Chapter Text
Your dad died the way he'd lived: quietly at his desk.
His FBI agent was eating a ham sandwich when it happened. Monitor six showed the usual Thursday morning — your dad at his desk, coffee cooling at his elbow, sorting through utility bills. The agent, Piper Birch, glanced at the feed, glanced away, bit into his sandwich.
When he looked back, your dad's head was on the desk.
Not dramatically. Just, down. Cheek against the stack of bills, one hand still holding a pen.
Birch set down his sandwich.
He watched for six minutes before calling it in. Not because he was uncertain — he'd seen death on feeds before, that unparalleled stillness that settled over a body once the person inside it had left. He waited because some stupid part of him thought it was a joke. Your dad was unassuming — balding, soft around the middle, the kind of man who blended into every room he entered. But Birch knew what the file said. Arthur Voss wasn't some mid-level paper-pusher. He was connected, powerful, the kind of man who made calls that ended careers or lives, and never left a fingerprint. The kind of man who might fake his own death just to see who'd come looking.
Birch waited.
Your dad did not lift his head. Did not reach for the coffee.
Birch typed up the report in six lines. Subject deceased. Natural causes confirmed via paramedic feed. Recommend deactivation of surveillance package.
He knew it wasn't natural causes. Someone had gotten to Arthur Voss.
The response came back in eleven minutes: Maintain feeds. 90-day observation window. Standard protocol.
So the feeds stayed on.
On the second day, you dragged your dad's desktop tower out of his office.
Birch sat up.
The camera embedded in the monitor had been their primary feed into Arthur's operation — always on, even when the computer wasn't, monitoring both the screen itself and the room outside of it. It was giving them everything they needed: encrypted calls, file transfers, the digital map of a network that ███ across █████ ███ and ██. And now you were hauling it down the hallway like it was a piece of furniture.
It took you three trips. Tower, monitor, the tangle of cables you'd just yanked from the wall without bothering to trace which went where. You set it up in your room — your bedroom, somewhere he technically isn't allowed to surveil — with the satisfied expression of someone solving a problem. Birch watched you spend twenty minutes clearing space and routing cables, your tongue pressed between your teeth in concentration, until the thing finally booted.
You pumped your fist. Adorable.
Then you opened The Sims.
Birch stared.
You leaned back in your chair, chewing gum, and said aloud to no one: "Now I can invite eight Sims to my next house party."
The computer your father had used to coordinate ███████, ████, and ██████; and move money through shell corporations in six countries. The machine that contained enough encrypted intelligence to dismantle a network the Bureau had been chasing for four years.
And you were... building a house in a place called... Pleasantview. Something in Birch's chest went soft in a way he didn't like. He watched you create your own family. You started with yourself — adjusting the face, the hair, frowning at the screen like the digital version wasn't quite right. Then your mom. Then your dad.
You stopped.
Your hands hovered over the keyboard. You stared at the screen — at the blank template of a man you were supposed to fill in — and your face crumpled. You pressed both palms over your eyes, shoulders shaking, and the sound that came out of you was small and broken and the mic barely caught it.
Birch reached for the keyboard. The feed went dark. He told himself it was a judgment call, no intelligence value in watching a child grieve. He kept the feed off for four days. His co-worker, Doug Felsman, asked if the monitor was broken. Birch said yes. Doug offered to put in a ticket. Birch said he'd handle it.
He turned it back on at 9:47 PM on a Monday.
The floor was near-empty. The boss, Wilhelm Graves, sat four rows down, back to the room, earbuds in. The fluorescents had dimmed to their evening cycle. Birch's coffee was cold. He'd been staring at the dark square of monitor six for three hours, and his fingers moved over the keyboard before the decision had fully formed.
He cycled through feeds.
Kitchen: dark.
Living room: empty.
Computer—
You were sitting on your bed, facing the computer. Facing him, though you didn't know it. The monitor's camera gave him a straight-on view — your face lit by the glow your bedside lamp, that doll-like prettiness he'd noted in passing suddenly impossible to ignore. You had the kind of features people called cherubic — round cheeks, a small but pointy nose, a mouth that looked perpetually on the verge of a pout. But you were growing into them now, the softness sharpening into something more. Your eyes were large and dark, framed by lashes that cast shadows on your cheeks when you blinked. Your lips were full, the kind that drew attention even when you weren't doing anything with them. Lush. That was the word. You had lush features, the kind that would make men look twice in a couple years, that were already making Birch look harder now.
You stood up. Crossed your arms and pulled your shirt up over your head in one smooth motion.
Birch's hand froze on the keyboard.
The shirt came off and you dropped it on the bed behind you, leaving you in your bra. White with small red hearts scattered across the cups. The kind of thing a girl your age would pick out without thinking, somehow obscene in its innocence.
You reached behind yourself. One hand, easy, practiced. The clasp came apart.
The straps slid down your arms.
You let it fall.
