Shadow Bratva Daddy (Wicked Bratva Daddies #9)

1. Luna

LUNA

Iwas three-tenths of a second from beating the only man I'd ever loved, and I'd never even seen his face.

The timer in the corner of my left monitor bled milliseconds. My fingers hovered, then dropped. The exploit chained clean: a heap overflow into the login daemon, a shell popped where no shell should live, and then I was inside the target box like a hand sliding into a glove that wasn't mine.

Somewhere out there, in a city I couldn't name, he was doing the same thing, only faster.

The rig sat under my desk, three salvaged fans running hot enough to warm my shins.

A bowl of ramen had gone gray and forgotten at my elbow, the noodles stiff as wire.

My place was a cramped one-bedroom and a radiator that knocked like it wanted in.

The parts that mattered, the cards and the keyboard worn shiny where my fingers landed, I had built on ninety dollars a month and a bad attitude.

The flag waited somewhere in the target filesystem, a token of thirty-two random characters behind a wall neither of us had any right to climb.

First hand to close around it won. He had led the tally by two for weeks now, which would embarrass me more if he were anyone else.

I don't lose. Professors have handed me their systems, and bug-bounty boards have paid me to break theirs.

He's the only wall I haven't walked through, and I keep coming back at 2 a.m. to throw myself at it.

We both know by now it was never really about winning.

I walked the file tree with a script I could write in my sleep, cutting through directories, hunting the one that felt wrong. Most folders on a locked box are honest, but one always lies. It sits too quiet, its timestamps too clean, and if you know how to listen for it, it hums off-key.

Then I had it, a folder called cache that had never cached a thing in its life.

NYX: found your hiding spot.

SHADOW: No.

That was all he sent. One word, and it shut like a door.

I laughed into the empty room. The sound came out rough and unpracticed, the first real one in days.

NYX: you sound nervous.

SHADOW: I sound like a man three moves ahead.

NYX: that is exactly what nervous looks like on you.

He threw a feint at me, a decoy process banging on the front door of the box, loud and clumsy, the kind of noise built to drag my eyes while his real hand worked a window around back.

I had watched him run it a dozen times. I let him think it landed, dropped a tripwire on the window, and kept moving toward the quiet folder.

NYX: cute. the decoy.

SHADOW: You still looked.

NYX: i always look. stopping is what gets you killed.

The flag file sat under one more layer, a permission lock demanding a key I didn't own, so I forged one. I spun up a race condition, two processes clawing at the same handle, and shoved my read into the half-second where the system forgot how to say no.

Characters flooded my screen.

A breath before I could close my fist around them, they scattered. Someone tore the file out from under me, and the token collapsed into a permission error, clean and final.

SHADOW: Got it.

NYX: you didn't.

SHADOW: The board disagrees.

I checked. His handle sat at the top with a fresh green mark. That made three straight, and I stopped counting how far ahead it left him.

My jaw ached from grinding my teeth again.

NYX: you didn't beat me. you beat my ping.

SHADOW: A win is a win. The excuse is new, though.

NYX: i'm building you a shrine out of your last words.

SHADOW: Use a good font.

He was right, which was the worst thing about him, and under the sting lived something warmer I refused to look at head-on, the way you don't stare at a filament.

I shoved back from the desk, and the chair groaned.

The wall above my monitors carried four years of sticky notes, curling yellow at the corners.

Some marked passwords I had cracked, others handles long dead.

Higher than I liked to reach hung one note in a hand that wasn't mine, blocky and impatient: back in an hr, do not touch my chair.

He never came back for it. I had been sitting in it every night since.

I don't spell his name in my head anymore.

It costs too much. But every unknown handle that slid past me in the back rooms of the underground, every anonymous ghost trading exploits in the places where gifted boys with no supervision tend to go silent, pulled the same reflex out of me.

I looked. I hoped. I measured the words for a shape I knew.

None of them ever fit.

He taught me at this desk, in this chair, four years and a whole life ago.

Eighteen and furious, I couldn't get a script to run, and he leaned over my shoulder, smelling of solder and gas-station coffee, and said, "The machine is never lying to you, little moon.

You are just not listening yet." Then he fixed it in nine keystrokes and refused to tell me which ones.

Not long after, he was gone. No note, no body, only a coffee going cold on the sill and a chair I couldn't stop sitting in.

Then I did the thing I never confessed to Shadow.

HELIX lived in a window I kept buried behind the others, my thesis and my quiet monster.

I had built it to do the one trick that shouldn't work, to take a handle scrubbed of every fingerprint and start peeling it open.

It reads the cadence of a person's typing and the way their packets leave home.

Anonymity is a coat, not skin, and HELIX had learned to find the seams.

