All Chapters of Crossed Lines: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

POV: Elara Her pulse thundered, but she kept her chin lifted, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of seeing her falter. Damon’s words still lingered in the air, heavy and inescapable. She reached for her glass of water, needing the pause, the distance. But the moment she set it down, Damon moved, smooth, controlled, inevitable. His hand crossed the table, fingers brushing lightly over hers before resting on the stem of her glass. Not forceful. Not claiming. Just enough to make her breath hitch. “Tell me,” he said, his voice low, meant for her alone, “what would you do if, just once, you stopped resisting?” Heat coiled in her stomach, sharp and unwelcome. She tugged her hand back, but the ghost of his touch clung stubbornly to her skin. “I’d lose myself. And unlike you, Damon, I don’t gamble with things I can’t afford to lose.” His lips curved, not quite a smile, something darker, edged with possession. “That’s where you underestimate me. I don’t gamble, Elara. I guarantee my w

POV: Elara The screen lit up beneath her fingers, the familiar glow washing away the last of her hesitation. Here, in the dark lattice of code and encrypted channels, she wasn’t Elara Duval, stepdaughter, corporate heir, pawn on Clarisse’s chessboard. Here, she was ShadowByte. And ShadowByte never hesitated. Her hands moved with instinct, booting her secure shell, threading into the hidden layers where the city’s elite whispered in shadows, paid for in untraceable currencies and loyalty traded like stocks. She keyed Clarisse’s networks first. Not the public-facing conglomerates polished with marble and PR gloss, but the shell companies and quiet branches she kept tucked out of sight. The ones that smelled faintly of laundering and blood. Her pulse quickened as a new file surfaced, a series of transfers under one of Clarisse’s lesser-known subsidiaries. The amounts were too clean, too exact. Payment structures designed not for efficiency, but silence. Elara leaned closer, scannin

POV: ElaraBack in her apartment after the dinner with Clarisse.The cursor blinked on her screen like a heartbeat, steady and impatient. Elara leaned closer, chin propped against her hand, eyes scanning the activity logs she’d pulled from her hidden server.Something was off.ShadowByte’s systems were built to ghost through traffic, to mask everything under layers of misdirection. She’d run enough missions to recognize the rhythm of digital noise, the way it usually swelled and ebbed around her operations. But tonight, there was a new hum. Too clean. Too deliberate.She sat back, letting her fingers still on the keyboard.Clarisse.It was only a suspicion, but it fit too well. The sudden call, the pointed words, the weight in her stepmother’s tone, it wasn’t just posturing. Clarisse was pushing somewhere she didn’t belong.Elara closed the laptop slowly, the soft click echoing too loud in her apartment. She pressed her palms against the table, steadying herself.She couldn’t afford t

POV: ClarisseThe report landed on her desk at dawn, a slim dossier wrapped in the kind of silence that already screamed failure.Clarisse slid a manicured nail under the seal, her eyes cool even as irritation curdled in her chest. The first page was all she needed. Contract terminated. Operation suspended. Assets withdrawn.Her jaw tightened. Withdrawn. That word never meant voluntary.She read further anyway, flipping through pages with the precision of someone slicing meat from bone. Every trace of the probe she’d ordered toward ShadowByte had been cut off midstream; clean, surgical. Not a stumble, not a hack-job. Someone had erased her reach.Clarisse set the file down, fingers steepling under her chin.“Elara…” she whispered, though she didn’t believe it. Her stepdaughter was reckless, yes, but this smelled of another hand. Another predator in the dark.Her aide hovered at the door, nervous. “Ma’am, do you want me to…”“Leave.”The word cracked through the room like a whip. The a

POV: ElaraShe didn’t need the alert to know something had shifted. It was in the air, the kind of static hum she’d learned to trust long before ShadowByte even became a name whispered in dark forums.Elara sat at her desk, hands still on the keyboard, her gaze fixed on the flow of code that looked clean, way too clean. Clarisse’s people had pulled back. No probing signals, no fumbling attempts. Just silence.Which meant they’d learned enough to know the game wasn’t one-sided anymore.Her stomach knotted.She closed her laptop and leaned back, staring at the ceiling of her apartment. Damon’s voice from the boardroom replayed, calm but cutting. ‘Good. Then you’ll be ready for what comes next’.Maybe he hadn’t been warning her. Maybe he’d been preparing her.Her phone buzzed across the desk, and she snatched it up too quickly. Not Damon. Not Hailey. A message with no sender ID, just a single line of text:Nice trap. Careful who you bait.Elara’s fingers went cold. Clarisse hadn’t spoken