Chapter 2

He stared at me for a full three seconds, a barely perceptible, icy smile on his lips. Right then, I felt like helpless prey caught in the eyes of a deadly snake. My whole body tensed up, every nerve on edge.

The department meeting felt like a death sentence for me.

Kieran stood expressionless in front of the projection screen, the blue glow giving his icy features an almost ghostly vibe.

With a casual swipe of his long fingers across the touchpad, a snippet of code popped up. It was so concise and perfectly logical that it was practically a piece of art.

My breath caught the moment I recognized the code.

It was the core module that Echo had helped me optimize last night. The messy logic I'd had before was now turned into a three-dimensional topological algorithm I'd never seen.

It boosted efficiency by three hundred percent, but was so unique that it instantly stood out from any ordinary pile of code.

"Evelyn Leighton, care to explain?" Kieran's voice echoed through the spacious conference room, his tone leaving no room for argument.

I clenched the hem of my blouse so hard that my nails dug deep into my palm. The pain was the only thing keeping me grounded, but I could feel cold sweat trickling down my back, sticking my blouse to my skin.

"About this code, I dug through some obscure open-source documents and optimized it myself." I forced myself to look up, my gaze flickering away. My voice trembled so much that I could barely stand to hear it.

"You wrote this yourself?" Kieran slowly walked down from the podium, the crisp, almost jarring sound of his leather shoes echoing through the dead silence of the room.

He stopped right behind me, and I could feel his cool, minty tobacco scent washing over me. He leaned down, hands braced on the back of my chair, forming an aggressive, half-enclosed posture around me.

"There are maybe five people in the world who could pull off this kind of nonlinear encryption iteration," he murmured in my ear, his voice low and dangerous, with a predatory undertone.

"And you, Evelyn, have been in the field for three years, never standing out. So tell me, how did you suddenly have a breakthrough?"

Every pair of eyes in the room was fixed on me, and whispers flooded the space like a rising tide.

My mind was blank, and my throat felt so tight it was as if someone had stuffed it full of wet cotton. I couldn't force out a single word.

Kieran suddenly asked, "Do you know Zero?" His eyes were sharp and unyielding, locking onto me like a predator.

The name "Zero" crashed into my mind like thunder, making my ears ring.

"I-I don't know what you're talking about." I shot up from my seat so quickly that my knee smashed against the desk. The pain was intense, but I couldn't care less.

Kieran didn't back off. Instead, he stepped even closer, towering over me, his shadow swallowing me whole. Suddenly, he lifted his hand and jabbed his finger at the screen in front of me, highlighting an extremely hidden variable with a tiny triangle symbol.

That was Tristan's signature move. Whenever he coded a tricky loop, he'd leave that mark behind, his way of tagging a Möbius loop.

"Are you still not going to come clean?" Kieran pressed.

Kieran suddenly leaned in. He was so close that I could make out every thick lash around his eyes. His voice dropped to a chilling whisper, his cold presence practically seeping into my skin.

"Stop pretending. This code is a dead ringer for the patch left after the Homeland Security Office got hacked three years ago. And the one who fixed it? His codename was Zero."

My heart seemed to stop for a split second, and my blood rushed to my head, leaving me dizzy.

"That person is Tristan," Kieran said, his voice barely louder than a whisper, but it hit me like a feather landing on the deepest ruins of my heart.

How could he possibly know Tristan? Tristan had never once mentioned Zero to me. Tristan was just a system architect at a regular tech company, an ordinary guy who'd get all flustered and break out in a sweat if I caught a cold.

My breathing was getting faster and shallower, and my vision started to go fuzzy.

Suddenly, Kieran clamped down on my wrist, his grip so fierce it felt like he might snap my bones. His cold stare pinned me in place, and he spat out each word.

"Now, tell me, where is Zero? The one who died in an accident three months ago, but somehow was helping you write code just last night. Where is he hiding?"

I froze in place, cold as if I'd been dropped straight into the ocean's depths. Suddenly, my phone in my laptop bag started buzzing intensely. It was Echo's custom alert.

Out of Kieran's sight, my phone screen quietly lit up.

A single line popped up. [Evie, don't look at him.]

By the time I got home, the sky had turned a murky, leaden gray.