Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
Anders
The sound of a resonant hum vibrating through the wall was not something a man could easily ignore.
It was a low-frequency, sub-bass and steady, the kind of sound that settled deep in the chest cavity. Daniel’s voice. The "Voice of a Generation." The voice that had narrated three of my bestselling authors’ audiobooks and currently commanded a royalty rate higher than most Hollywood actors.
I sat at the kitchen island, staring at the grain of the white oak cabinets, my hands clenched so tight around the edge of the counter that my knuckles were bloodless.
Hummmmm.
Then, a gasp. Her gasp.
It was wet, broken, and dangerously relieved.
I knew exactly what was happening in that bedroom.
I knew the logistics of it. I knew the physiology.
I had spent the last hour reciting the biological parameters of post-withdrawal cramping to myself like a catechism, trying to convince the roaring beast in my chest that this was a medical procedure.
Daniel was providing sonic oscillation to break up muscle tension. Daniel was providing stability.
Daniel was putting his mouth on the woman I had spent years trying to forget.
"Stop pacing," I snapped, not turning around.
Simon froze mid-step near the window. He was a mess of nervous energy, his dark hair pulled into a chaotic knot, his fingers twitching against his thighs as if he were trying to draw the air.
"I can't sit still," Simon hissed, his voice pitched low, darting a terrified glance toward the hallway. "Do you hear that? He's… he’s reading to her."
"He is managing the crisis," I corrected, though the words tasted like battery acid. "He is utilizing his skillset."
"His skillset involves her legs wrapped around his head, Anders," Simon muttered, sliding down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, burying his face in his hands. "God. We broke every rule in the book."
"We wrote new rules," I said, opening my laptop.
I couldn't listen anymore. If I listened, the Alpha in me, the possessive, territorial creature that lived beneath the tailored suits and the contract law, was going to kick that bedroom door down.
I would drag Daniel off her and finish what we started on the kitchen floor.
And that would invoke the brass lamp again.
That would destroy the fragile détente we had managed to scrape together.
I needed a target. I needed something to kill.
Since I was currently barred from killing the source of her pain, and I couldn't kill my friends, I decided to kill the things that threatened her existence.
I logged into the network. The satellite connection was spotty thanks to the storm damage, but the redundant uplink I had installed in the rental unit, my own paranoid backup, was holding steady at low bandwidth.
I pulled up the dossier on T.L. Rose.
Not the marketing packet. Not the sales figures. I pulled up the raw data. The digital footprint.
"What are you doing?" Simon asked, lifting his head.
"I am auditing the fortress," I murmured, my fingers flying across the mechanical keyboard. The clack-clack-clack was a satisfyingly violent sound, a percussion of control in a chaotic room.
I started digging. I ran a traceroute on her domain registration. I engaged the search algorithms I paid a small fortune for, the ones that scraped the dark underbelly of the forums where obsession turned into stalking.
What I found made my blood run cold.
It wasn't a fortress. It was a house of cards built inside a glass box.
Nexus Management. Her previous representation. The hack-job agency that had pumped her full of suppressants and milked her for content before I bought out her contract. They hadn't protected her; they had hidden her.
"Security through obscurity," I muttered, a curse word in my industry.
They had relied on the fact that no one was looking hard enough.
They hadn't encrypted her personal email metadata.
They hadn't bought up the typo-squatting domains.
Her registered address for the copyright filings funneled through a shell company that dissolved two years ago, leaving a paper trail that led, terrifyingly, to a P.O. Box three towns over from here.
"What is it?" Simon crawled over, drawn by the change in my scent. I reeked of cold winter air and ozone, sharp and aggressive.
"She’s exposed," I said, hitting a key that brought up a visualization of the threat vectors. "She thinks she’s anonymous because she doesn't do interviews. But look at this."
I pointed to a thread on a sub-forum dedicated to Omegaverse theory.
User: RoseWatcher88 posted: "I tracked the IP on the newsletter header. It pings to the Pacific Northwest. Coastal grid. Anyone else think the descriptions of rain in 'Alpha's Oath' are a little too accurate?"
Drafted three weeks ago. No replies yet. But it was a crack in the dam.
