Chapter 13
I fucked up.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I fucking fucked up.
All I can do now is everything in my power to make it right, to help Lane and Harrison kick this motherfucker’s ass.
My apartment is dark except for the glow of screens.
There are wires everywhere, protein bar wrappers, a half empty bag of Goldfish, and empty coffee mugs that have definitely reached sentience.
Felix has abandoned me for higher ground because even he knows when the energy in a room turns feral.
He glares down at me from the top of the bookshelf like I personally offended him by choosing chaos today.
“He started it,” I tell the cat, referring to the man I’m supposed to be winning against. Not fucking losing. “If he didn’t exist, I’d be having a normal morning. Maybe eating cereal. Maybe touching grass. Okay, probably not that last one.”
Felix blinks slowly. Damn judgmental cat.
My fingers fly across my keyboard, and sweat slides down my spine.
He got through. He fucking got through.
Not my enemy, but theirs.
And not entirely, but enough. One weak point was all it took. One tiny seam in the firewall I built like a paranoid conspiracy theorist with abandonment issues. I layered it, stress-tested it, broke it, and rebuilt it. And still, he found the one spot that wasn’t perfect.
That one weak point is how they got to Lane, how they were able to take him.
And also the reason why Harrison is most definitely going to fucking kill me.
Especially if I don’t fucking fix this.
“Okay,” I mutter, cracking my knuckles as code scrolls across three different monitors. “Okay. We adapt. We pivot. We do not spiral into a dramatic meltdown because that would be unprofessional.”
I am absolutely spiraling.
My phone starts vibrating across my desk.
Mom Calling
Of course.
I rarely miss a call from her, but I let it buzz. Lives are literally at stake.
“Love you,” I mutter to the phone as I flip it face down. “Call you when I’m done dismantling a criminal empire.”
Back to work.
The virus window is open on the center screen.
Four years of obsession. Four years of caffeine and insomnia and rage funneled into one beautiful, terrifying thing.
Four years, and now it comes down to this.
It needs to spread without being detected, without tripping automated fail-safes.
It needs to suffocate the network slowly enough to avoid triggering countermeasures but fast enough to give me a window.
Two minutes to drain accounts. Three or four to erase the contingencies and an entire digital footprint.
Then the rest of the time for the part that actually matters to me, the part no one hired me for.
I run one last stability check. The runtime is still tight. I reroute part of the propagation through a secondary cluster I set up months ago. It’s risky and unstable. If it crashes too early, everything collapses and I lose the window. But if I don’t, I might not get enough time.
I need twelve minutes.
Lane’s life is hanging in the balance, and I’m not willing to risk my revenge in order to save it. I’m still determined to have both.
I’m a selfish fucking bastard.
I can do this.
The encrypted network interface flickers on my second monitor. Active. Busy. Chat threads, transaction pings, anonymous users moving money and information and people like they’re all just lines in a spreadsheet.
My jaw clenches so hard it aches.
“Okay,” I whisper, flexing my fingers. “Showtime.”
I hover over the execute command.
This is the point of no return. The blackout will ripple outward into temporary chaos. Systems frozen, routers fried, communication severed, anonymous layers stripped bare.
And if it fails—
I press execute.
For half a second, nothing happens.
Then the screens erupt.
Traffic spikes. Nodes blink offline. Encrypted channels collapse like dominoes. Connections start dropping in waves, like someone is turning off the lights in a city one block at a time.
All of my preloaded and automated scripts zip across in ones and zeroes, already siphoning through crypto wallets, offshore banks, shell corporations. Numbers cascade. Accounts drain. Digital vaults hollow out.
Two minutes.
Phase one complete.
I trigger the deletion protocols. Encrypted fail-safes surface, resist, collapse.
Dead man’s switch is gone. Erased.
Backup triggers are overwritten. Mirrors are wiped. Every contingency my virus finds is unraveled. The system fights back. It always does. Defenses flare, but the blackout chokes them before they can compensate.
Four minutes.
The infrastructure begins to crumble. Archives corrupt. Data fragments. Identity layers collapse.
Six minutes.
My turn.
As much as I want to check in on Lane and Harrison, this is what I’ve been waiting for.
I reroute, sending the payload down a hidden fork, a path no one else knows exists, a last-minute attack that would catch anyone off guard. It tunnels deeper, toward a different network, a different set of servers.
Toward the person who hired a man to kidnap me.
The person who put that man in my path.
The person responsible for that path ending abruptly.
A bead of sweat drips from my chin onto the keyboard, but my hands don’t stop moving.
Nine minutes.
Ten.
Eleven.
I inject the final payload, the one I built from scratch. The one I spent four years writing and refining and obsessing over.
Twelve.
Everything goes silent.
The blackout peaks.
Across the feeds, systems crash. Screens go dark. Everything collapses into digital silence.
I sag back in my seat, my lungs burning and chest heaving as though I just ran a marathon.
Twelve minutes and some change after I hit execute, the first nodes begin coming back online, slowly, the digital world stitching itself together again.
Temporary, just like I promised.
But the damage?
Permanent.
Felix meows cautiously from his perch.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I fixed it.”
And somewhere out there, a lot of very bad people are having a very bad day.
With that thought, I grab my phone. My hands are still shaking when I call Harrison. It rings once. Twice. My pulse skips before he finally answers.
They’re alive.
Lane and Harrison are both alive.
The air finally moves in and out of my lungs again.
I think I’ll live to see another day.
The call ends, and I lower my phone back on the desk slowly, giving myself a chance to soak everything in, for the adrenaline to fade and my heart rate to slow.
I fucking did it.
I burned down two empires with one attack. I gutted the shadow that’s been haunting me for four years, the one who hired a man to take me. A man who never walked out of that basement.
But…
I thought this would feel different.
Victorious.
I thought maybe grief had a kill switch, like if I found the right target and hit it hard enough, something in me would finally shut off.
Instead, it feels like pressing on a bruise that never healed. Like scratching at a phantom limb, one I cut off years ago and my body still swears it’s there.
Felix jumps onto the desk and nudges my wrist, purring like I didn’t just commit large-scale cyber warfare.
I thought revenge was supposed to taste sweet.
I burned down everything they built, piece by piece, exactly the way I planned. All that’s left is smoke in my lungs and a hollow space where purpose and hope and ashes once were, like I mistook destruction for resurrection.
Now the fire’s out.
And I’m still the kind of person who’d strike the match again.