Chapter 31 Downburst
Downburst
It had taken him three days to admit it.
David’s fingers glided across the glass screen of his tablet, the hum of data tripping through his senses like background noise against the louder silence around him. The air conditioning floated through the vents overhead, a steady rhythm that usually soothed him. Tonight it felt cold.
She was pulling away.
He couldn’t prove it—there was no metric for fear, no diagnostic flag for distance—but Lena was quieter. More careful. And her sarcasm, that spark that used to crackle between them, had gone missing.
David shifted in his chair, the leather creaking beneath him. His office loomed too large, too empty. He’d never minded working alone before. Hell, he’d preferred it. But now the silence pressed against his ears like static, filling the void where Lena’s voice should be.
When had that happened? When had he started listening for her footsteps in the hallway, cataloging the specific cadence of her walk? When had the absence of her laugh become something he missed?
He rubbed his eyes behind his glasses, regretting it when his vision blurred.
Exhaustion pulled at the edges of his consciousness, but sleep remained impossible.
Not when his mind kept replaying their last conversation—if you could call it that.
She’d barely looked at him, and when she had, her eyes had been distant, remote.
She’d nodded at his questions, offered monosyllabic responses, and excused herself at the first chance.
Like she couldn’t stand to be near him.
The thought twisted something sharp behind his ribs. David laid his palm flat against the tablet’s surface, seeking the familiar comfort of the network’s rhythm. Data flooded his awareness—clean, logical, comprehensible. So much easier than human emotion.
He glanced at the camera feeds displayed across his secondary monitor, eyes flickering over timestamps and angle shifts.
The feeds from the lobby showed the night shift going about their routines.
A couple was checking in late. A maintenance worker was replacing a bulb.
Ordinary moments, all catalogued and recorded.
At least the machines made sense. They didn’t ghost you emotionally and then act like nothing happened. They didn’t look at you with those turquoise eyes—god, her eyes—and turn away like something disappointed them.
David’s jaw clenched. He was being ridiculous. Melodramatic. Lena had every right to maintain professional boundaries. They’d crossed lines that shouldn’t be crossed, and maybe she was being smart to retreat before things got messy.
Except it already felt pretty damn messy from where he was sitting.
Focus. He needed to focus.
He pulled up the resort’s system logs again, diving deeper than before.
FTP traces. Shift access logs. Personal email metadata—all legal hauls under corporate policy, given the ongoing sabotage threats.
The familiar territory of ones and zeros surrounded him like a blanket, muffling the ache in his chest.
His fingers flew across the screen, accessing data streams and cross-referencing patterns. This was what he was good at. Not feelings, not relationships, but this: finding the invisible threads that connected seemingly random events. Seeing patterns no one else did.
There—he zoomed in on a blip in generator activity that had gone unnoticed yesterday. The timestamp caught his eye—3:47 am. Right in the dead zone when even the night audit staff were at their groggiest. Someone knew that. Planned for it.
“Gotcha,” he muttered, isolating the pattern.
His pulse quickened, the rush of discovery pushing aside his personal turmoil.
Someone pinged the maintenance system from the staff comms center.
The access was subtle, buried beneath routine diagnostic queries, but it was there.
Whoever it was knew the approximate service cycles and stayed below the disruption threshold. Almost invisible.
Almost.
David sat forward, his entire world narrowing to the screen before him. He placed both palms flat against the tablet’s surface, closing his eyes. The network opened up to his touch like a book written in light and electricity.
The feed crackled in his mind.
It wasn’t sound, per se—more like sensation.
A voice, not a person’s, but something deeper.
An awareness. The network spoke to him in the only language it knew, showing him patterns and anomalies that no standard diagnostic tool detected.
It showed him buried code masked by system-level permissions, hidden in the spaces between legitimate commands.
David’s psychic connection to the network simmered hotter when he pressed his thumb harder against the smart glass, and he felt it.
Static in the layers. Interference where there should be none.
