Malakai's POV
For one dangerous minute, I let myself forget what I was.
Kiera was still in my arms, her body warm against mine, her breathing finally evening out after that last kiss. The room had gone quiet in the way only night could make it quiet—thick, intimate, full of shadow and held breath. The lamps were low. The curtains were half-drawn. Everything beyond the walls of her room felt distant, muted, irrelevant.
That was the problem.
Nothing in my life was ever irrelevant for long.
My hand rested at the curve of her waist, my thumb moving once, absently, over the fabric there. She was quiet now, but not asleep. I could feel thought moving through her. Tension still lived in the line of her shoulders even while she stayed tucked against me, as if some part of her still didn't fully trust peace when it came.
I understood that better than she knew.
I lowered my head and pressed my mouth to her hair again.
She shifted slightly under the touch.
And then my phone vibrated on the nightstand.
Once.
Twice.
A third time.
Not a call someone made casually. Not a call anyone sane made at this hour unless something had already gone wrong.
Kiera stiffened before I even moved.
The warmth in the room changed instantly.
I closed my eyes for half a second, already feeling the switch inside me begin to turn. That cold mechanism. That old steel. The one part of myself that never slept, never softened, never stayed buried for long.
The phone vibrated again.
I reached for it.
Tiger.
Of course it was Tiger.
I answered without taking my eyes off the dark ceiling. "What."
His voice came low and clipped through the speaker. "We have another problem."
Every muscle in my body tightened.
Kiera pushed herself up slightly on one elbow beside me, not speaking, but watching my face with that same quiet alertness she brought to everything that mattered.
I swung my legs off the bed and stood.
"Talk."
I crossed the room, one hand braced on the edge of the dresser as Tiger continued.
"The north security grid went down for forty-seven seconds," he said. "Not a full system failure. Just enough for someone to slip through and back out before the backup trigger finished cycling."
I went still.
"Where?"
"The lower archive corridor."
A pulse started in my jaw.
The lower archive corridor wasn't random. It wasn't decorative. It wasn't somewhere a curious idiot wandered into by mistake.
Files were kept there.
Movement reports.
Financial routing.
Travel documents.
Names.
My voice flattened. "What was touched?"
"We're still checking. One of the outer locks was bypassed, not broken. Clean job. No camera face, no direct prints."
I looked down at the dark floorboards, already seeing the shape of it.
"Anyone see anything?"
A beat of silence.
Then Tiger said, "One guard."
Not good.
I turned away from the bed and walked toward the window. "And?"
"He's alive."
That only meant the story got uglier.
"But barely conscious," Tiger continued. "Head trauma. Blood loss. Looks like he got too close and paid for it. He tried to crawl to the hall phone before he passed out."
The city beyond the glass was a black spread of sleeping lights and distant reflections, the mansion grounds below almost invisible except for the occasional sweep of perimeter beams and the faint ghost of gravel paths under moonlight.
Behind me, Kiera moved off the bed. I heard the soft shift of fabric, the careful silence of bare feet against the floor.
Tiger kept talking.
"And Mal—"
"Yes?"
"We found something else."
Of course they had.
"There was a file drawer left half-open in the archive office. Not ransacked. Just one drawer. The Russia packet is gone."
My grip tightened around the phone.
For a second, I said nothing.
Didn't breathe.
Didn't move.
The Russia packet.
The Sokolov route.
Meeting coordinates.
Travel changes.
Financial bridges.
Contingency names.
Classified so tightly only a handful of men should have known it existed.
My mind started turning fast, cold and precise.
Not an outside guess.
Not random theft.
Not a lucky breach.
Someone had known exactly what to look for.
Someone inside.
Tiger lowered his voice further. "They anticipated our response."
I laughed once.
Not because anything was funny.
Because rage sometimes wore the same face.
"Yes," I said quietly. "They did."
Behind me, I felt Kiera stop moving.
She still hadn't said a word.
But I could feel her attention on my back like a physical thing.
Tiger went on. "We also had an unmarked vehicle caught two streets over on traffic cams. Same time window. Plates are fake."
"Driver?"
"Gone."
"Witnesses?"
"Nothing useful."
I looked at my own reflection in the window—dim, fractured by the glass. A man in darkness, phone to his ear, with too many enemies and suddenly too little room for error.
"How many people know the packet is missing?"
"Just me. Now you."
"Good. Keep it that way."
Kiera's reflection appeared faintly behind mine now. Smaller. Still. Watching.
I lowered my voice. "Seal the archive floor. Pull every badge ping from the last six hours. I want vehicle logs, kitchen deliveries, housekeeping movement, maintenance requests, all of it."
"Already started."
"Good. Re-run them anyway."
Tiger exhaled through his nose. "Thought you'd say that."
"And wake Dorian."
Tiger paused. "Now?"
"Yes, now."
"He'll be thrilled."
"I don't care."
