hell, maybe Homeland Security. Who knew? The wind carried the sound upward in eerie distortion.
Jessa was crouched now, clearly terrified. “We need to go, Vivi. Like now. I’m not kidding. They’ll arrest us. And if we fall …”
But I couldn’t climb down yet.
Not until he saw.
I turned toward the camera, standing tall—arms outstretched, hair whipping, Charleston glittering like a promise at my back.
And I smiled.
The kind of smile that said,Come get me, Cipher.
8
ELIAS
My screens flickered, a grid of code and grainy feeds, but all I saw was her. Vivienne Laveau, silhouetted against Charleston’s glittering skyline, arms wide like a goddamn siren on the Ravenel Bridge. The footage was everywhere—X, news streams, some asshole’s shaky phone video tagged #CrazyBallerina.
She’d climbed a fucking bridge, four stories up, with nothing but steel and wind between her and a 200-foot drop. And she’d smiled. Smiled like she knew I was watching, like she was daring me to break.
My fingers twitched over the keyboard, itching to erase every pixel of her defiance. I could’ve done it—hijacked the streams, crashed the servers, wiped her reckless stunt from the internet.
But that wouldn’t erase the image seared into my brain: her red curls whipping in the wind, her green eyes blazing, her body balanced on a razor’s edge. She was a glitch in my system, a variable I couldn’t control, and it was driving me insane.
I leaned back in my chair, the leather creaking. My pulse pounded, a relentless drum. My suite was cool, sterile, but Iwas burning, my skin tight with need. Vivi’s scent—jasmine and sweat, raw and alive—lingered from that cramped ballet office two days ago, a ghost I couldn’t shake. I’d killed for her, snapped three necks because they’d dared to touch her world. And now? She was out there, taunting death on a bridge, tauntingme, and I was coming apart, thread by bloody thread.
My phone buzzed, an alert from a script sniffing X for her name. Another post:Ballerina goes rogue on Ravenel Bridge! Who is this chick?I slammed the phone down, the crack of plastic echoing.
My screens hummed, my haven of logic and control, but they were useless tonight. Code was my lifeline, my way of bending the world to my will. Every line, every function, was a puzzle I could master. But Vivi? She was chaos, a storm that mocked my firewalls, and I was drowning.
I stood, pacing the polished concrete, my mind screaming. The demon inside me was awake, snarling for her. I wanted her here, in my space, where I could pin her down, make her see what she was doing to me. I wanted her wrists under my hands, her pulse racing, her defiance mine to break. The thought was a drug, hot and wrong, and it made my blood roar. She wasn’t mine—not yet—but the demon didn’t care. It wanted her claimed, caged, safe from the world, from herself.
My laptop pinged, another alert. I froze, eyes snapping to the screen. A live feed from a news chopper, its spotlight locked on the bridge. There she was, still up there, Jessa crouched lower, looking like she was praying. Vivi stood tall, arms wide, her tank top plastered to her skin by the wind. The camera zoomed in, catching her grin—wicked, fearless, a middle finger to gravity and me. The caption crawled across the bottom:Unidentified women climbing Ravenel Bridge. Authorities en route.
My vision tunneled, red at the edges. Authorities. Cops, Coast Guard, maybe SWAT. She was exposed, and they’d dragher down in cuffs, or worse—she’d slip, and the harbor would swallow her. Charleston’s waters were a graveyard, claiming fools like her every month. The thought of her gone—her laugh, her spark, her infuriating light—ripped a growl from my throat. I slammed my fist into the desk, monitors rattling, but the pain didn’t help. It only made her sharper, brighter, a beacon I couldn’t ignore.
I grabbed my jacket, keys, burner phone. No plan, no pause. My scripts could wait, my firewalls could hold. Vivi was on that bridge, and I was going to get her down, even if I had to climb up there myself.
The demon roared, but this wasn’t just about saving her. It was about owning her, making her understand she couldn’t keep slipping through my fingers. She was mine, whether she knew it or not, and I was done watching from the shadows.
The drive to the Ravenel Bridge was a blur, Charleston’s streets streaking past in a haze. My SUV’s engine growled, matching the storm in my chest. I parked near the base, where a crowd had gathered—gawkers, news vans, cops setting up barriers. The chopper’s rotors thumped overhead. I slipped through the crowd, hood up, face a mask. Nobody noticed me. Nobody ever did. That was my gift—being a ghost, until I chose otherwise.
The bridge loomed, its cables glinting like wires in a circuit, its pylons thrusting into the sky. My tech-addled brain mapped it like a network: access points, weak spots, paths to her.
First, I needed eyes. I pulled out my burner, tapped into the chopper’s feed with a script I’d built for jobs like this. The signal was encrypted, but encryption was just a lock, and I was a master key. Ten seconds, and I was in, the feed streaming to my phone. There she was, higher now, gripping a support cable, her body swaying with the wind. Jessa was below, shouting, but Vivididn’t look down. She looked out, at the city, at the harbor, like she was daring it to take her.
My jaw clenched, my free hand fisting. She was reckless, fucking reckless, and I wanted to shake her, scream at her, pull her into my arms and never let go. The demon was loud, its claws sinking deeper, and I let it. I wanted her safe, but more than that, I wanted hermine. The thought was a live wire, crackling through me, and I hated how right it felt.
I moved, slipping past the cops, who were too busy yelling into radios to notice. The fence was a joke, the lock giving way in seconds. I climbed the ladder, boots gripping the rungs, the wind biting my face. Someone yelled for me to stop. I ignored them.
The harbor stretched below, black and hungry, but I didn’t look down. My focus was her, on the beam where she stood, four stories up, playing chicken with fate.
The higher I climbed, the louder the wind howled, tugging at my jacket, stinging my eyes. A woman in the crowd screamed. The bridge hummed under my hands, a living system, and I felt it—the pulse of steel, the rhythm of its structure. It was like code, predictable if you knew the patterns, and I always did. But Vivi? She was the anomaly, the bug I couldn’t squash, and it was killing me.
I reached the crossbeam where Jessa crouched, her face pale, her braid whipping in the wind. She saw me, eyes widening, but I didn’t stop.