CHAPTER ONE: The Daily Grind & The Glitch
The espresso machine in the break room made a sound like a dying animal, and Lidia Curtis decided that summed up her Monday morning perfectly.
She jabbed the button again. Nothing. Just that awful wheeze, then silence, then the faint smell of burnt nothing. Behind her, the office was already humming — keyboards clacking, someone's phone buzzing unanswered on a desk, the low murmur of people pretending they weren't checking the clock until five.
"It's broken," said a voice behind her. Low. Amused. Entirely too pleased with itself.
Lidia didn't turn around. She knew that voice the way she knew the ache in her shoulders by Wednesday of every week — familiar, unwelcome, and somehow always nearby. "Thank you, Harrison. Groundbreaking analysis."
"I try." Harrison Lugard leaned against the counter beside her, arms crossed, dressed in the same rotation of three button-downs he seemed to own, sleeves pushed up like he couldn't be bothered to care how he looked. He always looked fine anyway. It was infuriating. "You've hit that button four times. It's not going to apologize to you."
"I have a 9 a.m. with Patricia. I need caffeine more than I need your commentary."
"Then let me fix it." He nudged her aside — not roughly, just enough that she caught the clean, simple smell of his soap, and hated that she noticed — and popped the side panel open with practiced ease.
"You know how to fix an espresso machine."
"I know how to fix a lot of things nobody expects me to know how to fix." He said it lightly, like a joke, but something flickered behind his eyes before he shut it down, the way he always did whenever a sentence got too close to something real. He jiggled a cord, and the machine shuddered back to life with an apologetic hiss of steam. "There. Miracle worker."
"Don't let it go to your head."
"Too late." He flashed her a grin — the kind that made her stomach do something she refused to name — and reached past her for the second mug on the counter, filling it before she could stop him. He held it out. "Truce offering. You look like you're about to bite someone's head off."
"I might still." But she took the mug anyway, because refusing would mean admitting it mattered, and nothing about Harrison Lugard was allowed to matter. Not this year. Not with everything riding on her keeping this job.
They stood there a beat too long, close enough that she could feel the warmth coming off him, and neither of them moved.
"Curtis! Lugard!" Patricia's voice cracked across the office floor like a whip. "My office. Now. And bring the Hartman files, because apparently one of you thought Tuesday meant next Tuesday."
Harrison winced. "That would be me."
"Of course it would be you." Lidia was already moving, mug in hand, heels clicking a fast rhythm against the tile. "You had one job."
"I had several jobs, actually, and most of them I did well." He fell into step beside her, easily, the way he always did — like keeping up with her was no effort at all, like he wanted to. "You're just used to being disappointed by men in general. Statistically, I think that's more your problem than mine."
"Careful," she said, not looking at him, fighting the smile threatening at the corner of her mouth. "I have your performance review coming up."
"You wouldn't."
"Try me."
The Hartman meeting ran long, the way Patricia's meetings always did, circling the same three points until everyone in the room had silently aged a year. By the time Lidia made it back to her desk, the fluorescent lights had that end-of-day flicker to them, and half the floor had already cleared out.
She should have left too. She had exactly one microwave dinner waiting at home and a stack of bills she was avoiding like a bad ex. But the Hartman project had a formatting error buried somewhere in the shared drive, and if she didn't find it tonight, Patricia would find it tomorrow— in front of everyone.
So she stayed. Because that was what she did: she stayed, and she fixed things, and she made herself indispensable, because indispensable people didn't get let go when budgets got tight, and Gideon's tuition wasn't going to pay for itself, and her parents certainly weren't going to help.
By nine, the office had emptied except for the hum of the vending machines and the security guard doing his rounds two floors down. Lidia rubbed her eyes and clicked through the shared drive folder by folder, hunting for the file that had somehow duplicated itself into oblivion.
That was when she saw it.
A folder she didn't recognize. Buried three layers deep, in a subdirectory that had no business existing, named with a string of numbers that meant nothing to her. She frowned, clicked it out of pure reflexive curiosity — the same instinct that made her double-check locked doors and reread emails twice — and the screen stuttered.
Not crashed. Stuttered. Like it was thinking too hard.
Lines of text scrolled past too fast to read, then vanished, replaced by a login prompt unlike anything she'd seen on the company system before — sleek, unbranded, asking for a credential she didn't have and had never been issued.
"Weird," she murmured to the empty office.
She clicked out of it. The screen glitched again, a half-second freeze, before returning to normal as if nothing had happened at all. Probably a server hiccup. IT was always promising an "upgrade" that never quite materialized. She made a mental note to mention it to someone tomorrow, already halfway back to thinking about the Hartman file, about the walk to the train, about whether she had enough left on her card for groceries this week.
She didn't notice the small light blink on beside the port at the back of her monitor. She didn't notice it because there was nothing to notice — it was smaller than a pinhead, tucked into the seam of the casing, the kind of thing you'd only find if you were looking for it.
Somewhere else, in a room with no windows and three monitors glowing blue in the dark, someone was looking for it.
A cursor moved across a screen that mirrored Lidia's own, tracking the exact folder she'd opened, the exact timestamp, the exact employee badge number logged into that terminal. A man leaned back in his chair, phone already halfway to his ear.
"We have a problem," he said quietly. "Someone found the server."
He didn't sound worried. He sounded like a man about to become very, very inconvenienced — and like he already knew exactly how he intended to deal with it.
Lidia shut down her computer, gathered her bag, and headed for the elevator without a single idea that anything had changed. Two floors up, Harrison Lugard was still at his desk, jacket off, tie loosened, staring at his phone with the particular stillness of a man who'd just received a message he didn't want.
He deleted it before she passed his office. Smiled at her like nothing was wrong.
"Working late?" he asked.
"Aren't I always?" She didn't stop walking. "Night, Lugard."
"Night, Curtis."
He watched her go, and the smile faded the second the elevator doors closed
