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CY

“New lead?” Maddox leaned over my desk again.

“Yeah. What did your girl call her?”

“You didn’t ask her name?”

I gave him a dead stare. “You know I never do. Besides, she would have just given me a fake one.”

Maddox grunted at that. “Mercedes called her E.”

“Oh, it’s Mercedes now, is it?” I saw a faint blush rise up on Maddox’s dark cheeks. Hypocrite, giving me a hard time about getting too personal. It was that savior complex of his.

“And why aren’t you looking for her, by the way?”

He shrugged, trying to regain his composure. “You’re on your girl. I had other things to focus on. You know, that we’re actually supposed to be working on.” I ignored that.

“Think she’s got a record?” I asked.

“You don’t end up breaking into a POM server if you’re a goody-two-shoes,” Maddox replied.

“Right.” I filtered down by matches with any sort of criminal record, but that wouldn’t be enough. I hesitated before also filtering for enrollment at Elysium University, at any time. I saw Maddox raise an eyebrow.

“You think she really was a student at some point?” he asked.

“You know the best covers are built on truth.”

He nodded, and I hit enter.

278. Better. Maddox grunted approvingly again, but before I started to scroll, I added one more: cross reference to Tanaka’s lab.

“You think she’s connected to the shield leak?”

“Might as well try.”

Seventeen results. I scrolled down the page and there she was.

Number five: Eon Ibarra. The picture in the POM database was a mugshot from an NSPD station at the edge of Magenta.

She looked like a hot mess. Her bobbed green hair was tangled and her cheeks were sunken, with deep bags under her eyes.

The live mugshot played a few seconds on loop, and I saw her eye and cheek twitch in that way everyone on the street knew.

Vector withdrawal. But it was her, there was no mistaking it. Her eyes gave her away.

Maddox leaned down over my shoulder. “Look, Cy.” He pointed to the corner of the screen, where her record was marked with a black hexagonal symbol. Electroteknik. I’d never met another. I thought about that perfect face she had made when I’d shocked her. Not pain, but resonant pleasure.

“No wonder you liked her.” Maddox was giving me a shit-eating grin. I ignored him. I ran my fingers over my Vysor. I had just gotten it back from tech support a few hours ago. They’d had to replace a whole board—couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it.

“She must have used her Flux on my Vysor. I didn’t even notice,” A half-truth, good enough for Maddox. “This bitch is good.”

Maddox swiped through her profile, his non-interest clearly forgotten. “Dropped out of Elysium University. Was studying data restoration. She a cyberrunner?”

“What’s her arrest record for?” I asked because Maddox was apparently driving this now. He scrolled back up to her mugshot.

“Picked up on…solicitation?” Maddox read off the screen while I’d been staring at her face.

“Solicitation?” I thought about that sweet pussy and the act she had put on for me. God, I was so fucking dumb. Of course she was a shōfu.

“Charged with solicitation and assault of an officer. There’s a station vid.” Maddox pointed to the corner of the screen. He didn’t have to tell me twice.

The vid was from the security camera in the corner of the interrogation room.

She was cuffed, which wasn’t surprising, but it was surprising how.

Normally, detainees were cuffed to the table in front of them.

They’d moved her back and cuffed her hands behind her chair, so she was more exposed, and her tits were pushed out.

“Surprised they kept the vid of this,” Maddox said, observing the same breaks in procedure I saw. We did it all the time, but there was never any evidence left behind.

“Pigs. How they get anything done is beyond me.” Maddox grimaced at that, but he had left that life behind. I knew better than some how that didn’t really matter.

“Why do they even have her cuffed?”

“Always underestimating women, huh? Watch, bud.”

“This coming from the guy who got completely pussy-blinded by a Magenta whore.” I almost laughed at Maddox’s unusual profanity, but his assertion was too correct for me to respond.

“Just watch the fuckin’ vid.”

A couple of the officers were in there with her, obviously trying to intimidate her.

Her face was pulled tight, the mask of fear and naivety that she’d used on me.

One of the officers got close and ran his finger down her cheek.

Maddox grunted in displeasure, but I was just watching her. That poor fucker.

He got close enough that she was able to swipe his feet out from under him before standing up and swing the metal chair she was cuffed to around and into his face.

She slammed it into him again before the other officers in the room managed to grab her, and the vid feed finally cut off.

The last shot was of her face contorted in pure rage, her eyes glowing with Flux.

It made the hairs on my arms stand on edge and my cock twitch.

“She’s a tough one, huh? Surprised she survived what came next.”

I grunted at that. She’d looked more used there.

More like the working girls I knew from home.

Not the same bright, flushed face I’d seen at the bar.

Even with her skills, if she’d looked like that when I’d met her, I would have known what she was.

Something had changed between then and now, something that had brought her back to life.

The arrest was from eight months ago. I sighed.

“What?” Maddox asked.

“I just can’t believe I went down on a sex worker from Magenta.”

“You did what?!” Maddox gasped.

“Cyanos, I thought you were working, not gossiping.” Tex stood behind Maddox, leering down at my terminal. His eyes darted around Eon’s profile, his lips setting into a hard line. Something dark swirled in his eyes as he observed her, and it was unnerving.

“Got a lead on one of the girls, boss,” I said.

“And this is the work you are prioritizing?”

“She is related to the bombing, boss. I’m sure of it.”

“We cannot handle any distractions, Cyanos,” Tex interjected.

“Boss, no one should know who we are.” That’s what made us alpha-level assets. We didn’t exist. Ghosts in a city where everyone else’s identity had been turned into a set of consumer profiles. “I can handle—”

“Let me be perfectly clear.” Tex turned to me, and the dark eddies of his eyes swirled like a storm unraveling in slow motion.

My stomach dropped. “You are to cease all investigation into this woman. You are right—no one knows who you are. You cannot be a target. All your focus is to be on this Renard case, and if you have any spare time, perhaps you can ruminate on how to not let yourself be led around like a dog chasing scraps.”

The words hit like a punch to the gut. My jaw tightened, but I kept my mouth shut. Tex wasn’t someone you argued with—not unless you wanted a slow and painful death.

“Do you even understand how fragile your position is, or has she fogged your brain that thoroughly?” he continued, his voice sharp enough to flay skin.

“You’ve spent years building a reputation, clawing your way to relevance in my organization, and you’re ready to throw it away over one woman? One liability?”

I stared straight ahead, my silence a tightrope walk over an abyss.

“I think you have forgotten you are not untouchable. Should I remind you the consequences of insubordination?”

In ten years, he had never threatened to terminate me . Ten years I worked my way up, done every dirty deed, and one bitch had put that all at risk.

“No, sir.”

Maddox’s eyes were wide at the exchange, but he stayed silent. Luckily, Tex was done with me.

“Maddox, the beta squadron put in charge at the Green data center has already caused millions in damages. I need you back down there right away to get them in line. As soon as you have that done, join Cyanos in the investigation.”

Maddox nodded, and Tex walked out without another word.

Maddox let out a long whistle. “I mean I get it, but it’s crazy how Tex has you leashed like that.”

“Shut the fuck up, man.” Maddox did not get it.

To him, Tex was just another corporate manager.

One with more blood on his hands than most, but just a stooge.

He didn’t even have a police or military record.

But I knew what Tex really was. I had seen it firsthand.

Even to someone like me—the utter scum of the earth—Tex was a monster.