Chapter 39 Fallout & Fire
Eli’s POV
The war room looked like a storm on fifty different skies at once.
Every screen was screaming. Red bars, jagged graphs, connection maps lighting up as DDoS traffic slammed into Mercer’s outer walls. Client portals flickered under the load. Log windows spat endless lines of garbage requests and, buried under them, quieter probes feeling for weak spots.
Sloane stood in the middle of it in her suit from the boardroom, jacket off, sleeves shoved to her elbows, hair already pulling loose from its knot. She moved like a general dropped into the perfect battlefield for her.
“Kill traffic from the one one four block,” she barked. “Null route it upstream. Reroute client alpha through backup nodes C and D. Segment finance from external auth now, I do not care if accounting cries.”
Her fingers flew across a keyboard, shoulder brushing mine when she leaned over Mila’s console. Her voice cut clean through the noise, steady, fast, no wobble from what she had just done upstairs. You would not know she had just told a room full of people that she loved her bodyguard.
You would not know she had just set herself on fire for me.
On one of the side walls, someone flipped over to a news feed for a second. A headline bar crawled across. Mercer CEO Admits Relationship with Bodyguard Amid Security Scandal.
Under it, a shaky clip from inside the boardroom. Someone had recorded her standing, her voice sharp and clear. I care about him too.
“Kill that,” I snapped, more harsh than I meant. “We do not split focus.”
The screen flipped back to traffic graphs. But the words were still there, echoing in my head.
I watched her work and felt two things at once. Pride that felt like it might crack my chest open. Guilt like a slow bruise under my ribs. Her world was burning hotter because she had put my name in her mouth in that room, because she had refused to pretend I was just a contractor.
Mila cursed softly. “They are trying privilege escalations on three client boxes,” she said. “Looks automated but smart. Someone is steering this, not just a botnet gone wild.”
“Isolate them,” Sloane said. “Throw them in a sandbox and let them scream into a wall.”
Hours blurred. We rerouted, blackholed, walled off chunks of the network like sealing off a corridor filling with smoke. People moved around us, but for me it narrowed down to her voice, the beeping of systems, the steady tap of keys.
At some point, a junior analyst whispered, “She really said it, huh,” to someone else. I pretended I did not hear.
Eventually the graphs began to flatten. The red bars shrank. The angry little dots on our maps dropped off as upstream providers finally listened to our calls and cut traffic. Clients stayed up. Barely, but they did.
The room sagged all at once. Someone laughed weakly. Someone else cried for a second, then wiped their face and went back to logging incidents.
Sloane rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Spin up a full after action,” she told Mila. “I want source maps, timestamps, any overlap with our favorite shadow consortium. And get comms a stripped version in case press asks stupid questions.”
Then she looked at me. “Come with me,” she said.
She led me into a small internal conference room and shut the door. The sudden quiet made my ears ring.
For a moment we just stood there. Her back was against the glass, my palm still buzzing from where I had pressed it into a console for hours.
“You did not have to do that,” I said finally. My voice came out rougher than I liked. “Up there. You could have lied. Dodged. Let them think whatever they wanted.”
Her mouth twitched into something that was not quite a smile. “They were going to light us on fire either way,” she said. “I would rather burn for something that is actually true than for some story they made up in a boardroom.”
I shook my head. “I can live with being the villain in their story if it keeps you on top of this company,” I said. “I have been the bad guy on paper before. It does not kill me.”
“I am not throwing you under a bus to keep a title, Eli,” she snapped back. “That is not power. That is fear with a nice suit on.”
Silence stretched between us. Her hands were clenched at her sides, knuckles white. Mine were too.
“I do not know how to protect you from this,” I said, the words dragging out like I had to pull them over barbed wire. “Bullets, bombs, men in masks, I know those drills. This thing. Reputation. Narratives. People cutting clips until even you question what happened. I do not know how to stand in front of that.”
Her expression softened, just a little. “Then do not try to stand between me and it,” she said quietly. “Stand beside me and let them talk.”
She pushed off the glass and stepped into my space. Her forehead came to rest against my chest, right over the place my heart had been hammering all night.
I let out a breath I had not known I was holding and wrapped my arms around her. It was not the way I held clients in panics, steering them, moving them like pieces. It was gentler. Protective in a way that had nothing to do with guns or doors. Shielding her from the voice in her own head that would turn this into a mistake.
Outside, somewhere, people were arguing about whether she should be fired, whether we were reckless or brave or just hot together. In here, there was just the sound of her breathing, slowly matching mine.
She tipped her head back. Her eyes were dark and clear. She did not ask. Neither did I.
I lowered my mouth to hers.
The kiss was slow. No panic, no exploding need to forget. Just a careful, deliberate press of lips, a question and an answer at the same time. Her hands slid up into my shirt, fingers resting against my ribs. Mine cupped her face, thumbs brushing her cheekbones.
It felt like drawing a line in ink on a page already smudged. A claim. On each other, against the world, in full knowledge of what it would cost.
When we finally pulled apart, both breathing a little harder, we did not reach for more. Not now. Not with servers still warm from battle and cameras probably hunting for any new angle.
“If we cross that line now,” she murmured, eyes flicking down then back up, “it is going to be because we chose it, not because they pushed us together.”
“Agreed,” I said, and it was the hardest thing in the world not to slide his hands under her shirt and forget every agreement we had ever made.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
I did not want to look. The world was very good at punching holes in good moments.
Lucas’s name flashed on the screen.
Government liaison wants to talk. They are asking if your relationship compromised any security protocols on the contract. This is going federal, Eli.
I met Sloane’s eyes over the glow of the message.
Physical war I knew how to fight. This one was going to be fought in hearing rooms and headlines.
And now we were both in it, by choice.