Page 62 of Filthy Little Fix

"New job," I say. I walk slowly towards him and extend the tablet. "Svetlana wants this deciphered. Yesterday."

Finally, he turns his face to me. I see the empty energy drink cans around the desk, the coffee cups. The things he's been asking Luca for. Is he eating properly? The exhaustionthroughout his body doesn't match the astute alertness of his state, with the level of detail and perfectionism of each report delivered to me.

He takes the tablet. And I don't leave. I should.

He looks at the data on the screen, and his eyes gain immediate focus.

"AES encryption?" he murmurs. I have the impression he's talking to himself. "Solid math. It's a military standard." He turns back to the computer. He opens a terminal outside his main window, and I see him typing something. He leans back in the chair with a sigh as a secondary blank window opens and loads a wiped operating system in seconds.

I waste no time trying to understand him. "Break it," I say, forcing myself to step away.

But he starts to speak.

"I won't break the encryption."

I narrow my eyes. "What?"

"If you took the fastest supercomputer on the planet today and put it to work exclusively on finding the key, without stopping, it would take a few billion years to test half the possibilities, and that's an optimistic estimate," he says softly, glued to the screen with a feverish intensity, typing again. "The energy needed to compute all the keys, with current technology, would boil all the Earth's oceans more than once. Trying to break the encryption is useless."

This irritates me. His only act of refusal waited to show itselfin frontof me? One of my men would have taken a punch for much less. I suppress the urge to smash his face against the computer screen.

"So you're telling meyoucan't?" I snarl. I make it clear that this possibility is a death sentence that evenhewon't like.

"I'm saying it's a dispensable effort," he says, and doesn't even deign to look at me. "If this is still about hunting rats, yoursisn't that good. If he was, he would pass undetected. He just used a powerful tool."

And what irritates me most is how he just says it. He's not spitting arrogance on purpose, and yet he positions himself as if he's miles above me.

"Then enlighten me, you arrogant little shit," I say. I need to exert physical force not to grab him by the collar. "If breaking encryption is ‘dispensable,' what's your magic solution?"

"I don't attack the math."

I watch. Nyx isstupidlybrave, but that was already established. He doesn't compute the insubordination of ending his monologue withthat. He just types, and in the middle of lines and lines of indecipherable characters, a small section of pure text stands out.

He analyzes it. He bites the tip of his thumb and smiles a small, private smile of pure, unaltered satisfaction—a smile that isn't for me.

I cross my arms. I lean against the wall, watching thatthingtriumph, opening an editor and typing a sequence of codes. It's almost disturbing. He doesn't even stop.

"Where the hell did you learn that?" I say on impulse.

He doesn't take his eyes off the screen. The satisfied smile is still there, private, and it irritates me that it isn't for me.

"YouTube tutorials."

The answer is so trivial it sounds like a teenager's nonchalance.

"…Nyx," I warn him.

He laughs. "What? It's true."

"Tutorials don't teach you to bypass quantum security systems. And they certainly don't teach you to have the fucking audacity you have."

Only then does he stop. The rhythmic sound of the keys ceases, and he turns in the chair, facing me for the first timesince I handed him the tablet. Illuminated like this, his smile isn't defiant, but soft. Beautiful. He knows he has me. He knows my curiosity is overcoming my rage.

"Do you really want to know?" he asks. He leans back in the chair and inclines towards me. "I'll tell you. But since you refused my last proposal, I hope you accept this time."

Of course. A manipulative son of a bitch to the end. Everything with him is a transaction, a power exchange. I prepare for some ridiculous demand.

"What proposal?"