17. Ciel
CIEL
Blaring alarms woke me with a start. Blurry red lights flashed from my computer screens. I snatched my glasses from the end table and cursed when the warning became crystal clear.
We were under attack.
I glanced at the clock as I leapt out of bed and yanked on a pair of shorts. It was mid-morning. Everyone else had to be awake by now. Dashing to the door, I yanked it open.
“Leona!” I shouted as loudly as I could. “Come—come here!”
I collapsed into my computer chair as fast as I could and started typing. Thank God I’d gotten everything basically set up again. Otherwise, I’d have no way to fight this off. Terminal windows popped up one after the other. My hand ached while I furiously typed commands, trying to patch the breach.
Footsteps thundered up the stairs. The door opened.
“What is it?” Obi asked first.
“Cyberattack,” I said without even looking. My eyes darted across the screen. Line after line of code flooded the monitor. “Someone is trying to ha—hack us.”
Bodies crammed into the room, but nothing registered. Only the blinking red lights of servers under attack. Shit.
“Ciel?” Leona asked, voice tight as she popped into my periphery. “How can I help?”
Papers, desk, what can she do… I shoved off the stacks of research I’d left on my desk. “He—here. Pull up a chair.” I hadn’t got her secondary setup attached yet, but as fast as I could, I snagged my extra keyboard and handed it to her. “Plug in.”
Someone helped her materialize a chair out of thin air. She sat down in it. Wynn’s face popped up on my other side.
“What’s happening?”
“There was some kind of vulnerability in our wifi network,” I said through gritted teeth. “I’m trying to patch it, but they’re quick. Every time I put up a wall, they try to find a way around it.”
“What else can we do?” Obi asked from behind me.
I didn’t respond. There wasn’t time. Someone was trying to breach my servers, and there was no fucking way I’d let them get inside.
“Ready,” Leona said. “What do you need?”
I rattled off instructions for her to save segments of our important files and move them to a physical solid state storage drive. That way, if I couldn’t fight off the breach, I could wipe the whole server and we wouldn’t lose everything. Some, maybe, but not everything.
I did not want to do that. We’d lose so much if I had to wipe this server. It was a last resort.
“Ciel,” Obi said again. “What can we do?”
“I don’t know!” I snapped without looking away from my screens. “Go make sure we’re not being surrounded as we speak.”
“Ryu and I will walk the perimeters,” Cas said, voice disappearing outside the door. Obi answered him, but I didn’t have the capacity to pay attention.
No, that’s not working. They’re trying to penetrate…
What if I…? Maybe I could bolster these security protocols? Can I change the passwords to something more secure? Will it even make a difference?
What if I reboot the server?
No, that wouldn’t work, they’d just start hitting it again…
Maybe I could reroute the protocols. Change our server to a different storage location.
I’ve gotta figure out how to lock them out…
Thought after thought flew through my brain faster than I could catch them. My fingers typed as quickly as they could, and I fought through the pain of my stiff palm. The injury there had slowed me down, but it hadn’t made me less. I was still one of the best hackers in the world.
Another alarm blinked in the bottom right of my screen.
“Shit. Fuck,” I hissed.
“What is it?”
“They’re almost in,” I replied. They’d gotten through my first line of defense. Now they were probing my backdoor access points. “Wynn, tell everyone to turn off their fucking phones. Now.”
“Got it.”
Leona handed Wynn her phone, and he powered it off, setting it on the desk in front of her while she typed. Then he disappeared.
A bead of sweat gathered on my temple. I swiped it away and blinked, trying to clear the blurriness in my eyes.
“Okay, Ciel,” Leona said. I had no idea how much time had passed. “I’ve saved most of it. Should I keep going?”
My eyes flicked across the screens again.
I could shut it down. Kill the entire server. It would cut them out, but we’d lose everything I’d had stored. The programs I’d written. The data we’d collected about their patterns. The plans I’d made to secure our territory.
Leona had saved some of it, but it wasn’t near everything, and we were running out of time.
“What are they doing, Ciel?” she asked.
“They’re trying to get acc—get access to my information databases. Steal our data. Steal my programs.”
“What happens if they get inside?”
“They’ll have anything that was saved on my computers.
Some of it is useless, but it contains our location data.
Our software for planning the hits we do.
The programs I’ve created for facial recognition.
The locations of all our cameras across the city.
Browser history. Research. It’s…the records of our lives. ”
“So if they get it…they know where we’ve been, what we’ve been up to, what we’re watching, and what we plan to do next?”
I nodded. My throat felt tight, and I didn’t trust myself to speak. I didn’t have the time, anyway.
“What if you wipe it?”
“We lose it, too.”
“But they can’t take it?”
“Correct.”
I let out a breath as I patched one vulnerability, only to see two more pop up as they continued to pressure test my walls.
“Kill the server, Ciel.”
I rubbed my eyes. “But if I kill it, I lose all the time and effort I’ve put into building those programs. The algorithms I use to track…everything. I’d have to rebuild it.”
“Can you?” she asked. “Rebuild it?”
With a sigh, I braced one elbow on the desk and looked at her. “Yeah, it would just take fucking forever.”
“Kill it, then.” Her hand landed on my forearm. “It’s okay. You can do it again. I can help, too. If you wipe the data, they can’t get it.”
