The Hack: Onyx Tactical Files #3

Prequel Short Story

The Hack is the third prequel short story to my upcoming romantic suspense novel, Shepherd’s Watch.

Here’s a bit about it:

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Zeroes and ones never bleed. People do.

Milo “Hex” Monroe hates the analog world. It’s messy, cold, and unpredictable. He prefers the clean logic of code, where every problem has a solution and every error can be deleted.

When a black-ops contract sends him deep into a repurposed Cold War bunker in Kyiv, the mission is simple: scrub a server before a Russian syndicate seizes it. It’s a digital extraction, the kind of job Milo was built for.

But in the frozen dark, Milo finds a ghost in the machine—a desperate letter from a father to his daughter, hidden among the criminal data. For the first time, the code isn’t just data; it’s a life.

With enemy sweepers breaching the perimeter, Milo makes a split-second decision to save the file. But mercy leaves a digital fingerprint, and the error he’s made threatens to expose the entire Onyx team.

Now, with a gun to his head and the connection fading, Milo must face the hardest calculation of his life: does he save the innocent, or does he purge the human element to survive?

"The Hack" is a tense, claustrophobic prequel short story in the Onyx Tactical series, exploring the origins of the team’s genius tech specialist.

~ Connie