Page 67 of Cipher: Lethal Algorithm

Exhaustion, heavy and paralyzing, anchors me to the cheap rolling chair. My hands rest flat on the desk, trembling slightly. The adrenaline that kept me alive since the Macau ambushfinally drains from my blood, leaving behind a hollow, aching void.

I don’t want to run anymore. I’m tired of the shadows. I’m tired of the silence. More than anything, I want the man on the other end of that trace to catch me.

Four hours pass. The rain starts just before dawn, a steady, rhythmic drumming against the single pane of glass.

Ten more hours tick by.

Dusk settles over the city. The neon lights of the district bleed through the thin curtains, painting the cramped room in jagged stripes of artificial crimson and blue.

The apartment smells of stale coffee, ozone from the overworked server rack, and fear. I sit in the dark, watching the door, waiting for the inevitable. Every footstep in the hallway two floors down spikes my pulse. Every distant siren tightens the knot in my chest.

He’s coming. He isn’t sending a local strike team. He isn’t alerting Interpol. He’s coming himself.

The silence in the hallway shifts. The ambient noise of the building—the hum of the elevator, the rattle of the old pipes—suddenly drops away. A heavy quiet settles over the corridor.

The heavy wood of the front door splinters inward with a deafening crack.

The door frame shatters entirely. The deadbolt rips straight through the cheap plaster, sending debris scattering across the linoleum floor.

Julian steps through the threshold.

He doesn’t have his weapon drawn. He doesn’t need it. The raw, barely contained violence radiating from his massive frame is enough to suck all the oxygen out of the tiny room. He wears dark civilian clothes—a heavy jacket, a black shirt, road-worn and ruthless. His boots crunch over the broken wood.

He kicks the ruined door shut behind him. The small space instantly becomes a cage.

His eyes lock onto mine. They are completely devoid of the calculated, professional distance he maintains in the field. This is the predator unchained. The man who survived an eight-on-two crossfire and crossed an ocean just to hunt me down.

“You ran.” The gravel in his voice is a physical blow, low and devastating.

“I secured the objective.” I stand, keeping my hands visible, refusing to back away. My pulse hammers a brutal rhythm against my ribs. “I built an exit. I kept the Consortium away from the drive.”

“You left me on a road in Macau.” He crosses the room in three long strides, stopping inches from the desk. The heat rolling off his skin is suffocating. The scent of rain, jet fuel, and gunpowder hits me like a wall. “You cut the only connection that mattered.”

“Because you were going to die!” The fracture in my voice betrays the panic I kept buried for two weeks. I grip the edge of the desk. “Eight guns. One road. I calculated the odds. You were holding the line to buy me time. I couldn’t watch you take a bullet meant for me. I couldn’t be the reason you didn’t walk out.”

“You don’t get to make that call.” His jaw tightens, a muscle jumping beneath the heavy stubble along his cheek. “I told you we walk out together. I gave you a direct order.”

“I’m not one of your soldiers.” I push off the desk, closing the agonizing gap between us. “I’m a liability. A target. As long as I was with you, you were marked. I did what I had to do to keep you alive.”

“You vanished into a black hole for fourteen days.” His hands twitch at his sides, fighting the instinct to reach for me. “Fourteen days of dead silence. Do you know what that does to aman who promised to keep you safe? Do you have any idea what it took to pull your ghost signature out of the dark web?”

“I wanted to keep you safe.” The fight drains out of me, leaving only the raw, bleeding truth. My voice drops to a ragged whisper. “I left because I thought my proximity to you was a death sentence.”

“It is a death sentence.” He crowds my space, backing me hard against the edge of the desk. The immense mass of his body pins me in place. “For anyone who tries to touch you.”

“The mission is over.”

“Not even close.”

He closes the final inch. His hands, rough and unrelenting, grip my waist and haul me entirely off the floor.

He slams my spine against the wall. The impact steals my breath, but his mouth replaces it.

It isn’t a kiss. It’s an invasion. A raw, bruising collision of teeth and heat that demands total surrender. The desperate, violent energy he carried across the Pacific channels directly into the bruising grip of his fingers on my hips.

I gasp against his mouth, wrapping my arms around his neck, anchoring myself to the storm. My fingers fist in the damp fabric of his jacket, pulling him closer, desperate to absorb the impact of his rage.

He breaks the kiss just long enough to drag his mouth down my jaw, his teeth scraping over my pulse point.