Chapter 24
Charlotte
The quantum interference pattern flickered across my laptop screen like a digital heartbeat refusing to stabilize. Two days. That’s how long I’d been hunched over the desk in Ty’s parents’ guesthouse, chasing the last elusive segment of the stabilizer code.
We were running out of time.
My neck protested as I shifted position for the hundredth time, vertebrae popping in sequence.
The black-market auction was scheduled for tomorrow.
It was twenty-four hours until someone walked away with the ability to turn three billion devices into weapons, and I still couldn’t crack the final frequency harmonics needed to neutralize it.
“You need to eat something.”
I didn’t look up at Ty’s voice from the doorway.
Couldn’t afford to. Every time I saw him, my concentration shattered—not just from attraction now, but from the memory of his hands on my skin, the way he’d held me after, like I was something precious and breakable all at once.
We hadn’t talked about what happened at the motel.
Hadn’t had time. But it hung between us like an unfinished equation.
“Not hungry.”
“That’s what you said six hours ago.”
Had it been that long? The numbers on my screen blurred together, variables and constants dancing in patterns that almost made sense before dissolving into chaos. My brain felt like overheated silicon, circuits firing randomly, connections failing.
“Charlotte.” His voice was closer now, carrying that particular mix of concern and affection he’d developed. Like he had the right to worry about me now. Which maybe he did. “The code won’t write itself any faster if you collapse.”
“It won’t write itself at all if I don’t figure out this last segment.” I highlighted another section of code, deleted it, started over. The thermal coefficient variations kept throwing off the resonance calculations. Every solution created two new problems, like some kind of quantum hydra.
I’d been shifted into the guest bedroom after the kitchen table became command central for the Citadel tactical planning sessions. My workspace now occupied the corner farthest from the door, surrounded by towers of empty coffee cups and crumpled papers covered in calculations.
Through the walls, I could hear Ethan’s voice, low and steady as he talked someone through something tactical.
He’d transformed the kitchen into his operations base within hours of arriving, bringing a level of professional competence that made me understand why Citadel Solutions had the reputation it did.
Logan Kane, Ethan’s second-in-command, had arrived yesterday.
If Ethan was controlled power, Logan was contained violence.
He’d appeared in the doorway like a shadow given form, nodded once in acknowledgment, and disappeared outside.
I’d barely seen him since. He preferred perimeter security, Ty had explained, working with Donovan and Ben to establish overlapping fields of coverage that would give us warning if anyone approached.
The door opened wider, and footsteps that weren’t Ty’s entered the room. Heavier. More deliberate.
“How’s it coming?” Ethan’s question was professional, but I heard the underlying concern. We all knew what would happen if I failed.
“It’s not.” The admission burned my throat.
“I can identify the frequency signatures. I can create the interference pattern. But I can’t get them to synchronize without triggering a cascade failure in the baseband processor.
It’s like…” I searched for an analogy he’d understand.
“Like trying to defuse a bomb while someone else has their finger on the trigger.”
“What do you need?”
The question was so simple, so direct. What did I need? Time. Sleep. A brain that hadn’t been running on caffeine and desperation for forty-eight hours straight.
“A miracle,” I said.
“Fresh out of those.” Ethan’s tone was matter-of-fact. “But we’ve got Jace working his magic on the shell company. Everything’s in place for tomorrow’s auction. Multiple backup identities, untraceable funds, the works. All you have to do is give us something to deploy when we win the bidding.”
When. Not if. The confidence in his voice almost made me believe it was possible.
“How’s the threat assessment?” I asked, needing to think about something else for thirty seconds.
“Manageable. Three potential buyers we’ve identified so far. A terrorist cell out of Eastern Europe, a cartel with delusions of technological grandeur, and someone Jace thinks might be North Korean intelligence, though he’s still tracking that one.”
My fingers stilled on the keyboard. “Three groups who want to weaponize civilian infrastructure.”
“Four, if you count our shell company.” Ethan’s smile held no humor. “Jace has us set up as a separatist group out of the Balkans. Ethan Volkov, arms dealer with a grudge against NATO. Complete backstory, dark web presence, the works. Difference is, when we win the bidding, we’re destroying it.”
