LOGIN~Julian~The report landed at midnight.Reid sent it with no commentary — just the file, the timestamp, and a photograph. Katia Kensington at a restaurant in Tribeca. Private room. Victor sat across the table from her. His hand over hers. The photograph was taken through the window from street level, and it was grainy, but it was enough.It was more than enough to make me want to burn the city to the ground.I stared at the image until the edges of my vision blurred into a jagged, pulsing red. I knew Victor was dangerous. I had the full file on him. I had watched him move in Dubai with the smooth, deliberate confidence of a predator. I had tracked every corporate attack, every planted article, every fucking cent of that bounty.What I had not known, what I could not fathom, was that she would go to dinner with him. Alone. Without telling me.The rage didn't arrive as a wave; it arrived as a detonator. I swept a heavy crystal decanter off my desk, watching it shatter against the floor,
Katia He spent the next hour telling me about Meridian. Not the version I already knew, not the dry facts of a government contract and a lost bid. His version. He told me about building Halo Systems from nothing over ten years, about the government AI contract that was going to change everything, and about spending eighteen months developing a system that he believed was the best in the field. He told me about the evaluation committee and the result and the grinding unfairness of losing to a company that had appeared from nowhere with technology that he said, carefully watching my face, had not been developed entirely independently."What does that mean?" I said."It means someone helped them," he said. "Someone with access to proprietary architecture that was not theirs to share." He paused. "I cannot prove it. I have tried. The paper trail is clean. But I know what was in my system, and I know what appeared in Meridian's algorithm, and the overlap is not a coincidence."I sat wit
~Katia~Sam spent twenty minutes telling me not to go."He’s a sociopath, Katia. He put a price on your head, and now you’re going to let him buy you sea bass? It’s a trap.""It’s an information-gathering mission, Sam," I said, checking my reflection. "If Victor Hale wants to talk face-to-face, it means he’s run out of ways to break me from a distance. That makes him desperate. And desperate men leak secrets.""Give me the wire," she sighed, then spent ten minutes taping it to the skin just between my breasts. Her fingers were cold. "If he touches you there, the game is over. If he tries to take your clothes off, you hit the abort signal. Understand?""Sam, it’s dinner, not a porno.""With Victor Hale? It’s always a power play."The restaurant was in Tribeca. A private room that felt more like a velvet-lined vault. Victor was already there, standing the moment I entered. He didn't just look at me; he visually stripped me, his eyes travelling from my heels to my throat with the slow, h
~Julian~Thirty days.I had thought working alongside Katia every day would get easier. It did not get easier. It got harder in the way that things got harder when you knew exactly what you wanted and had promised yourself you would handle things correctly before taking it, and the handling was taking longer than expected.I noticed everything.She drank her coffee black until three PM and then added one sugar without thinking about it, the way people did things they had done so long they stopped registering them. She always read documents from the back last page first, then the middle, and then the front. I had watched her do it with four separate briefs before I understood it was a system, not a habit. She held her pen in her left hand when she was thinking and switched to her right when she was writing.I noticed all of it. I hated myself for noticing. I noticed it anyway.On day eleven she fell asleep in the conference room.Just her head dropping slightly, then catching herself,
~Katia~The message came through at eleven PM on a Wednesday.It came from a contact I had used for three years, a woman named Priya who ran the communications network for the New York underground circuit. She never reached out unless something was wrong. The fact that she was messaging at eleven PM told me everything before I read the words.Bounty posted. Cash prize for anyone who unmasks Catwoman at the next NY event. Significant money. Thought you should know.I read it twice. Then I called Sam.She answered immediately. "I saw it.""How long has it been up?""Six hours. It went through three circuit forums simultaneously. Whoever posted it wanted maximum visibility.""Amount?""Two hundred thousand dollars," Sam said. "Cash. Clean. Anyone who can provide a verified identity at the next event collects."I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the city through the window.Two hundred thousand dollars was not a random number. It was not the kind of money someone posted on a forum
~Delia~Mama was in the kitchen when I arrived.She took one look at my face and put the kettle on without saying anything. That was the thing about my mother; she could read a room before she read a person, and right now the room I had brought with me was ugly.I sat down at the kitchen table."Katia is fucking Julian," I said.Martha turned from the kettle."Delia—""I'm not asking. I'm telling you." I put my bag on the table. "She is fucking my husband. I went to her apartment today, and I told her to stay away from him, and she sat there with her wine and her Brooklyn view and gave me that face and denied everything, but she is fucking him, Mother. I know it."Mama came to the table and sat across from me. She had the expression she wore when she was deciding how seriously to take something — the slight tightening around the eyes, the careful stillness."You don't know that," she said."I had her investigated."Mama blinked. "You what?""I hired someone. I have photographs. Dates,







