Chapter 157. Leon’s Alert

The quiet on the terrace was a balm, a temporary armistice with the universe. The wind had gentled, and the city below had softened into the hazy glow of late afternoon. For a handful of minutes, there was only the shared breath, the solid warmth of Anton’s hand in his, the impossible sense of shelter. Sabatine felt raw, flayed open, but the bleeding had stopped. The fractures Anton saw were still there, but for the first time, they didn’t feel like failures. They felt like a map only he could read.

The peace was shattered by the vibration of Anton’s phone in his pocket, followed instantly by Sabatine’s, a synchronized, urgent pulse. They parted slowly, the real world rushing back in with the familiar chill of alarm.

Anton answered, his face hardening as he listened. “Understood. We’re on our way down.”

Sabatine was already moving, the soldier overriding the lover. “What is it?”

“Leon. A new breach attempt. Not on the corporate servers.” Anton’s eyes met his, a fresh, cold fury dawning in them. “On you.”

They took Anton’s private elevator down to the newly established security command centre, a fortified suite two floors below the executive level. The room hummed with low light and the quiet chatter of a hand-picked team Leon had assembled. Screens glowed with network maps, intrusion detection logs, and real-time threat feeds.

Leon stood before the central bank of monitors, his massive frame tense. He didn’t turn as they entered. “We caught it in the fourth layer. Very sophisticated. A multi-pronged spear-phishing attack disguised as follow-up correspondence from the Swiss clinic, targeting our internal medical liaison. The payload was a zero-day designed to pivot to our centralized personnel health records.”

On the main screen, Leon pulled up the attack vector. The code was elegant, malicious, and laser-focused. “They weren’t after financials. They weren’t after the prototype schematics. The end target was a single file.” He zoomed in. A string of text was highlighted in red: STALKER_SABATINE_MEDICAL_EVALUATION_GENEVA_REF#7782.

Sabatine’s blood ran cold. His medical records. From the check-up in the safe-house.

“We blocked the exfiltration,” Leon continued, his voice a gravelly monotone. “But the attempt is the message. They want your biometrics. Your blood work. Your physiological baselines. Everything the doctors noted.”

Anton’s voice was dangerously quiet. “Why?”

Leon finally turned. His face was grim. “It’s an escalation. Financial attacks, character assassination, espionage… those are the tools of their world. This is different. This is personal, and it’s primal. They’re moving from destroying your reputation to potentially targeting your biology.” He looked at Sabatine. “They know they can’t beat you in a straight fight. They can’t out-think you on digital terrain. So they’re looking for a weakness a bullet can’t fix. An allergy. A pre-existing condition. A pharmacological vulnerability.”

The air in the command centre seemed to thin. Sabatine felt a familiar, icy clarity descend, the kind that came when a threat shifted from abstract to intimately lethal. This wasn’t about boardrooms or press conferences. This was about the marrow of him.

“Roland Cross doesn’t have the technical capability for this,” Sabatine stated, his mind already racing through the actors. “This is state-level, or consortium-level, offensive cyber.”

“Volkov,” Anton breathed, the name a curse. “Evelyn is in custody. Marcus is a drunk fool. But their partners… they’re not done. They lost the prototype. They lost their inside agents. You are the living proof of their failure, and you are now the public symbol of my strength. Erasing you isn’t just revenge. It’s a strategic necessity.”

Leon nodded, pulling up another screen. It showed a dark web chatter log, intercepted by one of his bots. A fragment of conversation, in Russian, translated: “…the bodyguard is the key. The mind is a fortress. The body is always a village.”

“It’s a probe,” Sabatine said, leaning in to examine the code more closely. “They’re testing our medical security protocols. Seeing how we react. The next attempt won’t be so clumsy.”

“We shut it all down,” Anton commanded, his protectiveness hardening into a fortress of will. “All digital health records for key personnel are to be air-gapped immediately. Physical copies only, in the vault. No exceptions.”

