Page 27 of The Enforcer (Damn! #2)

THE SOFT BUZZ of Lily’s laptop warming up should have been comforting.

Familiar. But today it felt like the sound of something slithering across her nerves.

It had been three days since she and Zane had said I do, three days since she’d stood in the aftermath of gunfire and vows and bled into a marriage that wasn’t meant to be anything but survival.

And yet…

It had become more.

Zane had made her coffee for the third morning in a row.

Brought it to her in bed, strong and dark and mixed with just enough sugar to prove he’d been paying attention.

He’d kissed her shoulder, warm lips against bare skin, slow and lingering, like he wasn’t just saying good morning, but marking her.

He said nothing, but his fingers had brushed the edge of the sheet where it fell across her thigh, trailing heat and tension in their wake.

But it was the way he looked at her after he made love to her that undid her. Not like she was fragile. Not like she was dangerous. Like she was his. As if he saw the danger in her eyes, the pain behind her silence, and still chose to step closer. Still chose to be scorched.

As if he’d looked straight into the wreckage, into every jagged edge, every unspoken scar, and decided she was worth it anyway. As if the danger didn’t repel him. It called to him. Like maybe he craved it. Needed it. Needed her. As if she belonged to him, not by force, but by choice.

And maybe, somewhere along the way, she had chosen him too. Not in words. Not even in the vows they had been forced to say. But in every moment she let herself soften beneath his hands. In every time she looked at him and didn’t look away.

She should’ve been terrified by that.

The way Zane touched her like she was breakable and dangerous in equal measure. The way he looked at her like she was both a weapon and a promise. Like she could burn him alive and he’d thank her for the flames.

She wasn’t terrified by that.

She was terrified by this:

Letting someone in meant risking something she couldn’t out-cypher or outrun.

It meant vulnerability in a language she didn’t speak fluently, one written not in code but in touch and trust, in late-night silences and the way Zane brushed his fingers down her spine without asking for anything.

It meant being open in a way firewalls couldn’t protect.

Because it was easier to face a gun than Zane Dante’s quiet commitment.

Because being wanted was simple. But being seen, truly seen, meant standing bare in the places she’d spent years hiding. And still being chosen.

That was the kind of danger Lily Mirabella—Dante—didn’t know how to survive.

And that’s what he had done.

Made her feel like she wasn’t just wanted, she was his. And worse… she wanted to be.

The laptop pinged to life. Her fingers moved automatically, launching diagnostics, checking firewalls, security layers, VPN masking. It wasn’t that she expected trouble, it was that her instincts had been wrong before. She wasn’t making that mistake again.

Line after line of code blurred past her eyes, the digital world welcoming her like an old friend. She relaxed into the rhythm of it, the easy familiarity of her own language. Until—

A flicker.

One screen blinked. Not the one she was working on.

Then another.

Her head snapped up. Her breath caught.

A small, square window appeared. No sound. No alert. Just a pale gray box centered on her left monitor.

The message burned across the screen, line by line, like a slow knife dragging through her gut.

YOU WERE IN ON IT FROM THE FIRST KEYSTROKE. THANK YOU, LILY. BUT WE DON’T NEED YOU ANYMORE. NEXT BULLET’S FOR YOU. THIRD TIME’S THE CHARM. PREPARE TO BE A WIDOWER, ZANE.

She didn’t move.

Didn’t blink.

Didn’t breathe.

Cold slid down her spine like a sheet of ice cracking apart, jagged and merciless.

It wasn’t fear, it was worse. It was recognition.

The kind of soul-deep certainty that told her this wasn’t a threat designed to scare.

This was a promise. A calculated execution wrapped in words that knew exactly where to strike.

It tore through the armor she wore like code, sharp, unrelenting, precise, and left her spine hollow, her breath trapped somewhere between a scream and surrender.

No sender. No origin path. It wasn’t an email. Not a text. Not even code embedded in an executable.

This was a direct injection.

Someone had found a way into her machine.

Her machine. The one place that had always been hers, secure, fortified, bulletproof in ways the real world never was.

