Chapter 29
chapter twenty nine
did i love the city, or something else?
As the wheels touched the runway at JFK, I couldn’t tell whether I was happy to be back or missing London already. I also couldn’t figure out if I loved or hated London, either.
It was hard for me to really love a place. Sure, Chile was home, but it was tarnished in a way that felt irreversible. And I don’t know what invisible criteria a city had to meet for me to warm up to it, but every one I’d set foot in hadn’t hit those points yet.
New York certainly fucking hadn’t.
One question I never answered whenever anyone asked me was why I’d decided to set up Romano Security in New York if I hated it so much. And the answer was that I didn’t hate it. Not really. It was just far away enough from what happened back home for me to dull the pain of it.
And yes, it was that bad. Whatever you’re thinking happened, it happened. All because of me. All because I couldn’t say anything to stop it.
I think what I really hated was myself. Because it wasn’t my home that had made the bad things happen there. And it wasn’t New York that made the bad things happen here. Nor was it London’s fault for the shit things there.
The only recurring factor was me.
But for the first time in a long time, stepping back into New York didn’t feel like punishment. Maybe that was because of London.
London hadn’t erased the ghosts, but it had shown me something I’d almost forgotten—that life could feel different.
That I could. Somewhere between the noise of the city, the places I thought I’d hate, and the moments I hadn’t expected to matter, I realised the weight I carried didn’t always have to crush me.
I wasn’t naive enough to think a change of scenery fixed anything. London hadn’t changed me. But what happened there… who I was with there… It had cracked something open in me I thought was sealed shut.
So yeah. New York hadn’t changed. It was still crowded. Still loud. Still choking me with everything I’d failed to leave behind. The difference was I didn’t hate being here anymore. Because somewhere along the way, I’d stopped hating myself quite as much.
And if I let myself think too hard about why, I knew exactly whose fault that was.
After getting home, taking a quick nap, and leaving Cora in the safety of her house, I was walking into the office. I’d already clued Oscar and a few of the other guys in on what happened in London and the progress I’d made whilst I wasn’t playing shadow, but we needed a proper meeting.
I went straight to the control room, finding Oscar leaning over his desk, but as he spotted me, he moved, his body practically collapsing over mine with a sigh.
“How do you do it?”
Confusion was laced in my laugh. “Do what?”
He pulled back and ran his hands over his face as we walked over to the row of computers. “Look so young and run this fucking place. One week as head, and I’m ready to check out retirement homes. I’m exhausted.”
I blew a laugh through my nose as we pulled out chairs and fired up the desktops. “Earl Grey tea helps. Try that.”
“Does it de-age you by twenty years? Because that’s what I need.”
I shrugged, logging into the system. “De-aging you twenty years would make you four, so calm down. And it’s more for de-stressing. You should try it though.”
Just the name of the tea had me thinking of her, and before I could stop it, I felt my mouth curve into a smile.
“Does it also make you smile like a fucking psychopath? You don’t smile; what’s wrong with you?”
I pushed Oscar’s shoulders as I pulled my files from my briefcase. “Shut up. I smile.”
“Since when? Remember, I’ve been with you my whole life; you don’t smile.”
I opened up the files. “Since recently then. Now shut up and look at this.”
Oscar blinked, the humour fading just a fraction. He leaned forward, flipping open the top sheet with a finger. Rows of timestamps, connection logs, anomalies, and my handwriting scrawled across the margins.
My voice cut through the air like a knife, my eyes darting between him and Nathaniel, our digital forensics genius. “This wasn’t Jamie.”
Oscar’s brows furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that this was above him,” I snapped. “It was too clean. Too exact. Jamie’s impulsive. Cocky. Reckless. This?” I jabbed a finger at the log. “This was orchestrated. Strategic. And none of us saw it coming.”
Nathaniel tried to joke this time, shrugging as his hands clasped. “Maybe the guy finally levelled up? Stranger things have happened.” He pointed at Oscar. “Remember when you filed your taxes on time?”
My head shot up, eyes burning. “This isn’t a joke.”
Both of them straightened.
“I followed the traces,” I continued, voice tight as I scrolled. “There was a hiccup in one of the packets. Just a flicker of lag. But it was off. It returned too fast for the route it claimed to be on.”
I took a breath; like saying it out loud made it more real. More terrifying.
“It pinged from London. But it wasn’t local. Some international relay or anonymous VPN. And I realised someone wanted me there. Wanted me out of New York. Away from the company. From you.”