My eyes stayed on the dark grounds outside. "And Tiger?"
"Yeah."
"If the guard wakes up, I want every word he says recorded before he gets the idea to die on us."
There was no humor in Tiger's voice when he answered. "Understood."
I was about to end the call when he added, "You think it's the same leak?"
I turned that over for only a second.
The stolen Russia packet.
The earlier false vehicle records.
The manipulated gate logs.
The precise outage windows.
"Yes," I said. "And now whoever it is knows we're getting close."
Silence crackled over the line.
Then Tiger said the one thing I had already decided.
"You need to move carefully."
My gaze flicked again, almost against my will, to Kiera's reflection in the glass.
Careful was no longer just about shipments or weapons or business routes.
Now it had a face.
A voice.
A girl standing barefoot behind me in dim light, wearing the remains of softness my life had no right touching.
"I know," I said.
Then I hung up.
The room went silent.
Not empty silent.
Dangerous silent.
I kept staring out the window for another second, forcing every useful detail into place, feeling the shape of the night change under my skin. Somewhere out there, someone had stepped into my house's shadow and walked back out with something they should never have touched.
That kind of mistake usually ended in blood.
Behind me, Kiera finally spoke.
"What happened?"
Her voice was soft, but there was no fragility in it.
I turned.
She stood a few feet away now, hair loose around her shoulders, eyes darker in the low light. Concern sat openly on her face, but so did something else—something sharper. Thought. She was already trying to assemble the pieces from expression alone.
I crossed the room slowly.
"There's been another breach."
She swallowed. "In the house?"
"In the archive wing."
Her brows pulled together. "The same person?"
"Maybe."
That was a lie.
I believed it was.
But belief and proof were two different currencies, and I didn't spend one as the other.
Kiera looked toward the nightstand where my phone still rested in my hand. "Is someone hurt?"
I held her gaze.
"One guard." My voice hardened before I could stop it. "And someone took a file they weren't supposed to know existed."
Understanding flickered across her face—not full understanding, but enough to tell she grasped the weight of that.
"The Russia information," she said carefully.
Not a question.
I didn't ask how she guessed.
Because she usually guessed right.
I stepped closer until there was barely any space between us. "This is why I said I don't want you near it."
Her jaw tightened at that, but she didn't argue immediately.
Instead she looked at me—really looked. Past the anger in my tone. Past the control. Straight at the thing underneath it.
"You're leaving," she said.
"Yes."
The answer came too fast. Too flat.
Her eyes searched mine. "Tonight?"
"Now."
I reached for the shirt I had thrown over the back of the chair earlier and pulled it on in one motion, already feeling that other version of myself closing over the man who had been holding her moments ago. Buttons. Holster. Knife. Watch. Phone. The ritual was old, automatic, almost mechanical.
But Kiera stayed where she was, following each movement like she hated them.
And God help me, that made it harder.
"Malakai."
I looked up.
The room felt colder now. The intimacy still clung to it, but only like smoke after fire—evidence of what had been there before the world forced its way back in.
"Be careful," she said.
Not dramatic.
Not pleading.
Just honest.
Four syllables, and somehow they struck harder than threats ever had.
Something in my chest moved in a way I deeply distrusted.
I went to her before I could think better of it.
My hand came to the side of her face first, thumb brushing her cheek once. Then I bent and kissed her—not rough like before, not hungry, not reckless. Just deep enough to make the promise feel real. Her fingers caught at my wrist. Her mouth softened under mine immediately.
When I pulled back, I rested my forehead briefly against hers.
"Okay," I said.
It felt absurdly small for what she was asking.
So I gave her more.
"I'll be back to you soon."
Her breath caught at that.
To you.
Not here.
Not home.
Not the house.
To you.
I slipped one arm around her and pulled her close, holding her there for one suspended second longer than I should have allowed myself. She fit against me too naturally now. Too easily. Like my body had already memorized her.
Then I let her go.
Barely.
Just enough to look at her again.
"Lock your door tonight."
The softness vanished from my tone on that last part. She heard it. Nodded immediately.
I turned and left before I could stay.
The drive to the lower office site was black and wet.
Rain had started somewhere between the gates and the city, not a full storm, just a cold needling drizzle that slicked the roads and turned the windshield into a moving reflection of streetlights and passing neon. The wipers cut a rhythm through it. The engine growled low beneath me. Every traffic signal looked blood-red in the glass.
By the time I arrived, two black SUVs were already outside.
Tiger met me at the side entrance, coat damp at the shoulders, expression carved into something grim enough that I knew he had no intention of softening what waited below.
He didn't waste words.
"This way."
The lower corridor smelled like antiseptic, wet concrete, and iron.
Blood.
Even after all these years, fresh blood had a particular density to it in the air. Copper-thick. Metallic enough to live at the back of the throat.