Your breasts dropped free and bounced once, twice, the weight of them settling with a soft, natural sway that made Birch's throat close. They were on the small side for now, but still full, round, the kind that didn't need support yet. Your nipples were pale pink, small and tight in the cool air of the room, and the way they moved — the way you moved, unconscious and easy — sent a bolt of heat straight through him.
You turned to the side, studying yourself in the mirror on the closet door. You cupped your breasts, lifting them slightly, testing their weight. You squeezed once, experimentally, your fingers sinking into the soft flesh. You made a face at your reflection. Not quite a smile. Something between satisfaction and exasperation.
Birch's breath left him in a sound he couldn't stop — a low, strangled groan that he cut off by pressing his fist against his mouth. His other hand gripped the edge of the desk hard enough that the cheap laminate creaked.
You were fourteen. He'd typed that number into a file. Initialed it. And he was watching you touch yourself — not sexually, Christ, you were just looking — but the intimacy of it, the private unselfconsciousness... You had no idea. No idea that anyone was watching. No idea that a man almost three times your age was sitting in a cubicle four hundred miles away, hard enough that it hurt, watching you discover your own body in the amber light of your dead father's lamp.
You dropped your hands. Turned back to the closet. The lamplight caught the curve of your ass as you bent over to pick up something. Trash? A book? He didn't care, didn't bother to waste energy trying to figure it out. You hooked your thumbs in the waistband of your shorts and pushed them down, stepped out of them one leg at a time.
You stood there in your underwear. White with small red hearts. Just like the bra. The fabric was cotton, thin, pulled taut across your hips and — Christ — he could see the outline of you through it. The cleft of your pussy, the way the fabric dipped slightly between your legs, the suggestion of softness beneath. The elastic had pressed into your skin, leaving faint red lines along your hips that would fade in minutes but that Birch knew he'd remember for years.
He couldn't look away. The dip of your hip. The soft pale plane of your stomach. The way the light caught in the dimples at the small of your back, just above the waistband of your panties. You were built like a girl still — narrow hips, thin legs, that gawky in-between stage where your body hadn't quite figured out what it was becoming. But your breasts were there. Real. Perky and high and the kind that would fit perfectly in his palms if he—
He cut the thought off.
Beneath the desk, his cock was straining against his slacks, a hard, insistent ache that had been building since you'd turned to the mirror. He shifted in his chair and the friction sent a jolt through him so sharp he had to bite down on tongue to keep from making a sound. He was leaking — he could feel it, the wet heat soaking through his boxers, and the thought of it, the wrongness of it, only made him harder.
The cubicle partition hit mid-chest. If Graves turned around — if Graves so much as stood up to stretch — he would see Birch's face. The monitors. The amber-lit feed. The girl, you. Your breasts.
Graves did not turn around.
You pulled a shirt from the closet. Oversized, soft — one of your dad's, Birch guessed. You drew it over your head and it fell to mid-thigh, swallowing you. You gathered the collar up over your nose and breathed into it, eyes closing. Some private ritual. Grief, maybe, or comfort, or both.
Then you reached under the hem, hooked your thumbs in your underwear, and stepped out of it.
That small, hidden act of modesty hit Birch harder than all of it.
You climbed into bed. Reached for the lamp.
The feed went to night vision.
Birch sat in his cubicle, staring at the gray shapes on the screen. The rise and fall of your breathing, barely visible.
His hand had moved to his thigh. Palm flat, fingers spread, two inches from where his cock was pressing against the fabric, thick and insistent. He moved his hand across himself, just once, and his jaw locked and his eyes closed and the sound he swallowed burned in his throat.
He wanted to keeping touching himself. Wanted it so badly his hand was shaking. Wanted to unzip his slacks right there, four rows from Graves and ten floors above the street, and wrap his hand around himself and think about the way you'd cupped your own breasts in your small hands, the way the fabric of the underwear had clung to the shape of your pussy.
He put both hands on the desk.
The distance between the man he'd been at 9:46 and what he was now felt less like a line crossed and more like a door he'd been walking toward for days, that had simply — tonight — swung wide open.
He could see himself from the outside with perfect clarity: a thirty-eight-year-old federal agent, twice divorced — a man who had no problem at all getting laid, thank you — sitting in a cubicle at ten PM with his cock hard enough to ache, staring at the sleeping shape of a dead man's fourteen-year-old daughter.
He turned off the monitor. Gathered his things. Walked to the elevator with his bag held in front of him like a shield.
In the parking garage, he sat in his car for eleven minutes. Hands on the wheel. Engine off. He could still see you in his mind — the curve of your spine, the way you'd breathed into your father's shirt, the small private face you'd made at your own reflection.
He started the engine.
He drove home with both windows down despite the cold, one hand on the wheel, the other pressed flat against his thigh to keep it from drifting.
He told himself he wasn't thinking about you.
He thought about you the entire way home.