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CY

“ Y ou look like shit.” Maddox peered at me over the short wall of my cubicle. “Were you here all night?”

“Fuck yes, I was here all night. I’m trying to find these bitches who conned us. Where the fuck were you?” I rubbed the back of my head, the lack of sleep making it ache.

“I was out in Green, investigating the terrorist attack . You know, the actually important event of last night.”

“And you think the fact that my Vysor was tampered with and yours was off while you got your dick sucked during the exact time of the attack was just coincidence, huh?” I leaned back in my desk chair and looked up at Maddox. His lips curled into a frown.

“I think…you’re taking this a little bit personally,” he said.

“Damn right I’m taking this personally. That bitch knew who I fucking was, Maddox. That doesn’t worry you?” Alpha employee profiles were some of the most highly secured data in this place. As far as the world was concerned—Maddox, Tex, me—we didn’t exist. So how did she know that we did?

“She was there to distract me from doing my fuckin’ job.”

“You didn’t make it hard for her, did you?”

That was the root of it. I’d broken my own rule and underestimated her because she was gorgeous, and I’d needed to get my dick inside her as fast as possible. Stupid, rookie mistake.

I leaned back, rubbing my eyes. Maddox gave me a look that clearly communicated how much of a dumbass I’d been.

He was lucky he was a good partner, ’cause he was getting on my nerves right now.

I rubbed harder until stars sparked in my vision.

I’d been going through Elysium University’s records all night looking for her, but I’d found nothing.

My eyes ached in their dry sockets, but I couldn’t stop now.

When I opened my eyes again, Maddox was leaning over my terminal screen.

“You find her in the enrollment list?”

“No, nothing.”

“You think she was really a student?”

Fuck. Fuck! Of course she wasn’t a student. God, she’d set a trap for me, and I’d fallen right into it like some idiotic Sky District asshole.

Maddox frowned at me. “You really didn’t consider that?”

“Shut the fuck up, man. Goddamnit. I have less now than I did last night.” I flicked the side of my Vysor so the image I’d taken of the mirror displayed on my terminal for Maddox. “This is all I have.”

Maddox’s lips twitched into a smile.

“You think this is fuckin’ funny, asshole?”

“Just sounds like something you would say.”

It did. Something clicked in my sleep-deprived brain. She didn’t know who I was—she knew me. And she hadn’t been able to resist letting it show.

“Gotcha, bitch.”

Maddox’s humor deflated again.

“What?” I asked.

“Be careful, Cy. I’ve seen you get obsessed like this before. It never ends well.”

“I’m not obsessed.”

Never mind that I’d had to retreat to the supply closet multiple times in the night because I’d gotten so hard over the thought of hate-fucking her with my gun to her head until she screamed my name, I couldn’t focus.

Even now, I was thinking about how good she had tasted when she’d finally let go and come all over my tongue.

I was going to have her doing that again.

And then I was going to fucking end her.

Maddox gave me a very knowing look and left me alone.

“Briefing’s in fifteen. Don’t be late.”

“Yeah, yeah…” But I was already looking through old case files.

I scanned all the images from a data center infiltration in Blue, but she wasn’t there. Only one woman had shown up in any of the images, and she’d been too short. I went back a month, then another month in my files, but nothing. This was getting me nowhere. Maybe it was nothing.

I pulled up that mirror image again.

She’d been smart. That “hotel” had been filthy, so any DNA samples I could’ve grabbed—if I hadn’t been scrambling out of there—were contaminated.

Should’ve guessed a place called The Blackout would have anti-recognition tech.

I had no useable footage from inside the bar, and neither did Maddox.

She had known that. This wasn’t some petty thief or regular sukeban.

She was good—good enough that I might have considered recruiting her, if I didn’t have to kill her.

But she’d made one mistake. She’d left me that note.

I went back six months to an incident at the Tech data center that had led to the leak of the Kinetic Shield.

A group of pathetic do-gooders had infiltrated the server rooms. Maddox and I had been called in after the beta squad wrecked the place.

I didn’t remember much of it. I’d been called in on my night off, and I’d had enough Vector in my system to kill an elephant.

I searched all the vids still in storage from my Vysor and played through the few clips side by side—when I heard it.

“Until next time, doll.”

Oh fuck. I replayed the vid. I’d cornered some dumb fuck at the end of a hallway, gun to her head, when she’d struck my head with a pipe.

My shield had stopped it from being deadly, and I’d grappled with her.

I watched the fight on my terminal screen, and it was better than any porn.

We’d slammed into the surrounding stacks, and she’d almost gotten the upper hand on me—but I’d pinned her to a server and fried her.

My arm slammed into her ribs, and she screamed and screamed. I wrapped my hand around her throat.

“Is that all you’ve got?” she’d said.

Fuck me. That was when the cameras finally managed to capture her face.

“There you are.”

She’d changed her hair, and her face was covered with an anti-recognition mask that flared and obscured her to my camera. The image wasn’t good enough for our top-of-the-line facial recognition program. A red warning popped up:

Incomplete data. Run anyway?

Our system with all the data in the world couldn’t recognize her, but I saw that spark in her violet eyes, that immense hatred, and I knew it was her.

“Until next time, doll.”

I hit enter, and the progress bar popped up on my terminal as I headed off for the briefing.