He pulls out a black card and hands it over without looking at the total. “Everything gets delivered to the compound. Today.” His hand finds the small of my back as we leave. The touch burns through the cotton. “We’re done here.”
Fine. Whatever she adds, I’ll deal with later. Right now, I don’t care about clothes. I care about the hardware.
The tech store is different. I forget myself the moment we walk in. Processors. Graphics cards. Solid state drives with speeds I’ve only read about. I move through the aisles like I’ve found the holy land, fingers trailing over boxes, reading specs, calculating what I could do with this kind of power.
“This processor.” I pull it off the shelf, already running the math. “With enough power behind it, I could run my analysis in hours instead of days.”
Lorenzo watches me. He’s leaning against a display case, arms crossed, but his eyes are tracking me the way they track threats.
“What else?”
“I’d need—” I glance at the price tag. More than everything in my old apartment combined. “It’s expensive.”
“What else?”
I look at him. His face is unreadable, but he’s shifted toward me. Leaning forward instead of back.
“Whatever you need, Isabella.”
My name in his mouth. Low and rough and disregarding professionalism. My fingers tighten around the box.
I grab everything. Three external drives. A new graphics card. More RAM than I’ve ever had access to. A portable monitor for mobile work. By the time I’m done, the cart is full. I’m bouncing on the balls of my feet like a kid who just won a shopping spree.
This is better than clothes. Better than food.
He pays without blinking.
The guards load everything into the SUV while I stand on the sidewalk, palms pressed against my cheeks, grinning at nothing. “Thank you.” The words aren’t enough. “I mean it. This is — thank you.”
He nods once. Doesn’t speak. But the corner of his mouth moves. Barely. A dent appears in his left cheek. Gone before I can confirm it.
The drive back is quiet, but my leg won’t stop bouncing. I keep pulling boxes out of bags, reading specs, planning the setup. He tracks me from across the backseat, steady and unblinking.
We carry everything into the house. He dismisses the guards with a look. Leads me toward his office and helps me set up like this is normal. Like we do this every afternoon.
His sleeves are rolled to the elbow. I watch his forearms flex when he lifts the monitor onto the desk, the tattoos shifting with the movement. The ink disappears under his shirt, and I have to look away before I start wondering how far it goes.
Focus.
The new processor hums to life. I connect the drives, configure the settings, watch my analysis tools load three timesfaster than before. My correlation algorithm starts running. Fast. So fast. Data that would have taken days to process streams across in minutes. The patterns I’ve been chasing for weeks start resolving, sharpening, becoming information I can actually use.
“Oh my god.” I spin in the chair. “Lorenzo, look at this. Look how fast it’s running.”
He moves from his spot by the window. Leans over my shoulder.
“The analysis that was taking sixteen hours? It’ll be done in two. Maybe less.” I’m grinning so hard my face hurts. “I can cross-reference the warehouse locations tonight. I can narrow down where they’re staging before transport. I can find her.”
I can find her. After years of running on fumes and failing, the path to Sofia is right there on the screen.
The reflex wins. I’m out of the chair. My arms are around him. The data is singing, the path to Sofia is visible for the first time since I started searching, and my body moved before my brain could catch up.
He turns to stone. Arms at his sides. He doesn’t breathe. Doesn’t move. Standing there like I’ve pressed a blade against his ribs instead of my cheek against his chest.
Oh god.
I start to pull back.
His hand closes around my throat. Not squeezing. Not hurting. Catching. His thumb presses into the hollow where my pulse hammers, and he tilts my head back until I’m looking up at him. Pupils blown wide. A thin ring of dark iris. A vein standing out at his temple, every tendon in his neck pulled taut.