They hadn’t just broken in. They hadn’t tripped an alarm or forced a backdoor.

They’d slid inside like smoke, like shadow, like they knew every inch of her code better than she did.

And they’d done it in silence. No keys. No heat.

Just precision. Just violation. It was intimate in the worst way, like someone had crawled into her skin and left their fingerprint on her spine.

The last time someone had gotten into her system without permission, she’d been seventeen.

Just a kid, running freelance jobs with too much arrogance and not enough fear.

She hadn’t realized what she’d tripped until it was too late.

A trapdoor buried in a corrupted payload, planted by someone darker, smarter, crueler.

They’d used her breach to trigger something else entirely.

Something real. Something deadly. Within forty-eight hours, three people were dead, clients, not friends, and Lily had gone completely off-grid.

She’d blamed herself for years.

She still did.

Her pulse skidded sideways, thudding in her ears like a warning siren trapped beneath her skin.

She tried to move, to shift, to reach for something familiar, but her fingers were numb, her limbs locked in place by the ice pouring through her bloodstream.

Her breath caught in her throat, shallow and sharp, as her brain kept flashing the message on repeat, each line carving itself deeper, as if the words weren’t content to haunt her, they wanted to live inside her.

Brand themselves on her bones. Drown out reason with terror.

This wasn’t a warning. It was a verdict.

YOU WERE IN ON IT FROM THE FIRST KEYSTROKE.

It echoed the gunman’s last words, words Kace, Zane’s second in command, had repeated in a clipped, deadly voice right before the light left that bastard’s eyes: “The girl’s not clean.”

Lily closed her eyes.

She’d run every test. Every scan. Every diagnostic.

She was supposed to be the ghost in the system. The one no one could track. The one no one could trap.

But someone had just walked into her code like they owned it.

They’d spoken like they knew her.

And worst of all…

They’d used Zane’s name.

PREPARE TO BE A WIDOWER, ZANE.

She didn’t scream.

She didn’t panic.

She copied the message into a secure container and locked it down. Then she shut off the laptop, pulled the drive, and tucked it beneath a false bottom in one of her duffel bags.

And then she sat.

For what felt like forever.

Trying to decide what the hell to do next.

ZANE WALKED into the penthouse with two coffees and a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

Not because he wasn’t happy to see his wife, he was.

But something tugged at the edges of his instincts, a subtle shift in the air, like the calm before a gunshot.

It was nothing he could name, not yet. Just a shadow in the back of his mind that made his skin itch and his smile falter.

The silence hit him first. Lily was too quiet. The place was too still. No pulse of music. No clack of keys. Just a vacuum of sound that wrapped around his gut and tugged. And Zane Dante had lived long enough to know that silence like that usually meant something was about to crank sideways.

He set the cups on the counter with deliberate care, rolled his neck like it might shake the unease, and glanced down the hall, toward the place he already knew she’d be. Then for reasons he couldn’t explain, he eased his gun from his shoulder holster.

Lily often disappeared into her work, losing hours behind glowing screens and tangled code.

Sometimes there was music, loud and defiant.

Sometimes just the rhythmic tap of keys and the quiet mutter of her own thoughts.

Caffeine was a constant, fueling her tunnel vision as she unraveled digital puzzles no one else could touch.

When she was in that mode, Zane usually let her be.

This wasn’t that kind of peacefulness.

Not the kind that settled over you like a quiet morning in bed, warm skin against warmer sheets, breath soft with safety and time.

Not the kind of stillness that came with trust. This was something else entirely.

This was the sharp-edged, waiting kind, the kind of still that made killers pause and predators go silent.

The kind Zane Dante recognized all too well.

The air had a thickness to it now, like the pressure before a lightning strike. It carried weight, but not the sort that pressed down. It hovered, sharp and suffocating, like something unsaid and volatile was poised to detonate. Zane couldn’t name it, not yet. But his body recognized it.

This was tension wound too tight, air stripped of motion, the kind of pause that made trained men reach for weapons before they even knew why. A hush that didn’t belong in a home. It belonged on a battlefield.