Chapter 103: Blind Spot **
The heavy lock on the glass door clicked loudly. The handle turned.
The blood in Ryan’s veins turned to liquid nitrogen.
The frosted smart-glass didn’t turn transparent—the privacy setting held—but the physical deadbolt on the door had been manually overridden. The heavy glass slab was already swinging inward.
"Shit," Sophie hissed.
Pure survival instinct kicked in.
Sophie scrambled backward, sliding off the polished wood. She didn’t have time to fix her skirt, and her panties were somewhere on the other side of the room.
She dove straight down, folding her body into a tight crouch, and vanished completely into the dark, cavernous recess beneath the massive walnut desk.
Ryan moved with blurring speed. He dropped into his high-backed executive chair, violently yanking it forward until the thick wooden modesty panel of the desk completely concealed his lower half.
His slacks and boxers were still bunched around his ankles. His cock was still slick, thick, and resting heavily against his bare thigh.
He grabbed the nearest open laptop, dragging it to the edge of the desk just as the door swung fully open.
Iralis stepped into the office.
She held a sleek, silver laptop balanced on one arm. She wore a dark, oversized sweater and her signature wire-rimmed glasses.
Her expression was the exact same flat, impenetrable mask of efficiency she wore to every meeting.
Ryan’s heart hammered against his ribs like a battering ram, but he forced his face into a mask of mild annoyance.
"The door was locked for a reason, Iralis," Ryan said, his voice level, completely stripping the panic from his tone.
Iralis didn’t flinch. She walked deeper into the room, stopping directly in front of the desk. The sheer mass of the walnut slab hid Sophie perfectly.
"I knocked. You didn’t answer," Iralis stated smoothly. She held up a thick, plastic keycard. "Sophie left the master override key on the main console. You left strict instructions that if the backend architecture flagged a load anomaly, I was to report it instantly. Regardless of your availability."
Ryan swallowed hard.
The air in the office was overly ventilated and air-conditioned enough to reduce the undeniable smell of sweat and sex. He prayed her clinical brain didn’t process pheromones.
"Fine," Ryan said, resting his forearms on the desk, very carefully avoiding any movement that would reveal his bare legs. "What’s the anomaly?"
Iralis pulled one of the guest chairs out and sat down opposite him. She opened her laptop, turning the screen so it faced him.
"The Sterling Media pipeline," Iralis began, pointing a manicured finger at a scrolling cascade of code. "The inbound requests are creating a bottleneck at the authentication gateway. We are generating synthetic data clusters to manage the overflow, but the hash rate is dropping."
As she spoke, Ryan felt a sudden, distinct shift in the dark space beneath the desk.
Soft, warm breath brushed against the sensitive skin of his inner thigh.
Ryan’s jaw clenched so hard his teeth groaned.
Sophie wasn’t just hiding. She had shifted her weight. She was kneeling directly between his spread legs.
’Don’t do it,’ Ryan thought, a cold sweat breaking out across his forehead.
’Do not do it.’
A wet, searingly hot tongue traced a long, slow stripe up the underside of his shaft.
Ryan’s fingers locked violently onto the edges of the laptop keyboard. His knuckles went bone-white.
A sharp, localized spike of electricity shot straight from his groin to his brain, incinerating his ability to process words.
"—if we reroute the API keys through a secondary server cluster," Iralis was saying, completely oblivious, her eyes tracking the data on the screen. "We can alleviate the packet loss. Do you concur with the restructuring?"
Sophie’s lips closed over the head of his cock.
She took him into her mouth, establishing a slow, deep, suffocatingly wet rhythm. She didn’t use her hands. She just used the crushing, slick suction of her throat, bobbing her head with agonizing precision.
Ryan’s vision blurred. The blue light of the monitor swam in front of him.
"I..." Ryan rasped, his voice sounding entirely too strained. He cleared his throat violently, forcing his gaze to remain locked on Iralis’s face. "Yes. Reroute the keys. But maintain the... the primary firewall integrity."
Iralis nodded slowly. "I can execute the patch. It will take approximately forty minutes. However..."
She trailed off.
Beneath the desk, Sophie swallowed him past her lips, the soft, muffled pop of the suction echoing faintly against the wooden panels.
Ryan dug his fingernails into the aluminum casing of the laptop to keep from driving his hips forward.
The sheer, overwhelming depravity of the situation—having his soul sucked out of his body while trying to talk server loads—was pushing him to the absolute brink of a second climax.
"However, what?" Ryan managed to choke out, a bead of sweat tracing down his temple.
Iralis stopped typing. She looked up from her screen.
Her dark eyes scanned the room. She noted the torn blouse buttons scattered on the charcoal carpet near the door.
She noted the heavy, musky scent hanging in the air.
Then, her gaze snapped back to Ryan. She looked at the sheen of sweat on his face. She looked at the white-knuckle grip he had on his keyboard.
Iralis slowly lowered the screen of her laptop.
"I could have sworn Sophie came in here," Iralis said, her voice dropping into a quiet, terrifyingly flat register. She tilted her head, her gaze piercing straight through his facade. "Where did she go?"
Sophie paused her rhythm beneath the desk. The wet heat remained clamped around him, but the motion stopped.
Ryan stared at his systems architect. His brain scrambled for a logical, business-appropriate response.
"Uhhh," Ryan stammered, the absolute worst possible syllable leaving his mouth.
Iralis didn’t blink.
She looked him dead in the eyes. Her own eyes narrowed to thin, calculating slits, processing the data points with ruthless, undeniable accuracy.
"Could she be," Iralis asked, her voice quiet, lethal, and entirely devoid of amusement, "under your desk right now?"