"Someone is knocking on the door," Simon whispered, his eyes widening.
"And no one locked it," I snarled.
I cracked my knuckles.
For years, I had been the rule-follower. I had been the Class President who sat in his chair while Tessa Kane fell apart because protocol dictated I stay seated. I had trusted the system to handle it. I had trusted security to be gentle. I had trusted the administration to protect the student.
I was done trusting systems. I was the system now.
"Watch," I told Simon.
I went to work.
I didn't just patch the holes; I poured concrete.
I started a hostile takeover of every domain name remotely associated with Tessa Kane, T.L.
Rose, and even the misspelling of her pseudonym.
I routed the purchases through a labyrinth of holding companies in the Cayman Islands and Singapore, creating a digital maze that would take the NSA six months to unravel.
Then I went for the throat.
I located the hosting provider for the forum thread. A mid-tier company in Nevada.
I didn't send a polite request. I drafted a legal nuclear strike. I cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, defamation statutes, and implied an imminent lawsuit that would bankrupt their grandchildren. I attached the digital signature of my firm’s litigation department, the one known in the industry as " The Shredder. "
Send.
The thread vanished in forty-five seconds. The user account was banned.
Clack. Clack. Enter.
I moved to video sites. "Graduation Girl." The bane of her existence. The viral clip that had driven her into this isolation.
It was still out there, lurking on mirror sites and "cringe compilations."
I deployed the crawler bot I had commissioned last year. It was a nasty piece of code designed to flag biometric violations in media hosting. I manually tagged the video as "Non-Consensual Medical Episode/Biometric Data Leak."
It wasn't just a copyright strike. It was a terms-of-service violation that triggered automated liability filters.
One by one, the red lights on my dashboard turned green. The links died. The mirrors shattered.
"You're erasing her," Simon breathed, watching the screen with a mix of horror and awe.
"I am fortifying her," I corrected. "I am building a wall that no one can climb."
I was sweating. My shirt stuck to my back. The adrenaline was different from the crisis in the kitchen. That had been reactive panic. This was proactive violence. I was hunting down every digital ghost that had ever haunted her and putting a bullet in its head.
A shout from the bedroom broke my concentration.
"Daniel!"
It was a scream of shattered release. A high, ringing cry that spoke of a pleasure so intense it bordered on pain.
My fingers froze over the keyboard.
The sound was followed by a silence so heavy it felt like the air pressure in the house dropped. Then, the low, rumbling murmur of Daniel’s voice, offering aftercare.
My stomach twisted into a knot of hot, jagged iron.
"He fixed the pain," Simon whispered, looking at the hallway.
"Yes," I said, my voice tight. "He fixed the pain."
I looked down at my screen, at the green lights, at the scrubbing reports. Daniel could fix the pain. Simon could immortalize the beauty. But I was the only one who could make sure the world never hurt her again.
I closed the laptop with a snap that echoed like a gunshot.
Twenty minutes later, the bedroom door opened, and she stepped out.
Tessa Kane looked... reconstructed.
She was wearing fresh leggings and an oversized sweater that swallowed her hands.
Her hair was damp, brushed back from her face.
She was pale, shaking slightly, needing to lean a hand against the doorframe for support.
But her eyes, those intelligent, storm-grey eyes behind the glasses she had miraculously found, were clear.
She wasn't the feral creature holding a brass lamp. She wasn't the hallucinating victim on the floor.
She walked into the living room, her gaze sweeping over Simon, who tried to merge with the sofa cushions, and landing on me. There was wariness there, yes. But also a question.
"You're still here," she said. Her voice was scratchy, raw from screaming.
"The bridge is still down," I said, keeping my tone neutral. Professional. "And we operate on a no-man-left-behind policy."
She looked at the kitchen island. At my laptop. At the neatly arranged stack of hard drives and the router I had dissected to upgrade the firmware.
"What are you doing?" she asked, walking slowly toward the island. She moved with a hitch in her step, a physical memory of the cramps.
"Auditing," I said.
"Auditing?" She stopped, gripping the back of a bar stool. "My house puts out a distress beacon, I almost die, and you're doing paperwork?"
