Chapter 12
I’m back at my desk before midnight with a rather large thermos of piping hot coffee. Felix has already judged me for being late, eaten, and is now loafed directly in front of my keyboard like a furry paperweight.
“Move.”
He blinks slowly.
I adjust my glasses and stare at him. “Should I report you for obstruction of justice?”
He yawns.
“Unbelievable. I rescue you from a storm drain, and this is the loyalty I get.”
He doesn’t move.
I sigh and scoot him two inches to the left. He allows this with the long-suffering patience of someone who knows he owns the apartment, strutting over to the edge of my desk where he plops right back down.
The screens glow in front of me—lines of code, network maps, simulations. A web of connections that look less like infrastructure and more like a nervous system. I lean back, cracking my knuckles.
Two birds, one stone.
If I do this right, I can destroy two enemies.
Harrison’s is the paying job, and mine is the reason the program exists in the first place. And maybe whatever justification I have is just grief dressed up as logic, but I don’t care. I need somewhere to put it.
Felix purrs, which is either support or an early warning system for imminent doom.
My phone rings, and I lean forward to glance at the screen.
“Oh, look. Speaking of doom,” I joke to Felix before answering the call with a grin. “Hey, Malc.”
“Cason.”
I wish I could’ve asked him to call me Case a long time ago, but even now, I can’t.
I only lived with my uncle for a couple months after my kidnapping, but we’re both the only family each other has on this side of the country.
We take turns checking in on each other.
I’m glad he didn’t take it personally when I quit working at the Institute. I just couldn’t stand the attention.
“Look, if this is about the time I accidentally crashed Bellrose’s internal server when I was seventeen, I maintain that was a learning experience.”
“You were twenty.”
“Time is a construct.”
He laughs. “How have you been?”
“Oh, you know. Trying not to get into too much trouble. It’s not going so well.”
“You know I’m always here if you need anything.”
“I know.”
There’s a beat of silence, then he says, “How’s your mission going?”
I blink. “My…what?”
“Your mission.”
I stare at the code, suddenly very aware of every line on the screen. “You’re going to have to be a bit more specific. I have several. Some of them involve pizza.”
A pause.
“I know what you’ve been doing.”
The air in my apartment shifts. Even Felix stops purring.
I lean my chair back again, slowly, giving myself time to decide how to respond. “That’s deeply ominous. Should I go on the lam now or later?”
“You asked me a long time ago if I had any enemies. If someone was trying to use you to get to me.”
“I remember.”
“I’ve been watching since then.”
“Watching what, exactly?”
“I have eyes everywhere, Cason.”
I wince. “Okay, first of all, rude. Second of all, I suddenly feel extremely violated. Is this how celebrities feel?”
He blows out a breath of laughter. “You’re not a celebrity.”
“Tell that to the press that camped outside my apartment for two months. I considered faking my own death. It seemed easier.”
“I’d say the ridiculous green hair was a better call.”
“Aw, so you don’t hate it!”
I can practically hear him rolling his eyes from the other side of the line.
There’s another stretch of silence before he says, “I told you I didn’t know of any enemies I might’ve had at the time. I was wrong.”
My tapping fingers go still, and I hold my breath. I don’t want him to know the truth. I need him to believe the version he can understand. Because no one would understand why I’m doing all of this for my kidnapper.
Someone came after me. Someone used him to get to the Bellroses. Someone humiliated Malcolm and the Institute by taking me right out from under them. Maybe they’re still out there, plotting their next attack.
That’s where he needs to believe my motivation lies.
“I thought I could take care of them without you ever knowing,” I admit.
“Who do you think sent you that tip two years ago?”
I let out a disbelieving noise. “You?”
“That’s when I noticed them popping back up.
I could tell you had a desire to do something about it, so I dropped a few breadcrumbs and have been watching since then.
You’ve been asking interesting questions of interesting people.
You built a workstation powerful enough to simulate half a corporate network and bought more encrypted storage than most startups use in a year. ”
All paid for with private jobs and cash transfers split so thin they looked like static.
No Bellrose money. Not anything that Malcolm could freeze or question or use to pull me back under his roof.
Every dollar I’ve made from people like Harrison went into this machine, storage, servers.
Into the thing that was supposed to buy me one clean ending.
I rub a hand over my face. “Okay, when you say it like that, it sounds a little concerning.”
