Unscramble Monkey

In New York’s underbelly, secrets are currency, and spending them can cost your life. Oliver Blaese is a brilliant British hacker with a talent for blackmail and a magnetic pull toward trouble. When a routine job exposes a powerful politician’s murderous secrets, a single power failure leaves Oliver’s identity exposed. Now he’s the target, and desperately in need of a shield. Kirill Nikolaev runs a club built on chrome, loyalty, and very expensive body counts. Russian. Ruthless. Untouchable. He doesn’t babysit reckless hackers, and he definitely doesn’t let chaos move into his penthouse. But the money is good. The job should be easy. Keep Oliver alive. Eliminate the threat. Except Oliver is all sharp smiles and filthy wit, a chaos monkey who presses every button Kir has. Trapped in the same space, hatred mutates into something hotter. Oil and flame. Threats that sound like foreplay. Stares that feel like impact. Kir understands dominance, violence and control. He does not understand why the golden, sharp-tongued hacker makes him question everything he’s ever believed about himself. As danger closes in and a secret affair ignites, obsession begins to twist into devotion. What starts as hate-fueled heat becomes a dark romance built on chosen loyalty. In a landscape built on secrets and body counts, love isn’t tender. It’s territorial. It’s volatile. And it demands blood in return.

For the past three months, I've slept only three hours every day just so my team and I can create an app. Thanks to our hard work, the app goes absolutely viral to the point we've garnered over 100 million registered users on the first week of its launch. At the afterparty, my wife, Stacie Woodward, announces that her godbrother, Tory Frost, who's the PR manager, will be the one receiving the million-dollar bonus. She then tosses me a few 50% discount coupons that can be used in shopping malls as my bonus. "You're just a code monkey—why do you need that much money anyway? You can have these discount coupons. Use them on anything you want. At least buy some nice clothes for yourself. Don't go around wearing these rags. You'll just end up humiliating me more." I plead to her in a low tone, "Have you gone crazy, Stacie? My dad needs the money for the best medication in order to save his life! Can you please stop joking around?" But Stacie clings to Toby's arm, looking high and mighty. "Your dad's dying, isn't he? He might as well stop wasting the public resources! I can always choose him a better grave and hold a nice funeral for him when his time comes!" As I look at Stacie's smug face, I just smile at her instead of getting mad at her. She must have forgotten that the app's core algorithm and the user growth model are built using my private, undisclosed technology stack. That means the copyright is mine and has nothing to do with the company. I just smile while nodding at Stacie. That night, I activate the technology stack's self-destruct and migration protocols.