Chapter 1 The Night I Broke My Algorithm
Sloane’s POV
The first time I saw him, I lied about my name and asked him to ruin me.
I was already half angry at myself when I thought it. Angry and restless and bone deep tired in a way no amount of sleep ever fixed. The bar on the top floor of the hotel buzzed with low music and expensive conversation, all sharp suits and glossy hair, everyone competing to out humble brag about funding rounds and zero day exploits. I was supposed to be out there among them, the star attraction of the Berlin cybersecurity summit. Instead I had escaped to a shadowed corner table like a coward.
My badge was in my room. My hair was down around my shoulders instead of crushed into the tight knot my assistant called my battle helmet. I had traded my usual brutal dress for a simple black slip and a worn leather jacket. On my fake conference app profile, my name tonight was Lena. Lena was allowed to be nobody.
Lena did not have to carry an entire company, a board, a market worth nine figures on her shoulders. Lena did not have to be the youngest woman on every panel, or the one reporters asked about being a role model. Lena did not have to be perfect code in heels.
My real life was a loop. Work, gym, sleep, code. Optimize diet, optimize time, optimize outputs. Everything measured, everything controlled. My father had taught me early that if you were exceptional you owed your talent to whoever funded it. Noah had taught me that if you were not careful, someone would sell your brilliance in back rooms and smile while they signed your name under it. The lesson I took from both was simple. Never, ever lose control.
Which was why tonight felt like a small, clinically designed rebellion. A controlled experiment in chaos. One night, one variable, then back to baseline.
He walked in while I was lecturing myself about it.
American, my brain tagged at once. There was a certain way they moved, casual and alert at the same time. He was taller than most of the men in the room, broad shouldered in a dark shirt and jeans instead of a suit, sleeves pushed up to show ink on his forearms. Not showy tattoos, just black lines and hints of words that disappeared under fabric. His hair was a little too long for the corporate crowd, his jaw rough with end of day stubble.
He did not look like he belonged to the digital orbit swirling around the bar. He moved like he belonged to the physical world, the one of doors and exits and hard impacts. His gaze swept the space in a way I recognized, a quiet sweep cataloguing who sat where, where the staff moved, where the fire doors were. Ex military, my mind filed, then immediately scolded me for caring.
He glanced my way. Our eyes met for a fraction of a second, too long to be accidental, too direct to feel safe. I looked back at my nearly empty glass, set it down because my hand had started to shake. This was stupid. I did not do this.
So of course when his shadow fell across my table, my body went very still and my mind raced.
“Seat taken?” he asked, voice low and rough, like gravel that had learned to be polite.
I told myself to say yes, to wave him away, to go back to my room and my code.
“No,” Lena said.
He sat. Up close he smelled faintly of soap and hotel air, not heavy cologne. His eyes were a dark hazel that picked up stray amber from the bar’s lights. They were not soft. They were not hard, either. Just very, very awake.
“Buy you another?” He nodded toward my glass.
“Yes.” It surprised both of us, I think.
He signaled the bartender, ordered something neat for himself, another gin and tonic for me. For a moment we just existed in the quiet between songs.
“You in town for the circus?” he asked.
I took a sip. “Vacation.”
He raised a brow. “In a hotel full of hackers and venture capital?”
“Maybe I like chaos.”
His mouth quirked. “You do not look like someone who likes chaos.”
That stung more than it should have. “You must be very good at reading people, then.”
“Sometimes.” He studied me, but not in the way men usually did. It felt less like evaluation and more like he was checking the integrity of a structure. “What do you do, Lena?”
The name slid easily on my tongue now. “Tech.”
“That narrows it down.”
“Consulting,” I added, picking something vague and true enough.
He smiled, small and knowing, like he understood that was all he was getting and was not offended. “Me too. Security clients.”
Of course. He had the posture, the scanning eyes, the coiled readiness.
We talked. At first about neutral things, the city, the hotel, the kind of silly irritations that came with long flights and bad airport coffee. Then, somehow, we were on burnout, on how people in our line of work wore overstimulation like a badge, how the more important everyone said you were, the less human you felt.
He listened. Really listened. When he asked, “Are you running from something or toward something tonight?” it slid under my skin like a fine wire.
“Both,” I wanted to say.
“Neither,” I said instead, shrugging. “I am just here.”
His leg brushed mine under the table when he shifted to hear me better over the music. Heat flashed up my thigh, straight to my lungs. Our fingers grazed when he passed me my drink. My pulse jumped. I was not used to my body reacting before my brain.
I heard myself say, very calmly, “I want one night I do not have to remember as a mistake or a calculation.”
His eyes searched mine, and for a second I thought he would laugh, or worse, pity me. Instead he checked the almost empty glass by my elbow, the steadiness of my gaze.
“You sober?”
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” My voice did not shake.
He nodded once, as if I had just answered something much larger than that. “Then finish your drink,” he said quietly. “We will go upstairs. And if you change your mind at any point, you say so and we stop.”
The bar noise faded. My heart was loud in my ears. This was my experiment. I had chosen the variable, watched it walk across the room, invited it to sit down.
I finished my drink.
In the elevator I watched our reflection in the mirrored walls. Him, solid and dark at my side. Me, hair loose, mouth already slightly swollen from the first kiss we had stolen in the hallway, my own eyes unfamiliar.
He did a small sweep of my suite without thinking, glancing into the bathroom, checking the balcony door, the adjoining door lock. I should have been annoyed. Instead it felt oddly like care.
My laptop sat open on the desk, lines of code and a network map glowing accusingly. His gaze skimmed the screen.
“You really are in tech,” he murmured.
I snapped it shut harder than necessary, like I could crush Sloane Mercer in the hinge.
Then I let Lena take over.
Later, in the dark, his body was heat and weight and focused attention. He moved like he fought, precise and reading my responses, always adjusting, never rushing. I had not known sex could feel like being rewritten, not just used as an outlet. Every time I reached for control, he gave it back to me and then, gently, took it away in ways that made my mind go blessedly quiet.
I came apart on a rough sound I did not recognize as my own. I let him hold me down through the aftershocks. I let him pull me to his chest, my ear over his heartbeat, his hand smoothing down my back until my breathing matched his.
“Right now,” he said into my hair, voice almost a vibration against my skull, “you are just a woman in my arms. That is enough.”
I fell asleep there. I do not sleep on anyone. I do not sleep in front of anyone.
I woke to gray light leaking around heavy curtains and a cold, hard knot of panic in my throat. His arm was still around me, heavy and warm, his face relaxed in sleep. The sight of him like that, unguarded beside me, felt like a data breach inside my own chest.
Carefully, I slid free, gathering my clothes from the floor, wincing at every rustle. I dressed without turning on any lights.
On the desk I found the hotel notepad and pen. My hand hovered. Then I wrote, Thank you for the statistically improbable night.
No name.
I left the note balanced on his dog tags where he had dropped them on the nightstand. One last look at the bed, at the shape of him under the covers, and I walked out into the gut punch chill of Berlin morning.
By the time the hotel doors hissed shut behind me, I had already started rebuilding my walls.
I told myself I would never see him again.
And that was the part I was most wrong about.