“It is concerning,” he says calmly.
“I prefer the term ambitious.”
“You also purchased custom FPGA boards from a broker in Prague.”
I freeze. “That was supposed to be anonymous.”
“Nothing is anonymous if the right people are watching.”
“Well,” I say, pinching the bridge of my nose, “good to know no one’s besting me at my operational security. Turns out my uncle’s just a serious stalker.”
He exhales a quiet laugh.
“On top of all that,” he says, voice settling into something more serious, “I know you, Cason. You disappear when something matters to you. You left the Institute, and you’ve only been taking independent projects.”
Because independent means mine. There’s no one asking why I need a component shipped through three countries, no one leaning over my shoulder pretending concern is different from control.
My gaze drifts back to the lines of code scrolling across my monitor.
“You’ve always been methodical,” he says. “When you want something done, you don’t rush. You build the tools first. You test them. You refine them until they’re perfect. You’re persistent and meticulous.”
Felix shifts beside my keyboard, tail flicking lazily.
Malcolm goes on, almost conversationally. “Now you’re going after them. You’re trying to destroy what they’ve built. You’ve dedicated the last four years of your life to it.”
He says it like he understands. Like this is about what happened to me in that basement, about the Institute being violated, about his failure, about every headline that made us look weak. About a Bellrose finally striking back.
He believes I’m doing this because someone took me, not that I’m doing this because someone took him away from me.
Closure is probably a myth, but myths still give people something to chase.
“Stop making it sound so unhealthy.”
“It is unhealthy,” he says.
I swallow. “Are you going to tell me to stop?”
“No. I’m going to tell you to keep going.”
My jaw falls slack on a sharp exhale, and my brow furrows. “That’s…not the lecture I expected.”
“They’re dangerous, Cason.”
“That is the least shocking information you’ve ever given me.”
“I’m just saying you need to be careful.”
“I’m always careful.”
“You were taken once, and I couldn’t stand it if something happened to you again.”
A couple days after I was rescued—I still have a hard time thinking of it that way no matter how many therapy sessions I attend—Malcolm apologized again and again and again for leaving me there for so long.
He said his team advised him not to send the ransom, to instead go on the offensive.
But it seemed to eat at him for a long time that he had listened instead of just paying the ransom like he wanted to do in the first place.
I stopped being angry with him for how much time I spent in that basement before I even left it. By the end, I didn’t care.
After?
My anger was directed elsewhere.
“I remember,” I say quietly.
“I don’t want to lose you too.”
Too. First, his wife a long time ago. Then my dad, his brother. Sometimes I forget how close they were, how much losing him hurt my uncle as much as it did me and my mom. I think he’s better at hiding things than I am.
At least I know it runs in the family.
For some reason, I repeat what Harrison said earlier today. “I have no plans of dying anytime soon.”
“Good.”
I’m still kind of reeling from the fact that Malcolm has known what I’ve been up to this entire time. Again, he hid it really fucking well. When I wonder what else he’s hiding, I realize something.
“You sound like you’re afraid of them.”
A pause.
“I respect them,” he says.
“Is that not the same thing?”
“No.” I can almost hear the smile in his voice. “It isn’t.”
I grin and look at Felix who has resumed purring like all these revelations over the past few minutes haven’t shook my very foundation.
“Well, I appreciate the vote of confidence, Malc. And the surveillance. Very normal. Very healthy family dynamic.”
“You and the Institute are all I have left, Cason.”
Any other jokes I might have had die on my tongue.
We talk a few more minutes about actual normal things, like how everything’s going at the Institute, how Felix is doing, the latest paper he’s had published. He asks how my mom’s been.
“I talked to her yesterday,” I tell him. “She’s good, really liking North Carolina. She joined some kind of book club.”
“She always liked those.”
When we end the call, l sit there for a while, staring at the reflection of code in my glasses.
I miss my mom.
The memory hits me out of nowhere.
Hospital lights. Too bright, too white. A steady beeping, different from that flat tone I heard before.
Everything hurts.
My throat is raw. My body feels like it’s been hollowed out and filled with glass. I ache everywhere, but the worst pain is somewhere so deep in my chest I think it lives inside me now.
“Cason?”
My mom’s voice.
I turn my head, and she’s there. Dark circles under her reddened eyes, hair a mess, relief and terror and love all making up her expression as she holds my right hand in both of hers.