A guard sat slumped against the wall outside the archive room, half-conscious, face pale under the fluorescent lights, hair sticky with blood near the temple. One medic knelt beside him, gloved hands moving fast. His shirt had been cut open at the shoulder where something sharp had sliced him on the way down.
"He woke once," Tiger muttered as we walked past. "Said he heard footsteps, saw someone in staff black, then got hit before he could call it in."
"Did he see a face?"
Tiger's jaw set. "No."
Of course not.
Inside the archive office, the damage was quiet.
And that made it worse.
No overturned desks.
No shattered glass.
No dramatic signs of forced entry.
Just precision.
One opened drawer.
A disabled interior sensor.
A file packet missing from a space too specific to be random.
The kind of violence that arrived with planning instead of heat.
I stepped farther in, scanning every surface, every hinge, every line of the room.
"Show me the logs again."
Tiger handed over a tablet.
I moved through the timestamps, the pings, the outage window, the cloned clearance trail. The data was neat. Too neat. Whoever had done this knew exactly how long they had before suspicion became action.
Then I saw it.
Not the absence.
The rhythm.
A kitchen delivery entry had been delayed on the sheet by six minutes—but the freight lift cycle attached to it hadn't.
I stopped walking.
Tiger noticed immediately. "What."
"This." I turned the screen slightly toward him. "The delivery time was adjusted after the system wrote the lift use."
He frowned. "Meaning?"
"Meaning whoever cleaned the log corrected the surface record and forgot the machinery timestamp underneath it."
Tiger stared at the screen for two beats, then let out a low curse.
I looked back at the open drawer.
No random enemy did that.
No outsider knew which layers to alter.
No amateur anticipated both human review and digital review.
This was someone who knew our habits.
Our systems.
Our blind spots.
Someone patient.
Someone close enough to hear things they shouldn't.
My thoughts flicked, just for a second, to Raphael—only because he had been in the room earlier, because he had seen the logs, because he had gone tense at the inconsistency before smoothing it away.
I killed the thought the moment it formed.
Not because I was sentimental.
Because suspicion without proof was how men started making sloppy decisions.
And sloppy decisions were exactly what whoever was doing this wanted from me.
Tiger watched me carefully. "You thinking of names?"
"Yes."
"You want to say them?"
"No."
He gave a short nod. Good. He understood the answer.
I handed the tablet back. "Start with anyone who had reason to hear movement around the Russia trip, then narrow by technical access and internal route familiarity."
Tiger's expression hardened. "You still think that's what this is tied to?"
I looked at the empty space where the packet had been.
"I know it is."
The rain hit somewhere above us, faint on the structure overhead.
A medic stepped into the doorway. "We're moving the guard."
"He keeping the arm?" Tiger asked.
The medic hesitated just enough to answer without words.
Then: "If swelling gets worse and the tissue doesn't respond, maybe not."
I said nothing.
Tiger muttered a curse under his breath.
A missing file was one thing. A man losing part of his body because someone inside wanted leverage was another.
I stepped back into the corridor and called over one of the senior men waiting near the stairwell.
"Names of the dead guards' families from last week," I said. "And his too, if he doesn't keep the arm."
The man straightened. "Yes, sir."
"Compensation gets sent before sunrise. Full amount. No delay."
Tiger looked at me once, then away. He already knew why.
Men died for me.
Bled for me.
Lost pieces of themselves for a machine bigger than any one of us.
If there was betrayal in the walls, the least I would do was make sure loyalty did not leave their families empty-handed.
When the man hurried off, Tiger glanced back toward the archive room. "So what now?"
I looked at the corridor camera, dead and dark above the door.
Then at the blood on the floor near the wounded guard's boot.
Then at the missing space inside the archive room.
What now.
Now I hunted.
Now I stopped assuming the leak was careless.
Now I treated it like intelligence.
Now I acted as if every wrong step had already been predicted by someone standing inside my reach.
And worst of all—
Now I had Kiera sleeping under my roof while a traitor moved through my world with enough confidence to steal from me twice.
My mouth hardened.
"Now," I said quietly, "we close every door."
Tiger's eyes narrowed. "And when we find him?"
I turned toward the stairs.
The fluorescent light cut pale over the concrete. My footsteps echoed once, twice, sharp against the corridor. The rain outside kept falling. Somewhere behind us, the wounded guard groaned as they lifted him.
"When we find him," I said, "I want him alive long enough to explain why he thought I wouldn't notice."
Tiger almost smiled, but there was nothing pleasant in it.
"That can be arranged."
I kept walking.
Because somewhere between the house and this room, between her quiet be careful and the blood on this floor, something in me had settled into a colder shape.
Not panic.
Not grief.
Purpose.
And whoever had touched my house, my men, my plans.....
Had no idea yet what they had just invited in.
Especially now I was forced to leave my girl's side. Her warmth. Her scent.
They will pay for that as well. And I'll still be counting