“If I can make this countermeasure work.”
“You will.”
The certainty in his voice made something twist in my chest. They were all counting on me. Ty, his team, the FBI, everyone who carried a phone in their pocket without knowing it could become a bomb.
“Ethan, we need you.” Jace’s voice crackled through the radio. “Got something interesting on the auction server.”
Ethan moved toward the door, then paused. “Ty says you haven’t taken a real break in twelve hours.”
“Ty says a lot of things.”
“He’s usually right.” Ethan disappeared before I could argue.
I turned back to my screen, trying to recapture the thread of logic I’d been following, but the code had become meaningless symbols. The function I’d been writing for the last hour suddenly looked wrong, like I was reading a foreign language I’d never learned.
I deleted a line. Rewrote it. Deleted it again. My brain kept chasing the same circular logic, like a corrupted loop with no exit condition. Every pathway led to the same dead end.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard, but I couldn’t remember what I’d been trying to accomplish. The harder I tried to focus, the more the solution seemed to fragment and scatter.
Suddenly, Ty was there, his hand warm on my shoulder. The touch sent electricity through me, memory and present tangling together.
“That’s it,” he said. “You’re taking a break.”
“I can’t. The auction is—”
“In twenty hours. I know. And you’re so fried you’ve been staring at the same screen for five minutes without typing anything. You need a break.”
“Okay. I’ll take ten minutes.”
“Two hours. Minimum.” He slid me back from my laptop before I could protest.
“Ty, people are going to die if I don’t—”
“Nobody’s dying on my watch.” He pulled me to standing, steadying me when my legs protested.
His hands lingered on my arms, and for a moment, we just stood there, the air between us charged with everything we hadn’t said since the motel.
“You’re going to step away, let your brain process in the background, and come back fresh.
Sometimes the solution comes when you stop strangling it. ”
I wanted to argue, but my vision was doing interesting things at the edges, darkness creeping in like system failure warnings.
“Plus, my plan will be pretty entertaining.”
“What kind of entertainment?” I asked, too exhausted to fight.
His grin held mischief. “Family dinner.”
“That’s your idea of entertainment?”
“Trust me.”
Two hours later, I understood exactly what he meant.
The Hughes family dining room was chaos incarnate, but organized chaos, like a particle accelerator where every collision was calculated for maximum energy transfer.
The massive oak table groaned under the weight of what appeared to be enough food for a small army, though there were only nine of us.
“Pass the potatoes,” Frank said, reaching across Bridget to snag the bowl before she could respond.
He had the same brown eyes as Ty but carried himself with the careful precision of someone who spent his days handling priceless artifacts.
The PhD in history made sense—he had that academic air I recognized from years in university halls.
“You have the manners of a barbarian,” Bridget informed him, snatching the bowl back and serving herself first. “Four years of law school and I still have to cite proper precedent for vegetable-passing protocols in this house.”
“Precedent would be whoever’s fastest gets fed first,” Leonard interjected, adjusting his glasses in a gesture so perfectly befitting a high school math teacher that I almost smiled. “It’s basic survival dynamics. Very mathematical.”
“Everything’s mathematical to you,” Annabel said, rolling her eyes. She had the same strong jaw as Ty, softened by laugh lines earned from what she’d told me were fifteen years of delivering babies. “Last week, you tried to explain labor contractions using sine waves.”
“They follow predictable patterns!”
“Tell that to the woman who’s been pushing for three hours.”
Donovan sat beside me, methodically working through his plate without engaging in the verbal sparring. But I caught the way his mouth twitched at certain comments, fighting not to smile. Whatever demons he’d brought back from deployment hadn’t killed his sense of humor, just buried it deep.
“Charlotte.” Frank’s attention turned to me with the intensity of someone who’d found an interesting artifact. “Ty says you have two PhDs. From Stanford? That you attended quite a bit earlier than the average student?”
“That’s right.”
“What was that like? Being so young in that environment?” The question held genuine curiosity rather than the usual mixture of awe and alienation I encountered.
“Lonely,” I said, surprising myself with the honesty. “Everyone else was worried about parties and dating. I was worried about quantum entanglement and whether my proof was elegant enough for my adviser.”