Page 61 of Filthy Little Fix
Nyx is the best hacker we've ever had. He is extraordinary, and Ihatethat he is. It would be much easier to get rid of dead weight, of someone who wouldn't make the slightest difference in any aspect of my life.
The worst part is that, in the ridiculous IT office of his daily job, heobeysme. I watch this. I watch each of that woman's—Nicole's—attempts at approach be met with disinterest and monotony.
It's late at night. The mansion is silent. I stare at a logistics contract I can't read. His absence is a black hole in the center of my concentration.
That's when Svetlana calls me.
"We have something," she says, without preamble. "A burst transmission intercepted ten minutes ago. Directed to a ghost server in Estonia."
I straighten in my chair. "What did Sal get?"
I can almost hear her disdain on the other end of the line. "He managed to hit his head against the wall. He thinks it's an AES encryption variation with a quantum key, but it could take days to force decryption, if it's even possible."
I press my temples. Days. Svetlana doesn't sleep well either, I know—the time of this call is proof of that. The lack of movement from our rat puts her more on edge than if he were setting fire to all our bases.
"We don't have days, Donya," she continues. "I told you to let the asset focus on unraveling the list, but this is more urgent."
The asset. The way she talks about him, as if he were a piece of machinery, irritates me. That's how I should see him too.
Svetlana calling me before deciding something alone also means something. She's tired of this unspoken tension. I am too. But isolating Nyx with absurd tasks was the only way to keep myself sane.
Of course, she doesn't know. And shewon'tknow.
"What are you suggesting?"
"Take the data to him. Now." She pauses. "Assuming your management hasn't compromised his cognitive ability, he needs to break the encryption as quickly as possible."
I press harder. I feel a red mark outlining my fingers, the skin of my temple staining from the pressure. IwishI had fucked with him on a cognitive level. Iwish.
I take a deep breath, forcing the rage to the bottom of my stomach. I won't give her confirmation of being who she thinks I am.
"His cognitive ability is intact," I say through gritted teeth. "Consider it done."
There's a pause on the other end of the line. Svetlana expected an explosion.
"Keep me updated," she finally says. "Every hour."
She hangs up before giving a chance for any useless discussion.
I waste no time. I grab the tablet from the table, the recently sent encrypted data relighting the locked screen, and leave my office.
It's work. Just work. An order from Svetlana.
I make every excuse not to delegate this to Luca. Calling him would be the logical move, it would maintain the facade of my self-control, but logic abandoned me the moment that bastard smiled at me with a cigarette box in his hand. Logic went up in smoke when he confessed he almost got hard knowing I controlled him. This is much more than a masochistic fetish I can satisfy with a punch.
I don't want a report from Luca. I want to see his face. This realization that I try so hard to hide and drown doesn't disappear; it feeds on his silence, on the obedience he gives me even after I deny his demands and conditions. I have nowhere tovent this. This shithead invalidated all the hatred I've felt since the poker night—myasset—with the disdain of opportunistically detaching himself from all his coworkers to please me, telling me again and again the pettiness of caring who Nicole Davis is to him.
Fuck, how weak does he make me?
I stop in front of the door of the room I assigned him—the guards in the hallway pretend not to see. I don't knock. I am the owner of this house,hisowner. I unlock the door with a fingerprint, turn the doorknob, and open it.
The room is completely dark. The only light source illuminates his face—flashes of green and white from a terminal scrolling a rapid sequence of codes. He doesn't stop typing for a second, immersed in the screen, and doesn't even notice my entry.
The ghost in the machine in its natural habitat.
I stand in the doorway, observing for a moment that stretches too long. The only things moving are the reflection of the code in his eyes and the rapid movement of his fingers. He's paler, with more dark circles. He hasn't slept in over twenty-four hours. I should feel satisfaction from having pushed him to the limit.
I step fully into the room, letting the door close behind me. The sound of the click isolates us from the rest of the world and is what breaks him from his trance—I see the subtle jump of his fingers the instant he stops typing, but it seems like a physical impulse. His eyes don't leave the screen, his head keeps turning the gears dependent on the code.
