A week earlier
Downtown, Penthouse Suite, 3:42 a.m.
Leila's heart was pounding, but not from fear.
From exhilaration.
The kind of thrill that started in her fingertips and bloomed like fire through her veins.
She sat cross-legged in silk shorts and an oversized hoodie, a pair of headphones around her neck and five screens glowing before her like a symphony of chaos. The city stretched behind her,glass and neon and stars, but she barely saw it.
All she saw was him.
Dominic Raine's digital empire.
RaineTech's firewall was the stuff of legends, coded with self-healing algorithms, artificial intelligence countermeasures, and threat detection so advanced it could sense intent.
But she didn't go through the front.
No.
Leila found the back door. A forgotten vulnerability in a dormant server,buried beneath layers of compliance software, rarely accessed, and overlooked by his team.
That was your first mistake, Raine, she thought with a grin, fingers flying across the keyboard. Thinking no one was watching you that closely.
The funds she was after weren't even real to him. A slush account,illegal, likely, quietly feeding his off-the-books ventures. It took twelve seconds to break the lock.
Three more to route it through ten untraceable crypto wallets.
And just like that—
$8.3 million vanished.
"Beautiful," she whispered, leaning back and licking a bit of chocolate frosting off her thumb. She'd been celebrating early, her little ritual.
She wasn't a Robin Hood. She wasn't pretending to be noble.
But she had her reasons.
She always had her reasons.
And if Dominic Raine was playing dirty behind closed doors? Then he deserved to be taken by someone who knew exactly how the game worked.
Still… as the last byte transferred, something strange happened.
One of the screens flickered.
Just once.
Then again.
Her brows furrowed. She tapped a key. No alerts. No pings. No breach notifications.
But the flicker felt deliberate.
Like someone was watching her back.
She sat still for a moment, blood cooling just slightly, before she closed the laptop.
That night, she didn't sleep.
That night, she dreamed of gray eyes.
⸻
The Present
"You thought I didn't know?" Dominic asked softly, his voice like smoke curling in her ear.
Leila blinked out of the memory—back in the present, back in the too-luxurious bedroom where he now stood beside her bed.
"I saw you the moment you touched the system. Watched you eat your cake. Watched you celebrate. Watched you enjoy every fucking second of thinking you won."
He crouched down beside her, his hand brushing her ankle where the silk sheet had slipped.
"You broke into a cage and thought the lion was asleep." His gaze burned into hers. "But I was wide awake, Leila. And now… you're mine."
With that he left.
The following morning, Leila awoke to the sound of a knock,sharp, deliberate, and far too early.
She groaned, burying her face into the lush pillow.
The door opened regardless.
Dominic didn't believe in privacy.
"Get up," he said smoothly. "Today's the day you start repaying me."
She blinked blearily up at him. "By doing what? Dusting your antiques?"
His eyes narrowed slightly. "You'll be working in my data division."
Leila sat up. "What?"
"You're going to fix the vulnerabilities you exploited," he said, walking to the window and pulling open the curtains. "From inside."
The light stabbed her eyes, but her interest was officially piqued. "You want me in your system?"
"I want you cleaning up your mess," he said. "And learning just how deep you really dug."
⸻
The Lab
Dominic's private tech division was a glass-walled vault two levels below the estate. No one got in without biometric clearance and a secondary retinal scan.
Except her.
He led her through like a guest.
Eyes tracked her from every station,his engineers, coders, data security analysts. Some looked curious. Others openly hostile.
Dominic didn't explain her presence. He simply handed her a secured laptop and murmured, "You have eight hours. Let's see if you're as good as I remember."
Leila cracked her knuckles.
Watch me, Raine.
She got to work.
Hours passed. She found flaws no one had noticed. Patched tunnels even his AI hadn't scanned yet. She left breadcrumb notes,tiny digital signatures—just to piss him off.
By six p.m., she was exhausted, proud… and just reckless enough to try something stupid.
She opened a ghost window.
A hidden command line, buried in the OS.
She reached out,probing,not to escape, not really. Just to see how far she could go.
That's when the laptop shut off.
All at once.
The screen went black. The lights flickered.
And Dominic's voice came over the room's speaker, calm as death.
"Room. Now."
~~~~~~~~~
The door slammed behind her as she stormed into her bedroom.
He was already waiting inside.
"You said you wanted me to work," she snapped. "I was just….."
"You were trying to see if you could still break into my system."
"I was testing parameters. You didn't exactly give me a manual….."
Dominic was in front of her before she could finish.
He grabbed her chin, not roughly,but with enough force to make her breath catch.
"You don't set the rules here, Leila."
"I don't respond well to being caged."
"Then I'll train you."
She shoved his hand away. "I'm not a dog."
"No," he said darkly. "You're a fox. Clever. Fast. But still trapped."
He took a step back, eyes raking over her.
"Strip," he said simply.
She blinked. "Excuse me?"
"You broke a rule. Now you pay. I said obedience wouldn't come easily." His voice dipped into something darker. "Take your clothes off. Now."
She stared at him—trying to decide whether this was about dominance, sex, or control.
Probably all three.
And despite herself… heat bloomed low in her stomach.
But she raised her chin.
"No," she said.
Dominic smiled. It wasn't kind.
"Fine," he said. "You don't have to strip."
Then he moved,grabbed her, spun her around, and pressed her face-down against the cold stone table by the window.
"You'll learn to follow my rules, Leila," he whispered, his breath hot on her neck. "Or you'll learn how creative I get when you break them."
And then she felt it,his hand sliding up the back of her thigh.
Slow. Firm. Not to hurt. Not yet.
To warn.
"Every time you disobey," he murmured, "you'll beg for mercy long before I give it."
~~~~~~~~~
The silk sheets felt colder tonight.
Leila curled up on the edge of the massive bed, arms wrapped around her knees, her cheek pressed to the pillow like she was trying to disappear into it.
Every part of her ached,not from pain, exactly. Not even from humiliation.
But from rage.
From the fire she couldn't put out.
Dominic had barely touched her. Just enough to make a point. To remind her that he was in control,that her body was no longer entirely her own.
But what gnawed at her now wasn't the punishment itself.
It was the way she'd felt.
The heat of his hands. The low timbre of his voice. The way her body betrayed her, responding to every whispered command with a traitorous pulse between her legs.
What the hell is wrong with me?
She hated him.
She hated that she could still feel his breath on her neck, that the memory of his touch replayed like a favorite song on repeat.
She hated that part of her wanted to test him again just to feel it.
"I'm not his," she whispered into the darkness.
But the silence didn't agree.
Her fingers dug into the bedsheet. She forced herself to breathe. Deep. Calm. In control.
He wanted to train her?
Fine.
She'd let him believe he was winning. She'd play submissive. Sweet. Compliant.
And then, when his guard was down—
She'd rip him apart from the inside.
⸻
Outside her door, Dominic stood in the hallway. Silent. Listening.
He could feel her emotions through the walls,rage, confusion, shame… and something else.
Desire.
She was cracking already. Not because he broke her.
But because she was starting to crave the very chain he wrapped around her.
Dominic smiled to himself.
She didn't know it yet.
But she was falling.
And when she did,
There'd be no getting up again.