Oscar frowned, rubbing at the back of his neck. “So it was a setup.”
“Exactly. While I was chasing ghosts across the ocean, someone was back here, moving behind us.” I stepped around the desk, yanked open a drawer, and tossed a USB drive onto the desk.
“And it gets worse. I traced the MAC address from that hiccup. It was masked, sloppy sure… but I’ve seen it before.
It was flagged in a breach we dismissed six months ago. ”
Oscar’s smirk faded entirely. “You’re saying—?”
“I’m saying that device was inside our system. One of ours. Or someone pretending to be.” I felt my voice crack slightly, fuelled entirely by the rage bubbling in my blood the longer I was reliving all this. The longer I realised this wasn’t a nightmare I could simply wake up from.
“This isn’t about the clients. They were just the entry wound. They’re coming after the company. After us. After everything we care about.” My head fell into my hands before raking down my face as I eyed Oscar. “They’re trying to destroy us.”
Oscar blew out a breath, trying to keep things from spiralling. “Alright, look. It’s bad, yeah. But maybe this is just someone pissed off. A former contractor. One of your old hookups who figured out Python. We’ve had worse.”
I turned on him like a whip, my eyes as narrow as I could make them. “Are you fucking listening? Wake up; this isn’t funny.”
Oscar stilled. The weight behind my words seemed to suck the air out of the room. And for good measure. If they didn’t start taking this seriously, we’d be gone this time next month.
“If we go down, Oscar… our clients are exposed. They’re vulnerable. They won’t be believed. They’ll be silenced, dismissed, or worse.” My chest heaved, the words falling like bullets. “Do you want them to end up like Lana?”
The name dropped like a grenade between us. And as though he could sense this was a discussion that only Oscar and I needed to hear, Nathaniel stood up. “I’m gonna give you guys some time.”
I nodded, watching him leave before my eyes drifted back down to Oscar.
His jaw clenched, his eyes on the table. “Don’t bring her into this.”
“I have to.”
“No, you don’t!”
“I have to!” I gritted out, quieter now but shaking. “Because that’s what’s at stake. You and I swore this company would protect people the system failed. If we lose that, what the hell was it for?”
Oscar stared at me. A muscle twitched in his jaw. Then he turned and grabbed his jacket from the back of a chair. “I’m gonna check the servers.”
He left without another word, the door slamming shut behind him.
I stood in the silence, chest rising and falling like I’d just run a marathon. The weight of it all—Cora, Jamie, the breach, my past—crushed me like a snowplough.
I walked to the window, pressing my forehead to the cool glass, and decided I hated New York again.
My fists clenched, anger fusing at my fingertips.
This had to stop.
Whoever was behind this, whoever had the gall to turn Jamie into a weapon, to endanger everything and everyone I’ve fought to protect, wasn’t just after my reputation.
They were after my life. My blood. My future.
Who the hell was this guy?
I turned back toward the desk, sinking into the chair Oscar had been in earlier.
It was still warm. My mind was running at a thousand miles per hour trying to break the code, trying to put a face to the crimes, and when I couldn’t imagine a single person from Romano doing such a thing, I slumped, my head barreling toward the desk as my fists slammed against it.
Over and over again until the urge to scream ripped through my chest, and the papers I’d set out barrelled off the desk as I swiped at them.
I was heaving into air, anger rippling through every part of me, pinching my skin and searing my mind.
But through the silence, I heard it—my phone, buzzing twice in my pocket and pausing reality.
I leaned back in my chair and slipped the thing out of my pocket, wiping the beads of sweat from my forehead as I stared at the screen.
I didn’t expect much. Maybe a system alert. Another breach. Another fire.
But instead—
Today at 16:57pm
Cora
I have no motivation to paint right now. Permission to undelete our Big Ben picture?
I couldn’t help it; I laughed. A proper laugh that had butterflies—butterflies—roaring in my stomach. I didn’t know how all she had to do was text me, and suddenly the world felt good again.
The more I stared at her name, the more the knot in my chest loosened. Not gone, but lighter. Like someone had cracked open a window in a suffocating room.
My hand closed around the phone, and for the first time in hours, I could breathe.
Everything else was breaking apart, slipping through my grip no matter how hard I fought to hold it together.
But not her. She was the one constant, the anchor in the storm, the reason I could take the chaos and not let it consume me.
And with so much of my life out of my control, I wanted to cling to the one thing I could.
I wanted to hold onto the reason I could love a city I’d spent years hating, simply because she existed in it.