I wanted to scream in frustration. This attacker was just too fast, and I couldn’t keep up. She was right. Wiping the server was the smartest thing to do.
“Okay,” I breathed. In a terminal window, I typed the commands to wipe the entire thing. My cursor blinked as I stared at the lines.
“Push it,” she said softly. “We’ll fix it.”
I hit the Enter key.
Months worth of work, years, disappeared into nothing.
A blank screen stared back at me, the cursor blinking.
My hand throbbed. I sat back, digging my thumb into the tight tissue while my stomach turned nauseous.
“What about backups? We could restore it.”
My head shook while my lips pressed together. “I could, but it would be a copy of what they just broke into. All they’d need to do is expose the same vulnerability, except now they’d know how to get in.”
She squeezed my shoulder. “You did the right thing. It sucks, but we’re safe.”
“If I could have been faster—”
Her palm cupped my cheek and turned my face to hers. “You fought it off. You didn’t let the attacker steal our data. We’re safe.” She kissed me. “That’s a win.”
I nodded and then sighed. “You’re right.”
The whole thing would need to be rebuilt. New programs. New databases. New tracking.
The only silver lining was that I could make it stronger than ever before. A fresh, blank slate could mean new thinking, new ways of doing things.
I pushed away from the desk and hunched over in my chair, head in my hands. My fingers caught in the snarl of tangles in my hair. “Mierda. What a fucking way to wake up.”
“I’m sorry, my love,” she said as she pushed me straight so she could slip into my lap. “Who do you think it was?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Who do we know that is on the same level as me?”
“Lucia.”
My hands tightened on her waist. “Had to be her. The way her attacks went after our weaknesses…she’s fast. She’s smart. She cut right through my patches.”
“She’s good, but you’re better,” Leona assured me.
“If I were, I would have been able to stop her and not have to wipe everything.”
“You did stop her.”
I waved a hand, not wanting to argue. “Thanks for—thanks for saving what you could.”
“We can build everything again together,” she said again. “And since we’re doing it together, it’ll be better than ever.”
I twisted my finger around one of her curls and gave her a small smile. “You’re right. With our two brains at work, maybe we’ll come up with something no one has ever seen before.”
She wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled me in for a tight hug.
A few hours later, the whole family gathered around the kitchen table for debriefing. Cas and Ryu had searched everywhere around the perimeter, and even taken a car out to case the new neighborhood, but nothing looked like our location was compromised.
On paper, we were still safe.
The anxiety in my chest still hadn’t lessened.
“So, what does this mean?” Ryu asked. “Our hacker got hacked?”
I let out a breath and tried to stop my leg from bouncing. I failed, and the bouncing continued.
“It means they’re coming after us,” I said. “They probably won’t stop. I need to rebuild everything from scratch and completely reconfigure our internet.”
“What about our devices?” Obi asked.
“Stay off the internet for now,” I answered. “Pretend we don’t have it until I can make sure it’s secure.”
Cas and Ryuji exchanged a glance. “If we’re not on the internet, we’ll have to be in the field more. Check in with our men in person. Are we good with that?”
I looked at Obi for confirmation, and he nodded. “We’ll have to, but exercise extreme caution. Get all our men new burner phones. Only leave the new house in pairs and always watch each other’s backs.”
“We should go after them,” Wynn said from behind me. His palm rubbed my back. “Greco might have said he was giving us three days for an answer, but he’s clearly not waiting to attack us.”
“I agree,” Cas said. “Max already told us where their guns are. If it’s still on schedule, a new shipment should arrive at the warehouse tomorrow. We should steal it.”
All eyes went to Max. He pursed his lips. “We won’t know unless our men stake it out. Or we do.”
“Our men?” Ryu crossed his arms over his chest.
Max’s jaw worked. “Your men. Can you have your men head to the ports, look for their ship, and follow the shipment to the warehouses? If it arrives, we can break in and steal it.”
Now, all heads turned to Obi and Leona.
“Yes. We’ll take the guns for our own,” Obi said after exchanging a look with her. “I want his men dead. As many as we can take out. Ciel, you stay here and start work rebuilding our systems.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “I could help in the field.”
“I know, but you can support us from here as well. Get everything we need back up and running as soon as possible. Meanwhile, we’ll coordinate with our men to start our assault on the smuggling operations. The ripple effects will force Greco to regroup.”
“Got it.”
Leona’s lips pressed together. “Three fucking days. What a joke. I want those guns, and I want him to know that we took them.”
Obi’s palm gripped the back of her neck. “I want this to be a simultaneous attack. While we’re hitting the warehouse, have some of our men go after his elsewhere. Tell Makarov to go on the offensive, Ryu. Spill as much Italian blood as we can.”
They talked through plans for another thirty minutes, but my leg kept bouncing. I could barely focus. All I could think about was creating stronger defenses and keeping everyone safe. They needed my technical support in the field, so I couldn’t be out of commission for long.
Lucia was still steps ahead of me, but now the gears in my head were turning.
If she could attack me, I could attack her.
I’d had the idea for a virus in the back of my head for quite a while. Maybe now was the right time to develop it.
As I walked back to my room to get to work, a weight pressed against my shoulders. The tone inside the house had changed. Things were real now.
The war had officially begun.