A handprint left by an attacker wearing gloves too perfect—someone who understood how to minimize their digital footprint but hadn’t counted on David’s abilities.
Because, of course, they shouldn’t exist.
Someone who understood the network, who knew its vulnerabilities. Someone who’d had time to study them, to map them, to exploit them with surgical precision.
“Someone knew the system’s vulnerabilities. From the inside.”
The conviction hit him like ice water. His eyes snapped open, his hands jerking back from the tablet in shock. His heart hammered, each beat echoing in his ears.
Oh, he realized employees were facilitating the sabotage: they’d found some had been paid off to hand out a password or insert a USB drive. But this was different.
A tech insider. Not some external hacker or corporate rival. Someone who walked these halls. A staff member who smiled at guests and collected a paycheck and betrayed them every single day. A team member from his own staff, someone he worked with every fucking day.
His lips parted. Confirmation bloomed cold in his gut, spreading outward until his fingers went numb.
This changed everything.
When he leaned back, the screen held a frozen frame of staff terminal access timestamps. David didn’t move for several seconds. He couldn’t. His mind was racing too fast, connections forming and reforming, implications cascading through his thoughts like dominoes.
How long had this been going on? How deep did it go? Was it one person, or were there others? And what did they want—money? Revenge? To destroy everything Nick had built?
Everything they’d built, David corrected himself. This wasn’t only Nick’s dream. It was his too. And Zach’s. It was every employee who depended on Ivory Tower for their livelihood, every guest who trusted them with their vacation, their celebration, their escape.
And someone was trying to tear it all down.
He should talk to someone. Nick, maybe. Or Zach.
But the truth was, listening to himself unravel the implications out loud—knowing someone among them was undermining what they’d built—might break something he wasn’t ready to face.
Speaking it would make it real in a way that data on a screen wasn’t.
It would require action, confrontation, possibly destroying someone’s life.
What if he was wrong? What if there were an explanation he wasn’t seeing?
He wasn’t wrong. He knew he wasn’t wrong. The data didn’t lie.
Worse, if he opened up about Lena’s sudden distance, Nick would give him that damn look.
The one that said emotional capacity was the cost of being human, not an optional upgrade.
The one that suggested David’s preference for logic over feeling was somehow a character flaw rather than a survival mechanism.
Nick meant well. He always did. But his big brother’s easy emotional fluency felt like a foreign language David had never quite learned to speak. Nick read people the way David read code—instinctively, effortlessly. He’d take one look at David’s face and know what was happening.
And David wasn’t ready for that conversation. Not when he didn’t understand it himself.
So instead, he refocused, calling up the coding layers again and moving further into the system, letting the cyber world swallow him—where the variables didn’t lie, and affection couldn’t be pulled out from under him like a barstool on a slick floor.
His glasses slipped down his nose, and he pushed them back up with one finger, his eyes already burning from screen glare. He didn’t care. The physical discomfort was easier to manage than the emotional one.
The code scrolled past his vision, beautiful in its complexity. He traced the intrusion backwards, following the digital breadcrumbs left behind. Each command revealed another layer, another decision point, another moment where the saboteur had made a choice.
And with each revelation, David steadied. This was familiar territory. This was solvable.
He’d crack the sabotage on his own. Prove it beyond any doubt before he brought it to Nick and Zach. Present them with a complete picture, not suspicions and half-formed theories.
And if Lena pulled away, he wouldn’t push. He’d wait. And watch.
The thought hurt more than he wanted to admit, but he shoved the ache down, burying it beneath layers of logic and rationalization.
He’d probably moved too fast. Maybe she needed space.
Maybe he was misreading everything between them.
Maybe the connection he felt was one-sided, another variable he’d miscalculated.
He’d survived worse disappointments. He’d survive this too.
Because in tech—and in love—timing was everything.
David’s fingers resumed their dance across the screen, his mind already three steps ahead, mapping out the next phase of his investigation. The empty office pressed in around him, but he barely noticed. He had work to do.
And work, at least, had never let him down.