"I am doing the job I was hired to do," I said. "Which is managing the asset, and right now, the asset is hemorrhaging security vulnerabilities."
I spun the laptop around.
"Look."
She hesitated, glancing at Daniel, who gave her a slow, encouraging nod from the hallway. She looked at Simon, who offered a tentative, terrified smile.
She stepped up to the computer.
I walked her through it. I didn't use soft language. I didn't use the gentle, soothing tones Daniel used. I gave her the hard data.
"This is your previous security setup," I said, pointing to the red graph. "It was a sieve. You were using a residential-grade firewall for a multi-million dollar privacy concern. Your IP was trackable by anyone with a Reddit account and a motive."
Her face paled. "I… I paid extra for the VPN."
"You paid for a sticker on the modem," I corrected ruthlessly. "It was useless."
I hit the next key. The screen shifted to blue.
"This is what I did in the last hour," I said.
I showed her the list of purchased domains. I showed her the cease-and-desist orders. I showed her the obliterated forum threads.
"I pulled the graduation video from the three major hosting hubs," I said, watching her profile. "I flagged it as toxic content. It’s gone from the surface web. If anyone tries to re-upload it, my bot will kill the link before it finishes buffering."
Tessa went very still. Her hand reached out, hovering over the screen, tracing the list of scrubbed links.
"You deleted it?" she whispered. "Nexus told me... they said it was impossible. They said once it's on the internet, it's forever."
"Nexus was lazy," I said, leaning forward, bracing my hands on the counter so I was eye-level with her. "And they were afraid of litigation. I am not."
I let the scent of bourbon and teakwood roll off me, not aggressive, but solid. Immovable.
"I followed the rules all those years ago, Tessa," I breathed. The room was silent, Simon and Daniel watching us like we were a bomb squad. "I sat in that chair because the handbook said not to create a scene. I failed you because I respected the system more than the person."
She looked up at me. Her grey eyes were wide, searching my face for the boy who had turned away.
"I learned," I said, my voice dropping an octave. "I don't follow the rules anymore. I weaponize them. I can't read you a bedtime story like Daniel. I can't draw you like a goddess, like Simon. But I can make sure that no one ever gets close enough to hurt you again unless you invite them in."
I pointed to the encrypted drive on the desk.
"Your digital life is now Fort Knox," I said. "You are invisible, Tessa. Truly invisible. Until you decide you don't want to be."
She stared at me. Her lips parted slightly.
For a moment, I thought she was going to scream at me again. I thought she was going to tell me I had overstepped, that I was controlling her life just like everyone else.
But then she exhaled, a long, shuddering breath that seemed to deflate the tension in her shoulders.
"You killed the ghosts," she murmured.
"I evicted them," I corrected. "There's a difference."
She looked at the screen again, then back at me. There was a new light in her eyes. It wasn't the heat or the panic. It was respect. And beneath that, a flicker of something that heated the blood in my veins.
"And if I want to be seen?" she asked, her voice gaining a fraction of strength.
I held her gaze, my blue eyes locking onto hers.
"Then I will make the world look," I promised. "And I will make them applaud."
The silence stretched, charged and electric.
"Okay," she whispered. She reached out and closed the laptop, a definitive snap. "Okay, Anders."
She didn't say thank you. She didn't have to. She stepped back from the counter, squaring her shoulders.
"I'm hungry," she announced, looking at the three of us. "And since you raided my pantry, Daniel, you're cooking."
Daniel let out a breath he seemed to have been holding for an hour, a massive grin breaking across his face. "Yes, ma'am. Protein scramble, coming up."
As I watched her walk toward the living room, moving with a grace that belied the trauma of the last twenty-four hours, I unbuttoned my cuffs and rolled them up higher, exposing my forearms. For the first time since we got there, I felt useful, lethal.
I looked at Simon, who was staring at me with his mouth ajar.
"Close your mouth, Bradlee," I muttered, picking up the router. "And pass me the screwdriver. I missed a port."
I didn't need to touch her skin to claim her. I had just wrapped her entire existence in my protection. And for the first time in years, the guilt in my chest was quiet.