Chapter 7
His gaze swept the street as she turned down a quieter road, lined with dimly lit apartment buildings and locked storefronts. The city’s noise dulled here, the chaotic energy thinning into something quieter, more intimate.
If anyone else had been following her, she wouldn’t have known.
Seamus hated that thought.
Mika finally reached her building, pulling out her keys as she approached the front entrance. Seamus stopped at the mouth of an alleyway across the street, watching as she unlocked the door and stepped inside without hesitation, without even pausing to check if she was alone.
She disappeared into the darkness of the hallway, the door shutting behind her with a quiet click.
Seamus exhaled slowly, rolling his shoulders as tension coiled tight beneath his skin. She had no idea.
She had no idea that she had been followed. That he had mapped every step she had taken, every decision she had made. That he could have reached her before she even saw him coming.
And she would have been his.
His jaw tightened. He had meant to follow her home to confirm her location, to know where she lived so that he could decide his next move. That was all.
But now, standing in the shadows, staring at the closed door of her building, something far more dangerous settled inside him.
Because for the first time, he didn’t like the idea of anyone else following her.
He didn’t like the idea of anyone else watching her, knowing where she lived, knowing how easily she could be taken.
She was too oblivious. Too trusting of the dark.
And if he had found her—who else could?
Seamus lingered a moment longer, his pulse slow, steady, controlled.
He had found her.
But suddenly, the thought of leaving her unprotected didn’t sit well with him.
He turned, stepping back into the night, disappearing just as effortlessly as he had arrived.
He wasn’t done watching her.
Not yet.
Inside her bag, tucked beneath the book she had purchased, sat a second book she hadn’t picked out. One that hadn’t been there before.
The title embossed in deep crimson letters:
HUNTED: A Killer’s Obsession.
A story about an assassin hunting his prey. And completely annihilating her.
Mika’s world had always been about numbers.
Cold, unfeeling, predictable. Data didn’t lie, didn’t manipulate, didn’t pretend to be something it wasn’t. It was truth in its purest form, and Mika had built her life around it.
She stepped into the sleek glass building that housed Grayson Analytics, a leading firm specializing in corporate intelligence, risk assessment, and financial security. The moment she walked through the revolving doors, she was no longer the woman curled up in a dark bookstore with a novel about obsessive, violent love. She was Mika, senior data scientist and corporate intelligence analyst—one of the best in her field.
The firm was designed like a machine. Efficient, calculated, pristine. High-powered executives flowed in and out of the lobby, their voices clipped and controlled, the sound of clicking heels and murmured phone calls filling the air. The company’s clients were multi-billion-dollar corporations, political entities, and financial giants who paid exorbitant amounts of money to ensure their interests were protected.
And Mika?
She was the eyes in the system—the one who found anomalies before they became crises, the one who spotted vulnerabilities before they were exploited.
She passed through security, swiping her badge at the checkpoint before stepping into the elevator. As the doors slid shut, she finally allowed herself to breathe. Work was order, and after a weekend spent too deep in her thoughts—too wrapped up in something she shouldn’t be thinking about—this was exactly what she needed.
The elevator dinged on the 20th floor, and she stepped out, greeted by the familiar hum of the operations floor. Walls lined with digital screens displayed real-time data: market fluctuations, financial irregularities, geopolitical shifts. This was where the world’s unseen battles were fought—not on the streets, but in codes, transactions, and hidden algorithms.
Her desk was tucked in the far corner of the floor, surrounded by multiple monitors running live feeds of market trends and financial reports. To anyone else, it looked like chaos, but to Mika, it was a language only she could read. A constant stream of movement, numbers shifting and reshaping as the financial world adjusted to every ripple.
She had barely set her bag down when a voice called her name.
“Mika, you’re back.”
She turned to see Elliot Grayson, her direct manager and the firm’s lead strategist. He was a man in his early fifties, silver-haired and perpetually dressed in the sharpest navy suits. He had recruited her straight out of grad school, recognizing something in her that most overlooked—her ability to see patterns where others saw noise.
“Morning,” she greeted, adjusting the strap of her laptop bag. “Anything urgent?”
Elliot smirked. “You mean besides the usual multi-million-dollar fraud cases?”
She huffed out a small laugh and followed him toward the main briefing room, where the glass walls were already filled with projection screens displaying various reports.
He handed her a tablet. “I flagged something last week. It started small, a few odd transactions buried deep in offshore accounts, but the more I looked, the more… strange it felt.”
Mika scanned the numbers, her brain already working, already seeing the connections forming between seemingly random data points. Offshore payments, shell corporations, rerouted funds.
“Who’s the client?” she asked, her voice even.
Elliot hesitated. “It’s not a client. It’s one of our partners.”
That got her attention. She lifted her gaze from the screen, meeting his sharp blue eyes.
“Which one?”
“Avalon Holdings.”
Mika frowned. Avalon was one of the biggest investment firms in the country, an entity so deeply entrenched in global finance that it was practically untouchable.
“And they don’t know we’re looking at this?” she asked.
Elliot gave a tight nod. “Not yet. I wanted fresh eyes before we escalate. You see anything?”
Mika’s fingers danced over the screen, pulling up deeper layers of the data, filtering through transaction logs, timestamps, encryption markers. It was almost second nature, the way her brain deconstructed the numbers, breaking them apart and reassembling them into something that made sense.
And then—
She saw it.
A name. Buried in the encryption, hidden in the metadata of a wire transfer.
A name she didn’t recognize.
But something about it felt wrong.
Her pulse picked up, a prickle of unease creeping up her spine. “These aren’t normal transactions,” she murmured, mostly to herself. “This isn’t just financial misreporting. Someone is hiding something… or funding something.”
She zoomed in, analyzing timestamps, cross-referencing with past transactions, following the money like a trail of breadcrumbs. The same name appeared again and again, linked to payments originating from various offshore accounts, always just below the threshold that would trigger an automatic audit.
Mika’s frown deepened. This wasn’t just an irregularity.
This was intentional.
Elliot studied her. “Do you think it’s worth digging deeper?”
Mika hesitated for only a second.