I fed it Shadow, the way I did most nights, and called it a stress test. In all that time, the tool had never handed me anything but noise.

Tonight the progress bar twitched.

It crawled to two percent and stalled, but it had moved, and a field that stayed blank since the day I wrote it now held a fragment.

It was a routing prefix, a region with weather and streets, no name and no face, only proof that he stood somewhere I could stand too, and my ribs did something graceless about it.

I closed the window fast, like he might feel me looking.

Some nights I nearly told him about HELIX, typed the whole confession and let the cursor dare me to send it.

I never went through with it. A tool that peels people open isn't a thing you hand a stranger, even the one you would trade your last exploit to keep.

NYX: rematch.

SHADOW: You'll lose.

NYX: i'll get closer.

SHADOW: You always do.

The cursor blinked under that line, and I sat on it too long. He had noticed. All along he had kept the same private tally I did, watching the gap between us wear thin as a receipt, until the place where he won had almost nothing left in it.

NYX: one of these nights i take everything you have.

SHADOW: I'm counting on it.

NYX: careful. that almost sounded like a feeling.

SHADOW: Don't tell anyone. I have a reputation.

NYX: what would you do if you ever won for good?

SHADOW: Find you.

NYX: to gloat?

SHADOW: To stop talking to you through a wall.

I typed something back, then deleted it. I typed it again and deleted that too. My reflection hung in the black glass between lines of code, hollow-eyed, hair a disaster, a girl who talked to a stranger at 2 a.m. because he was the only one who spoke her language.

He didn't know my name, and I didn't know his age or his face, or whether he grinned when I landed a hit or only stared the way I did.

But I knew he was the fastest mind I had ever run against, that he had never once talked down to me, and that when I vanished for two nights during finals, the first line waiting was always the same, "you are late," which I had read until the words stopped meaning anything and started meaning everything.

That was the sum of the only thing in my life that felt like being seen, and I would have burned the apartment down before I let anyone take it.

SHADOW: I have something for you.

NYX: a gift?

SHADOW: A fight.

An address dropped into the channel, an IP and a port, nothing wearing a face. The hair on my arms lifted.

NYX: what is it?

SHADOW: A lock.

NYX: how good?

SHADOW: Worth your teeth.

I read it twice. He knew exactly what those three words did to me, the same way he always knew which folder lied.

Every rule I had built through years of chasing ghosts told me to cage it first, to poke it from behind glass, to stay the careful girl who lived to hack another night.

My hand was already moving, because the careful girl and I have never been close.

Behind that address waited a lock I hadn't picked and a man I couldn't stop reaching for, and I'd never once talked myself out of either. He was winning, the way he always did, and I wanted the space between us gone.

I copied the address, and my finger hung over the key.

NYX: if this is a trap, i'm telling the whole channel you type in caps when you panic.

SHADOW: Nyx.

SHADOW: Don't…

The second line arrived a half-beat behind the first, faster than his hands moved. It felt wrong, like hearing your own voice come back a fraction late on a bad call.

I had already hit enter.

The connection reached into the dark, one thin thread of me leaving the machine. For a quarter-second nothing answered, and I let go of a breath I hadn't known I was holding.

Then my network map bloomed red.

Not one node lit but all of them at once, and inbound streams poured through ports I kept welded shut.

My firewall started losing, rule after rule blinking out like windows going dark at the end of a shift.

Something was already inside, and it wasn't knocking.

It had ridden my thread back down the instant I opened the door, because the lock had been a hand the whole time, and I had shaken it.

A box I hadn't drawn opened in the center of my screen, black and clean, holding a countdown in white I never wrote.

00:59.

00:58.

The cold climbed my arms. I killed the connection, and it refused to die. I ripped the ethernet from the wall, the little clip snapping off between my fingers, and the numbers kept falling, feeding on nothing, running on air.

00:54.

NYX: what did you send me?

SHADOW: Not me.

SHADOW: Pull power. Now. All of it.

Those two words, not me, turned the cold in my arms to something with teeth. The radiator quit knocking. The fridge went quiet. The whole building seemed to lean in and hold its breath with me, and even the fans under my desk had stilled without my telling them to.

I threw myself under the desk for the surge protector, cracked my shoulder on the edge, and knocked the ramen bowl over in a wet slap across my keys.

The countdown stopped at 00:47.

Every window on all three monitors closed at once, soft and instant, like a hand sweeping a table bare.

The red map, the channel, and HELIX vanished in the same breath.

My phone buzzed once on the desk and quit, its screen a dead mirror.

The monitors settled into a patient dark, and in the middle of it white letters typed themselves out one at a time, slow and unhurried, taking their time with the room.

Hello, Nyx. Danny says hi.

Then every light in the apartment went out.