The Alpha I Was Sent To Betray

Chapter 5: Caught Red-headed

Kieran Voss

A full week. Seven days of fixing printers that weren't broken, resetting passwords for people who couldn't remember their own birthdays, and drinking coffee that cost more than my monthly share of the apartment utilities. My bank account was making a sound I'd never heard before. Something between a wheeze and a death rattle.

Jamie would lose his mind if he knew how much I was spending on caffeine. Then again, Jamie had probably already lost his mind. I hadn't contacted him since the arrest. Morales had made it clear—no contact, no slip-ups, no trace of my old life.

The IT bullpen was a concrete box buried beneath ninety stories of glass and steel. Fluorescent lights that hummed at exactly the frequency of a headache. My coworkers were fine. Unremarkable. Safe. They'd nodded at me on the first day and then promptly forgotten I existed.

Or they would have, if not for the twins.

"Kieran!"

I didn't look up. I'd learned that looking up only encouraged them. Like feeding pigeons. Or gremlins.

"Kieran, Kieran, Kieran."

Leo's voice bounced toward my cubicle like a rubber ball thrown down a hallway. He appeared in the entrance, grinning. Luca was a step behind him, moving with that lazy, liquid stillness. Today Luca wore cream. Leo wore something blue and expensive-looking. They were both holding coffee.

"You're ignoring us," Leo said.

"I'm working."

"You're staring at a blank screen."

I was. I'd been trying to look busy while my brain spiraled about zero progress toward Level 80. The thumb drive was still in my pocket, a cold little reminder of my impending doom.

"That's a work technique," I said. "Very advanced. You wouldn't understand."

Leo set one of the coffee cups on my desk with a flourish. "Vanilla latte. Oat milk. You seem like an oat milk person."

I wasn't. I was a black coffee person because black coffee was cheap and didn't require conversation with the barista. But arguing with Leo was like arguing with a golden retriever—pointless and vaguely exhausting.

"You never decorate," Luca observed, silver eyes cataloging my workspace like he expected something to have changed since yesterday.

"I don't have photographs."

"Of anyone?" Leo leaned forward. "Friends? Family? A secret lover?"

"No, no, and definitely no."

"You're very mysterious, Kieran Voss."

"I fix printers."

The twins stayed for another twenty minutes. They talked about nothing and everything. A photoshoot Leo had done yesterday—"Very boring, very beige, I almost died of creative suffocation." A new restaurant Luca wanted to try. Whether the security guard on Level 12 was afraid of them or just naturally twitchy.

"Both," Leo said. "He flinched when I smiled at him."

"You smiled with teeth."

"All smiles have teeth."

"Yours have more."

The other employees noticed. I caught the looks—quick glances from over monitors, whispered exchanges near the coffee machine. The Moretti twins didn't spend time with IT staff. The Moretti twins didn't remember anyone's name.

"Dante's in back-to-back meetings all day," Leo announced, examining his perfectly manicured nails. "He's going to be unbearable by dinner."

"He's always unbearable," Luca said.

"He's been distracted lately." Leo's gaze slid toward me. "Have you noticed?"

"How would I notice? I work in the basement."

"And yet here you are, keeping count." Leo's grin was sharp. "Interesting."

"Dante's the best, you know," Leo said, his voice shifting—still bright, but with something genuine underneath. "He raised us. After our mother died. He was barely an adult, and he just... did it."

"I was a nightmare," Luca added, almost fondly. "Leo was worse."

"I was delightful."

"You bit three nannies."

"Dante taught us to fight," Luca said. "He was seventeen when he started training us. Seventeen and already running an empire and raising two feral twins."

"He makes pancakes at 2 AM when you can't sleep," Leo said.

"He hasn't done that in years."

"He would. If you asked."

The twins looked at each other. Something passed between them—one of those silent communications I'd started to notice. Then Leo turned back to me, all brightness again.

"Bye, Kieran! Try not to die of boredom!"

Luca glanced over his shoulder. "Try to stay out of trouble."

Then they were gone, and the bullpen felt suddenly, strangely quiet.

I stared at my screen. One week before I had to report to Morales. One week to produce something useful. The servers I could access were all low-level—HR records, maintenance schedules, cafeteria menus. Nothing incriminating. Level 80 might as well have been on the moon.

Dante Moretti's phone.

The thought surfaced before I could stop it. It was a stupid idea. The kind of idea that got people killed. But the twins kept dropping these little details—the pancakes, the fighting lessons, the way he'd raised them when he was still a kid himself. I was collecting pieces of a puzzle I hadn't meant to start solving.

I opened a terminal window and started probing the network. The executive subnet was encrypted beyond anything I could crack. Dante's phone was a ghost, invisible and untouchable.

"Right," I muttered. "Of course."

I was bored. I was frustrated. And I really, really wanted another coffee.

The surveillance system had its own subnet—slightly less encrypted than the rest. Their mistake.

It took me four minutes. Route through three internal proxies, spoof my access credentials, slip into the camera feed subsystem. I found the feed for the coffee shop on Level 3. The line was long. Seven people. Eight. This was harmless. I was just... waiting for the coffee line.

"You've got an interesting definition of printer repair."

The voice came from directly behind me.

I turned around very, very slowly.

Dante Moretti stood in the entrance to my cubicle. Close-cropped hair. Sharp jaw. Green eyes fixed on my monitor. He wasn't wearing a suit jacket. Just the dress shirt, charcoal gray, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His forearms were corded with muscle, and it was deeply, catastrophically unfair that he looked like that.

"Mr. Moretti." My voice came out about an octave higher than usual. "Sir. Hi. Hello. What are you doing here? In the basement? This is the basement. You don't—you're never—there's nothing here for you."

Words kept falling out of my mouth like marbles from a torn bag.

His gaze moved from the monitor to my face. "You're watching the coffee shop."

"I was—yes. The line. It's very long. Eight people. Maybe nine. The barista looks like she's questioning her career choices."

"You hacked the internal camera system to check the coffee line."

When he said it like that, it sounded insane. Which it was. But also impressive. But mostly insane.

"In my defense, the encryption on your surveillance subnet isn't great. Like, at all. That's—that's not a flex. That's a security concern. You should probably have someone look at that."

Dante didn't respond. He just looked at me, green eyes unreadable.

"How long?"

"To access the feed. How long did it take you?"

I considered lying. Discarded the idea. "Four minutes. Three and a half."

Something flickered in his eyes. Not anger. Not amusement. Something in between.

I smiled nervously. The smile of a man who knew he had f****d up and was simply waiting to see how badly.

"I can explain," I said, even though I absolutely could not.

Dante Moretti leaned against the cubicle wall. Crossed his arms. The pose was almost casual, but nothing about him was casual. He was a predator who had cornered something interesting and was deciding what to do with it.

"I'm listening."