“Already in progress,” Leon confirmed. “But that’s defence. It doesn’t tell us who, or what their end game is. ‘Biological’ can mean a lot of things. It could be planning a kidnapping to exploit a medical need. It could be crafting a tailored pathogen. It could be gathering intel for an ‘untraceable’ accident that looks like a natural cause.”

Each possibility was more horrifying than the last. Sabatine had faced enemies who wanted him dead. This felt different. This was a violation aimed at the very essence of his being, at using his own body against him, against Anton.

“We need to go on the offensive,” Sabatine said, turning to Anton. “We can’t just wall up. This attack gives us a trail. The zero-day has signatures. The phishing origin points can be traced. It’s a risk—engaging pulls us into their game—but sitting still makes me a stationary target.”

Anton’s gaze was torn between the cold logic of the hunter and the terror of the man in love. “It’s a trap. They want you to chase this. To step out from behind the corporate defences.”

“Maybe,” Sabatine conceded. “But I’ve never been good at sitting in a bunker. And this…” He gestured to the screen. “This is my terrain. They’re coming at me through data. Let me hunt them through it.”

The room was silent save for the hum of servers. Leon watched them both, his loyalty a tangible thing in the space.

“You don’t go alone,” Anton said finally, the words leaving no room for argument. “Wherever this trail leads, I’m with you. Not as a principal. As your partner. They want to use you to hurt me? Fine. Let them see that attacking you is attacking me. Directly.”

“Sir,” Leon interjected, a note of warning in his voice. “The exposure risk—”

“—is calculated,” Anton finished. “The rules have changed, Leon. They are targeting the man I love. This is no longer executive protection. This is a personal war. And we will fight it on our terms.”

The word love, spoken so bluntly in the sterile command centre, seemed to hang in the air, a defiant counterpoint to the cold malice on the screens. Sabatine felt it like a shockwave, not of fear, but of a strange, powerful calibration. Anton wasn’t hiding anymore. He was weaponizing their bond, making it a part of their tactical arsenal.

“Alright,” Sabatine said, a plan crystallizing in his mind. He moved to a terminal, his fingers flying over the keys. “We use the attempted breach. We create a honeypot—a falsified medical file for me, with a few tantalizing, catastrophic ‘weaknesses.’ We seed it in a decoy server, making it look like a rushed air-gap oversight. We let them steal it.”

“Bait,” Anton said, understanding immediately.

“Bait,” Sabatine confirmed. “And we pack it with every tracking beacon, forensic watermark, and data-slug Nadir and I have ever developed. The moment they access it, we’ll own their network. We’ll see their faces, read their plans.”

“It’s dangerous,” Leon stated. “If they believe the intel, they’ll act on it. That could put you in immediate, physical danger based on a fabricated vulnerability.”

“I’d rather know the shape of the knife before it’s plunged,” Sabatine replied, his voice steady. “This way, we choose the battlefield. We let them think they’ve found a chink in the armour. And then we show them the armour was a mirror.”

Anton watched him work, the fierce pride and gut-wrenching fear warring on his face. This was the man he’d fallen for—the strategist, the hunter, relentlessly turning threat into opportunity. He was asking Sabatine to use himself as live bait. The cost of love, he was realizing, was a perpetual, terrifying investment in another’s safety.

“Do it,” Anton said, his voice leaving no room for doubt. “Leon, coordinating with Rico Nadir. I want every resource, every dark channel, available. We’re not just defending. We’re hunting.”

As Leon moved to another console to make the call, Anton stepped closer to Sabatine, placing a hand on the small of his back. It was a small touch, hidden from the room, a point of contact in the digital storm.

“You are not a village,” he murmured, for Sabatine’s ears only, repeating the translated phrase. “You are my capital. And I will burn every empire that threatens a single stone of you.”

Sabatine didn’t look up from the code he was crafting, the deadly, beautiful lie that would hopefully lead them to the heart of the new darkness. But he leaned back, just slightly, into the solid warmth of Anton’s touch.

The attack had turned biological. The war had just gotten dirtier, more intimate. But as he built the trap with meticulous care, Sabatine felt a grim certainty settle in. Let them come for his body. They would find his mind—and the man who loved him—waiting.

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