My world has no edges. It consists entirely of twenty-four thirty-two-inch, liquid-crystal displays, curved around me like a digital ribcage. I don't breathe air; I breathe the recycled coolness of server racks. I don't feel emotions; I only analyze data packet variances.
In this sphere of total darkness, illuminated only by the faint, eerie glow of binary code cascading down my monitors, I am not Anya.
I am The Eye. And I am a goddess.
My current devotion is Julian Sterling.
I reached for my mug of black coffee, my eyes never straying from the center screen. The thermal imaging camera showed a silhouette of perfect symmetry. Six feet two, broad shoulders, a resting heart rate that barely broke fifty beats per minute even while asleep. Julian was exercising in his private, state-of-the-art gym, located on the sixty-fifth floor of Sterling Tower.
He shouldn't have been awake. It was 3:17 AM.
I had been inside his life for precisely thirty days. It took me a week to bypass the military-grade encryption on his home automation system, and another three days to find the vulnerabilities in his personal mobile devices. My client—anonymous, naturally, paying in untraceable cryptocurrency—wanted leverage. Crimes. Dirty laundry. Anything that could bring the untouchable CEO of Sterling Industries to his knees.
But Julian was immaculate.
He didn't do drugs. He drank only aged Macallan, never more than two fingers. He had no scandals, no gambling debts, no messy breakups. His life was a masterpiece of discipline and curated perfection. It was disgusting.
"Come on, Julian," I whispered, my voice raspy from hours of silence. "Show me the monster under the skin."
I tapped a macro on my custom mechanical keyboard. The lights on his private elevator control panel blinked from green to red. I had simulated a minor power surge. A tiny, insignificant annoyance.
On screen, Julian paused mid-rep on the bench press. His silhouette hardened. I zoomed in using the optical lens hidden within the 4K sensor disguised as a smoke detector.
He sat up, wiping sweat from his brow with a towel. The definition of his muscles was ridiculous, like a classical Greek sculpture came to life and decided to run a multinational conglomerate. But it was his face that always unsettled me. Even through a pixelated lens, his features were dangerously sharp—a jawline that could cut glass, lips that rarely smiled, and eyes that always seemed to be looking through everything.
He stood up and walked toward the console of his home automation system.
I smirked. He was going to check the fault logs. I had already scrubbed them, replacing the real surge event with a simulated diagnostic failure.
I watched him tap the screen. My keystroke logger intercepted his input.
PASSCODE: 0000
I laughed aloud, a sharp, dry sound in the empty room. A billionaire genius, and his security code was 0000? It was an insult. A deliberate statement that he didn't care about security because he believed no one would dare to invade his space.
But I was here. I was the ghost in his machine, the invisible shadow in his bedroom, the silent ghost in his elevator. I knew the exact viscosity of the soap he used, the temperature he preferred his water, and the names of the three people he spoke to on his encrypted line this week (his lawyer, his VP of operations, and a woman who sounded remarkably like the Prime Minister of France).
He looked directly at the console for a long moment, then turned away. He didn't look annoyed. He looked... amused.
That was the word. A tiny tug at the corner of his lips.
A cold shiver, unprompted and unexpected, snaked down my spine.
It was probably just the air conditioning. I pulled my oversized hoodie tighter around myself and refocused on the download bar on the adjacent monitor.
STERLING_ARCHIVE_ENCRYPTED_VOLUME_4: 98% Complete.
This was my breakthrough. A hidden, partitioned server I had discovered buried deep within the building's core. It wasn't linked to the main network. If there was dirt on Julian Sterling, it was here.
99% Complete.
The thrill—that addicting, borderline erotic rush of impending conquest—began to bloom in my chest. In ten seconds, the infallible Julian Sterling would belong to me. I would own his secrets. I would decide his fate.
100%. DOWNLOAD SUCCESSFUL.
"Got you," I breathed, the goddess savoring her victory.
I moved the cursor to decrypt the file. It should have taken hours. My decryptor usually brute-forced these things using a distributed botnet I controlled.
The file popped open instantly.
No passcode required. No waiting. Just an instant, clean, digital unlock.
My heart rate, usually as low as Julian's, spiked to ninety.
The volume didn't contain financial documents. It didn't contain illicit photos. It didn't contain blackmail material.
It contained a single, looping video file.
I clicked it.
The screen didn't show the inside of Julian's penthouse. It showed a dim, cramped room, filled with twenty-four curved monitors glowing in the dark. A woman with short, messy dark hair and an oversized black hoodie was sitting in the center, staring intensely at a screen that was showing a thermal image of Julian Sterling.
My blood turned to liquid nitrogen.
The video wasn't from a camera in his apartment.
It was from the built-in webcam on my own monitor.
Slowly, terrifyingly, the image of myself on the screen didn't change, but the center monitor I was watching—the live feed of Julian's gym—did.
Julian was no longer sat at the console. He was standing directly in front of the smoke detector camera, his face filling the frame.
He wasn't sitting or looking down. He was looking up, his gaze precise, direct, and devastating.
His piercing, dark eyes held an unnerving clarity. The tiny smirk I had seen earlier was now a full, chilling, predatory smile.
He slowly raised his hand, not a whiskey glass, but a hand, making a lazy 'W' gesture in the air. W for Voyeur.
Then, his voice, smooth and deep, echoed from my own high-end speakers, a sound that should not have been possible.
"Watched enough, Anya?"