She kept her eyes closed but her mind wandered in all possible directions, considering all possible what ifs. She raced her brain so much that after half an hour she fell into the cradle of sleep. She slept like a baby curled up on his gigantic king sized bed.

He tried harvesting all user names and passwords possible for the account that had done the transaction into Scarlett's account. When he was unable to find a clue he tried to randomize the last 8 bits of each IP and tried to trace them. 256 variations per server base address. The task was ginormous but he was not someone who would consider impossible as part of his dictionary. So he kept on burning his midnight oil till he found the encrypted tunnel. Now, all that he had to do was to decrypt it to find the sender's account name.

Before going for a full-blown attack on the bank server, he wanted to make sure that it was not a honey pot. As some banks use a fake server so when hackers think that's the main server and hack it, they end up raising an alarm. So he routed his own IP via multiple fake IP's and then did a DDOS attack on the server to find the user id using the conventional trial and error method.

He then plugged his randomizer and sat there waiting for minutes and then hours and suddenly in the morning at 5:30 am his randomizer beeped. The user account had been traced. He pressed enter on the screen without even waiting for a second and saw,

Acc No - 345 000 4522 7821

User name - Anthony Genwood

No way !!!

He drank all his irritation and disbelief and closed his eyes.

This had to end. How could he be so vengeful? Now he was really worried about Akira's safety.

He immediately called up David,

"Hello, David !!! Wake up and carefully listen to me. I need the full bio-data of Anthony Genwood. He is the same guy who had attacked Akira in our company's basement. I need to know in which Correctional facility he has been locked up now. Pronto".

"Got it !!! Anything else that I need to know?", David asked.

"The wired transaction into Scarlett's account is from Anthony's account. I could open up the account number to name mapping database, but the password database is triple layer protected and I can't get into it. So I don't know if that was Anthony's money or someone has given him that chunk. We need to figure out what is going on", Raymond said.

"I will work on it. And one more thing, yesterday after dropping Scarlett at the villa I double checked that the security cameras are working fine or not. And they were. But after one hour the guard had sent me a message telling that there was some glitch in the system for 10-15 minutes but after that, the system was up and was back to normal. Might be a generic glitch but I thought you should know", David said.

"Yeah might be but help to tighten the security there. We need to monitor her each and every single move", Raymond said.

"I am on it", David said and kept the call.

He had pulled an all-nighter but still, sleep was far far away from him in some parallel universe. He went upstairs and entered his bedroom. He tried to be as quiet as possible so that she didn't wake her up. The moment he saw her serene face, his tension slowly started melting away. His crippled heart was somehow at ease. He smiled and then climbed the bed and slowly covered himself with the same duvet in which she was sleeping in. He slowly inched closer to her and then embraced her in one arm and closed his eyes. Slowly he fell into a deep slumber as if the galaxy was singing a lullaby for him.

He opened his eyes as he could feel the brightness of the sun on his face. He turned his face and saw that all the window screens of his room were pulled open. He checked his watch and saw that it was already 8 am. Akira was nowhere in the room but he could hear the sound of faint music coming from downstairs and he knew that was her.

He got up from his bed and went downstairs. As he climbed the stairs down he could smell something amazing. When he reached the kitchen he saw her completely engrossed in the kitchen with the Christina Perry number with which they had danced, being played on her mobile phone. Her hair was tied up in a messy bun exactly the same way as he had seen her at the airport. She was still wearing his shirt and was swaying with the beats of the song. But slowly his mind started blanking out as he could see or hear anything apart from her silhouette and her humming.

"Uh.. hum", he said and cleared his throat.

"Hey you are up", she turned back and asked in a gleeful tone.

"Mmm. What are you making?", he asked.

"I am making pancakes and scrambled eggs for us", she said and pointed at the mini stack of pancakes kept on a plate.

"I love pancakes", Raymond said looking all happy.

"Me too", Akira quipped.

"Oh cool then its set. every morning you make me pancakes and I will reward you with a kiss", he said and sat on the breakfast chair near the slab.

"That's so easy for you. And who told you that I am going to make it every day for you? I am not your cook", Akira said and raised her one eyebrow.

"Ok, your wish. Don't regret it later when you don't get my kisses", Raymond said and pulled the pancake plate towards himself to eat.

"You wish. Hey... Hey, wait. Why are you eating it just like that? Wait I will get you some maple syrup", Akira said and opened the fridge to get the maple syrup bottle.

She started drizzling it over the pancakes and said,

"Everything tastes better with Maple Syrup".

Then with her index finger, she wiped the excess amount from the edge of the bottle and then licked her finger, just the way she was habituated doing it. But before she could even take a step forward towards the fridge to keep the bottle inside, she was pulled into his embrace and the next second his lips were on hers, touching her softly and then he licked her lips with his tongue and then slowly released her.

"You were right!!!", Raymond said and gave back a sly smile

"Umm... ", Akira just mumbled trying to catch her breath back.

"Everything tastes better with Maple Syrup !!!"