And yet here I am, waking up hot, restless, and painfully aware that the male responsible for the dream is very, very real.
My eyes squeeze shut.
Zavin Sethrak is attractive. There’s no point pretending otherwise. He’s intelligent, infuriatingly perceptive, and entirely too comfortable looking at me as though he’s already figured out parts of me I haven’t admitted to myself. Any woman with functioning eyesight would notice him.
That doesn’t mean any of this is a good idea.
He’s a crime lord.
A dangerous one.
A male who quite literally dragged me out of my apartment and locked me inside his compound. I still don’t have a timeline for this audit. No contract end date. No guarantee of when—or if—I’ll be allowed to leave. Every day I spend here is another day farther from my parents and the life I’m trying to claw my way back to.
The sensible response would be resentment. Instead, my brain insists on replaying every graphic detail of him etched into memory. The way he followed the handoff-gap theory almost immediately. His burning eyes remaining locked on mine whenever I explain anything technical. How quickly he grasps each concept.
The fact that the meal delivered last night somehow included every food I actually like. The atmospheric supplements that keep appearing.
The quiet certainty that, despite all evidence suggesting I should, I don’t actually believe he’d hurt me.
Groaning, I shove the blanket aside. Handsome, intelligent, thoughtful males are still capable of being terrible people. History has supplied plenty of examples.
Even if Zavin isn’t as bad as he should be, that doesn’t change the fundamental problem. I need to get off this planet. He is standing in the way of that.
The reminder settles some of the chaos in my head. I cling to it as I swing my legs out of bed and cross to Percy’s workstation. The audit is real. The mole is real. The compromised network is real. Those are problems I can solve.
The confusing feelings developing around a seven-foot-tall Sethrai male with amber eyes and entirely too much insight into my thought processes can wait their turn.
Preferably forever.
I already have my forever male.
“Morning, Perce.” He hums in his standby cycle, processors warming. I run my palm across the housing until his display flickers to life and the amber glow fills the room, and the familiar sight of it steadies me more than the clean air or the comfortable bed or any of the comforts designed to keep me functional.
The behavioral profiles are still spread across the screen where I left them. Fourteen distinct fingerprints moving through the network. Different traffic patterns. Different timing signatures. Different habits. I can tell them apart easily enough now, but I still can’t put names to any of them.
I’ve spent two days squeezing every possible answer out of the data Zavin gave me. The handoff-window theory is solid. The candidate pool is smaller. The mole’s access points are mapped. The problem is that I’ve reached the edge of what the redacted logs can tell me. Without identities attached to the patterns, my investigation has nowhere left to go.
Unless ... I stop trying to identify who doesn’t belong and approach the problem from the opposite direction.
Sitting back in my chair, I study the web of connections across the projection. If I can’t find the intruder directly, I can account for everyone who should be there. Track every behavioral fingerprintacross six weeks of activity. Build a complete picture of what normal looks like for each operative. Once I know the shape of legitimate traffic, anything that doesn’t fit should stand out.
It’s not elegant. It’s not clever. It’s brute force, the kind of slow, exhaustive analysis that eats hours and processing power. Fortunately, that’s exactly the sort of work Percy and I excel at.
And I have nothing else to do. This is why my brain has room to conjure Zavin into my dreams. Back to work it is.
“Change of approach, Perce.”
I pull up the first signature and begin working through its activity history, tracing it across the timeline one access point at a time. If I can’t identify the mole directly, then I’ll build a complete picture of everyone who belongs in the network and see what’s left when the pieces stop fitting.
Percy’s processors spin up immediately. The pitch of his cooling system climbs high enough to tell me I’m asking a lot of him. I rest my palm against his casing until the heat steadies.
The next two hours disappear into the work.
Weeks of traffic data scroll past. Access logs. Routing patterns. Behavioral markers. Percy handles the heavy analysis while I sort, tag, and compare. One signature becomes two. Two become six. Then fourteen. The steady hum of his processors fills the room while timelines take shape across the monitor, each one revealing the habits of an anonymous operative I’ve never met.
The rhythm settles something in me.
This is the part I’m good at. Systems. Patterns. Questions that have answers if you’re willing to look long enough. The world makes sense when it’s reduced to data and logic and problems that can actually be solved.
