Page 39 of Cipher: Lethal Algorithm

I don’t look up. If I look up, I’ll shatter. “The Luxembourg node is gone. The keys are useless. The Architect is rewriting the entire routing table right now, and I can’t even see the map because I don’t have enough processing power?—”

“Ivy.”

He crosses the room. The heavy fall of his boots on the hardwood draws closer, stopping just short of the tangled mess of my makeshift rig. I refuse to lift my head. Staring blindly at the blinking green light of the primary relay, I pry the connector loose and try to jam it back into the port.

His hand closes over mine.

The physical contact is a live wire. All the frantic, chaotic energy bleeding out of me instantly crystallizes at the pointwhere his palm covers my knuckles. He doesn’t pull my hand back. He just holds it in place, completely stilling the frantic movement. The intense heat radiating from his skin is suffocating.

Forty minutes ago, we spent three excruciating seconds touching in the dark. It obliterated every professional boundary I relied on to survive him. Now, in the harsh overhead light of the island house, he isn’t hiding it.

“Stop.” His voice is soft.

“I have to get back inside.” My voice is a tight, desperate rasp. “If the Architect secures the ledger, all of this was for nothing. The last three years were for nothing.”

“The ledger isn’t secured yet. Hutch has the NSA running a suppression wave on the Luxembourg relays to buy you time.” Julian releases my hand. The sudden absence of his touch leaves a freezing, aching hollow in my chest. He crouches down, bringing himself to eye level. “You don’t need to rebuild the rig in thirty seconds.”

“I don’t have a choice.” I finally look up, meeting his eyes. “When this is over—when the ledger is handed over and the Consortium’s financial network actually collapses—what happens to me?”

The question hangs in the dead air between us, raw and entirely unshielded. I hadn’t planned to ask it.

For three years, the only endgame was burning the next server. Now, sitting on the floor of a rented safe house with a Federal Marshal who looks at me like he wants to tear the world apart to keep me safe, the endgame is terrifying.

Julian’s expression tightens. The protective handler facade slides perfectly into place, a mask forged from years of Task Force 9 protocol.

“WITSEC.” The word is flat and definitive. “Protection detail. Relocation. We wipe your digital footprint entirely.”

The words hit me like a physical blow. The promise of safety feels exactly like a cage.

“I disappear.”

“A safe version of you.” His voice drops into that quiet, firm register he uses whenever he needs to manage my panic. “A version the remaining Consortium elements can never touch.”

I stare at the hard lines of his face, the exhaustion bracketing his mouth. He believes it. He genuinely believes handing my life over to a federal bureaucracy is the only way to save it.

He doesn’t understand that I already disappeared. I just did it myself.

“What if I don’t want to disappear someone else’s way?”

Julian goes completely still. The handler mask fractures, just slightly, at the edges. He recognizes the shift in my tone—the sudden, dangerous clarity that comes when I stop acting like a civilian and start acting like an operator.

“Then you negotiate.”

“With whom?”

“Me.”

It isn’t a promise of federal immunity. It’s a statement of raw, possessive intent. He offers himself as the wall between me and the rest of the world, including his government.

It’s the most honest, terrifying thing he’s told me since he climbed into the passenger seat of my rental car.

I hold his gaze. The adrenaline still burning in my veins flares, hot and desperate. I don’t want a handler. I don’t want a protector. I want the man who handed me a Glock and treated me like an equal.

Reckless, adrenaline-fueled instinct overrides three years of careful survival. I strip away the final, most crucial layer of my armor.

“The HSM is at the Venetian.”

The words drop into the silence of the room, heavy and final.