Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 77051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
River swallows. “H.L. as in—”
“Helena Lune,” I finish. My pulse spikes. I open the transcript. It’s short, clinical, the worst kind of tidy:
Andrew K.: “We can’t let this get out before the Q4 investor call.”
H.L.: “I’ll handle the employee. We’ll frame it as a burnout sabbatical.”
Unknown (audio only): “If he goes public, we push Psalm 88. We don’t get squeamish.”
River’s hand finds mine under the table, fingers tight. “That’s the file name.”
“Yeah.” My mouth is dry.
We keep reading. A second doc is a “post-incident checklist” template, last modified by hlune-admin. The checklist includes “device retrieval,” “HR narrative alignment,” and—my stomach turns—“bereavement talking points.” Timestamps fall two days after Shawn’s last code push.
River’s voice is barely there. “They buried him.”
“And anyone who could prove it,” I say. My jaw aches. “There’s more. Look—an access log export.”
We scan the CSV. Three names pop in bold—a telltale flag left by some lazy internal auditor:
hlune-admin elevated to superuser on a Sunday.
tkincaid-hr (Tasha) used a shared service account to mount a backup image from River-Q-Backup.
akent (Andrew) approved an emergency HR “data hygiene” sweep two hours after.
River exhales shakily. “So Helena planned the escalation, Andrew signed off, and Tasha did the dirty work.”
“And Psalm88 was their ‘in case of whistleblower’ folder,” I say. “Which means you have proof Helena’s been running an off-books HR machine and using company systems to cover a death.”
She looks at me like she’s on a cliff—wind in her hair, nowhere to go but forward. “This is why I’m the target.”
“Yeah.” My voice is rough. “This and the fact that you won’t fold.”
We go quiet. The city hums through the windows, and the plant Juno brought stands smug on the sill like it knew we’d get here eventually.
To break the tension, River digs into the lo mein with both chopsticks like it owes her money. “Confession,” she says around a bite. “I used to hate pair programming.”
“Blasphemy.”
“It felt like someone watching me breathe. But this—” she nods at our little command center “—this doesn’t feel like being watched. It feels like being… seen.”
There’s a difference. I feel it like heat under my sternum. “You are.”
She blushes, pretends not to. “Your turn. Confession.”
I pretend to ponder. “In the third grade I cheated at the science fair.”
Her eyes go wide. “Gage Dawson!”
“I hot-glued a store-bought volcano to a cardboard base and called it a day. Lark ratted me out. I had to do a report on igneous rocks as penance.”
She laughs, the real kind that starts in the chest. “I love that.”
“Thanks,” I say, then tap the screen. “Who wants to ruin a tyrant?”
She sobers, nodding once. “Me.”
We work through the rest of the bundle, flagging anything that will hold up under daylight: Helena’s calendar breadcrumbs, two sloppily anonymized payments from a shell vendor to a “security consultant,” and a list of internal badge IDs that pinged the data center after midnight the week Shawn disappeared. Andrew’s included. So is Tasha’s. Helena's admin token doesn’t need a badge.
By the time we lean back, the food is cold and the case feels hot enough to burn a hole through the floor.
“Victory dumpling?” I offer.
River takes one and feeds it to me, grinning when I almost drop it. “You’re impossible.”
“You love it.”
She sets the carton down like she’s made a decision. “I do,” she says softly.
The air changes. Not sharp—sweet, heavy, inevitable. She shifts across the couch, knees bracketing my thigh, and I’m already falling before she kisses me.
It starts soft—gratitude, relief, the press of a mouth that knows exactly where mine lives. Then it crests—heat, want, the elastic snap of something pulled too tight for too long. I cup the back of her neck and tilt her up to me, and she sighs, opens, and her name is a warm sound against my tongue.
“Hi,” I murmur, useless and happy.
“Hi,” she echoes, breath teasing my lips.
Her fingers slip under my T-shirt and flatten over my ribs, possessive like she’s staking claim. I’m embarrassingly easy, and I go where she guides me, kiss where she wants me, learn the map of her with my hands like there’s going to be a test and I plan to ace it.
“Tell me you want me,” I say, because I need to hear it from her lips.
She shakes her head and kisses me harder. “I want you. Oh Gage, I want you so damn bad.”
“I like you so fucking much,” I breathe, and she laughs into my mouth, which does inconvenient things to my self-control.
We tip sideways, the couch protesting while I gather her in. Her shirt goes first, then mine, and the room narrows to the slick heat of her kiss, the soft drag of skin, the sound she makes when I trace the line of her waist and pull her closer. I take my time anyway. Every yes she gives me is another brick in a house I didn’t know I was allowed to build.