The words take a moment to register. My attention is still caught on the brief glimpse of the male underneath all the control andcalculation. I drag myself back to the conversation. “You’d be surprised what can happen in three seconds.”
He strides across the room, all hard-edges again. “I probably wouldn’t.”
He pulls the second chair alongside the workstation and settles into it. The movement stirs the air, bringing the familiar scent of cedar and spice with it. My attention catches on it for a second before I drag it back to the screen. “What have you got?”
I force the distraction aside.
“I’ve found a pattern. No name yet. Every trail ends the same way. The activity’s still there if you know where to look — files accessed, data moved, then the records stop matching. The metadata is stripped. Timestamps shifted just enough to break the chain. Whoever’s doing this knows exactly which records matter and exactly how much to change them.”
“Administrative access?”
“It’s more than that.” I pull up the authorization hierarchy. “Some of these records need senior clearance to touch at all. I can’t tell which level — they’ve buried that too — but I can map it backward from what they were able to reach. They’re not cleaning up mistakes. They’re cleaning up themselves.”
Zavin goes still as his eyes roam every arm of the map. A sharpness seeps into his scent and a muscle tics at his temple. He’s not surprised because I’m confirming what he already knows.
“Bring up the authorization chain. I need to know where they touched the system to prove an account,” his voice has gone cold.
We work through authorization chains for the next hour. Every trail looks promising until it collapses under the same problem. Altered records. Missing metadata. Access paths that end exactly where I needthem to continue. Whoever we’re chasing knows how to clean up after themselves.
I pull another authorization chain onto the projection and trace it backward through the hierarchy. “Dies in the same place as the others.”
“If they altered this record afterward, they had to know it existed beforehand.” He reaches past me and taps a different authorization group. His arm crosses in front of me and he’s close enough that his warmth radiating off his skin, smell the cedar and spice of him, see exactly where the bronze scaling of his forearm shifts to the softer skin at his wrist.
By the time I look back at the screen, I’ve completely missed whatever point he was making.
Annoyed, I retrace the authorization chain from the beginning and run straight into the same dead end we’ve been hitting all afternoon. Every trail ends with evidence of the cleanup and none of the person doing it.
I drum two fingers against the desk. “We’re approaching this from the wrong direction.” I pull up a fresh workspace. If I keep my attention on the screen and off Zavin, maybe I can think more clearly. “We need to stop chasing them and give them something new to touch instead.”
Zavin’s eyes narrow as he turns his burning focus to me. “How so?”
“We build false intelligence. Seed information through controlled channels, but we give each channel a different version. Different details. Different access paths. Something valuable enough that the mole can’t ignore it.”
He watches me instead of the screen and I keep my focus locked onto the projection.
“If they take the bait,” I say, already building the framework in my head, “then they identify themselves for us.”
For a moment he says nothing. I make the mistake of looking at him as a slow smile spreads across his full lips. “You’re good at this, Miro.”
Three years at Helix and nobody ever said it without wanting something in return. They called me valuable. Called me an asset. Every compliment came attached to a contract, a nondisclosure agreement, or a reminder of who owned the servers I worked on. They loved my pattern recognition right up until it started pointing at things I wasn’t supposed to see. Then they sent someone to solve the problem three blocks from my apartment.
The bronze scales at his temples catch the light from Percy’s display. His gaze doesn’t leave mine. I look for the familiar layers underneath it, the things he usually keeps hidden behind jokes and easy confidence. They’re gone. Or maybe they’re still there and I’m too distracted to find them. Either way, he’s unreadable.
“I’ve never met anyone like you.” His voice is rough. Stripped of its usual polish. His focus stays on mine, searching. As though the answer he’s looking for is somewhere behind my eyes.
He reaches out. Slow. Deliberate, and tucks his knuckles under my chin.
Two fingers under my chin. Bronze scales cool against my skin. A touch so light I could break it by breathing wrong. He tips my face up toward his, unhurried, certain. The deadly tips of his claws are still visible, but his knuckles are smooth scales, warm, and they slide like velvet.
I am held in suspension. I could pull away, but I don’t move. I barely breathe.
His weight shifts forward, his shoulders lowering, and the space between us compresses by degrees. Those slit pupils are fixed,unblinking, as though if he closes his eyes for even a fraction of a second, I might be gone when he opens them again.
His lips brush mine. The first contact is barely pressure. A question, not a demand. His mouth is soft. Softer than anything about him should be. The scales at the corner of his lips are smooth. The warmth of his breath ghosts across my upper lip before he settles in, still gentle, still asking.
My spine unknots one vertebra at a time, a slow unclenching I didn’t know I was braced against. The tension I’ve been holding in my jaw releases.
I reach up and wrap my hands around his neck. My palms press against the sides of his throat where the scales are smooth and flat and warm. I slide my grip higher, into the hair at his nape, and the strands are silk through my fingers. I cross my wrists behind his neck, lock my grip, and pull him closer.
