Chapter 35
Electrical Storm
David stood in the server room, sweat slicking the back of his neck despite the cold, humming air. The usual rhythm of blinking LEDs offered no comfort—each flicker an accusation, each whir of the cooling fan whispering, you’re losing control.
He watched the display in soundless fury as lines of code jittered and spat red error flags faster than he could blink them away.
The entire network was bleeding—guest data, keycard access, the power grid—it was all falling apart, piece by piece, like someone peeled the skin away from the network to slice at its nerves.
He gritted his teeth until his jaw ached. “This shouldn’t be happening,” he said aloud, voice hoarse against the sterile silence of the room. “No one breached the firewall. No one got in.”
But something had. Some malicious code was dancing through his system like it knew it better than he did—bouncing through secure nodes, rewriting logs, erasing trails, waving a taunting middle finger as it left.
It was fast, unpredictable—pure chaos disguised as logic.
And it wasn’t messing with sensors anymore.
Another warning flashed as the HVAC power routing for all of Zone C went offline.
Guests were in those bungalows. Families.
David’s stomach flipped. His fingers tightened on the tablet’s smooth edge until his knuckles burned. This—this was personal. Someone was trying to gaslight the entire infrastructure, to make it look like incompetence… or worse.
He closed his eyes for a heartbeat, then opened them and spoke again to the empty room, “You want to play? Fine.”
He crouched on the floor, knees spread for balance.
A sharp tremble moved through his hands as he adjusted the tablet against his palm, connecting with its internal network through bare skin.
The usual static buzz that greeted him when he slipped into the machine scraped like a scream tonight—too loud, too violent, hurling fragmented data like debris in a storm.
This was going to hurt.
Weight was already building behind his eyes, drumming at his temples like a warning bell. If he stayed too long, fully immersed, he’d wipe himself out. Coma-level burnout. And there’d be no one to pull him back.
But he couldn’t stop. Not with multiple systems failing across the resort. He had to protect his brothers. Lena.
Taking a sharp breath, he let the physical world go. The electric hum flattened into a tone only he heard, and the room blurred. Code wrapped around him like a second skin—cold and alive, angry with purpose.
He plunged in, deeper than he’d gone in months. Probably years.
The network no longer resembled a street map—it was a war zone.
Lightning arcs of encrypted script tangled above him, snapping like thunderclouds. He moved through crawling data tunnels, shielding his psyche from malicious input clusters that clawed at his presence, tried to rewrite his consciousness as if he were a random line of corruptible code.
But he was David-fucking-Jones, and this was his system.
His pulse thudded in his ears. Muscles trembled in his legs.
Some distant part of his mind registered a nosebleed dripping onto the tile, but he banished the concern, tunneled toward the source.
He had to get there before the virus mutated again.
Before the saboteur turned the whole damn island dark.
Far ahead, in the lion’s den of the system, a flickering sigil pulsed in an unnatural blue—a fingerprint he didn’t recognize, dancing like a challenge.
David gritted his teeth. Found you, asshole. And he surged forward.
Lena burst into the server room, the heavy door slamming shut behind her with a metallic thud that echoed louder than her thoughts.
Her shoes slipped on the polished floor, damp from the island’s sticky tropical air bleeding into every crevice of the building.
Her breath came too quickly, too shallow, even for someone who’d sprinted across half the resort in the midday heat.
She scanned the room—towers of servers blinked and hummed like an army of indifferent eyes, walls lined with screens screeching lines of code she didn’t understand—until her eyes landed on the only thing that mattered.
David.
He kneeled by the racks, knees spread as though he were bracing against a hurricane.
She raced toward him, breath catching. “Half the guest doors aren’t unlocking. Phones are down. We have a wedding party threatening to leave—and that’s before we even tell them the air conditioning is down in Zone C. What can I do to help?”
No answer. Not even a twitch of recognition.
His tablet lay on the floor, fingertips just touching it, its light flickering incoherently, like it too was panicking.
