He’s paid to break into the most secure systems in the world. But this time, the real challenge is the man guarding the gates. Silas Vance is a top-tier penetration tester. Meticulous, controlled, and wearing a tailored Italian suit, he dismantles corporate security infrastructure for a living. When he’s hired to crack the subterranean server fortress at Nexum Financial, he expects a routine job. He doesn’t expect Julian Thorne. Julian is a twenty-eight-year-old prodigy. He’s the brilliant, territorial, and fiercely defensive network architect who built Nexum’s system from the ground up. Used to being the smartest guy in the room, Julian sees Silas as just another corporate suit trying to ruin his work. But as Silas methodically tears down Julian’s digital walls, the professional clash turns into an explosive game of cat-and-mouse that pushes them both to the edge. Then, the real attack hits. Trapped underground during a catastrophic, real-time cyber heist, the two bitter rivals are forced into a desperate alliance. With the servers overheating and a ticking clock to market open, they have to trust each other to survive. As the temperature in the locked-down server room skyrockets, the hostile tension between them burns away, leaving only raw, desperate heat. Silas is used to taking things apart—and Julian is practically begging to be dismantled. Penetration Testing is a scorching, high-stakes MM romantic suspense featuring a relentlessly dominant security expert, a brilliantly bratty network architect, forced proximity, and an explosive enemies-to-lovers dynamic.