But David… he wasn’t moving. His fingers twitched spastically now and then, and his eyes stared ahead, wide and glassy, like he was watching something behind reality. Blood dripped from his nose.
“David?” Her voice cracked.
She dropped to her knees beside him, her palms slapping the cold tile—then freezing as they slid in something wet.
Her gaze snapped to the thin trail of red beneath his nose. Her stomach clenched as ice slithered up her spine and squeezed.
She knew what this was. He was in the network. In deep. Alone. Without alerting anyone.
God, no.
Her brain scrambled, pinwheeling. What if he didn’t come back this time? What if no one pulled him out and he burned himself out? What if he ended up lying in a hospital bed, mind blank and gone, crazy hair and wild eyes like the psychics who’d gone too far?
“Dammit, David…” Her voice shook now, whisper-thin. “You aren’t supposed to do this without someone beside you.”
Still nothing. His lips trembled, lashes fluttering like he was dreaming—and not the good kind. Dreaming of corrupted code and system failures. Of being eaten alive from the inside out by haunted circuits.
She blinked through the hot sting in her eyes. This wasn’t fair. He didn’t always understand limits—not his, not anyone else’s—but he never meant to be reckless with hearts. Not when he’d started trusting her with his. Not when she’d started to believe someone would show up for her.
And now… his body was an empty shell.
Something jolted within her—a raw current of emotion she couldn’t label. Fear, frustration, affection, fury. All tangled together like a live wire with frayed ends. Somewhere behind the feelings, an instinct whispered. Do something.
“Hey,” she brushed her fingers along his cheek. It was damp, burning beneath the chill of sweat. “Hey, Genius. Whatcha doing in there? Burning yourself stupid?” His skin was cold and clammy—too cold, like his body was prioritizing saving his brain over his extremities.
She didn’t expect a response, so when he spoke—in a voice so hoarse it sounded ripped from his chest—she froze.
“Can’t… stop…” the words came jagged, each syllable like splinters. “Too far in—if I let go…”
His hands spasmed again. His head lolled forward before jerking back upright, eyes screwed shut like he was in agony. His entire body radiated strain, like a machine running on redline.
Lena’s heart thundered, rattling against shards of panic. He was slipping away by the second, and she had no damn idea how to save him.
So she did the only thing she could think of. She grabbed his slack hand, lacing her fingers with his.
His palm was scorching, and his skin buzzed with static, tripping her pulse the moment their fingers locked. The heat wasn’t just temperature—it was pressure. Energy. Vibration. Like his consciousness was a trapped signal trying to punch through interference.
Backlash hit.
A jolt snapped through her limbs, not painful but all-consuming—like the swirl of ocean surf yanking her off her feet.
Images flashed behind her eyes: streams of alien code, a wall of blue fire, faces flickering in and out of focus.
Anger. Pain. Confusion. A system in collapse—and in the center, David. Alone.
No.
Not alone. She wouldn’t let him go.
Something between them clicked into place—more than physical—like a tether snapping taut. Her hand tightened around his as his spine arched and he gasped aloud, breath broken and ugly.
His eyes shot open, wild and brilliant with light where there should be ordinary blue. And for the first time since she’d entered the room, he saw her.
“Lena…” he rasped.
“I’ve got you,” she choked, gripping him tighter. “So don’t you dare die on me. Please.”
A bolt of something primal—raw, electric heat—shot through David’s spine, seizing every nerve in his body like a supercharged defibrillator.
He gasped, choking on the air he gulped in.
His lungs expanded with a rush of cool, blessed oxygen, and for one terrifying second, his body didn’t feel like his own.
The screaming code in his mind—the chaotic whirlwind of misfiring signals and malicious scripts—sharpened. Focused. Crystallized.
He blinked.
He could see everything now. Not just the network, but the architecture of sabotage woven inside it.
A spiderweb of shadowed strings, false paths, and logical landmines…
and beneath it, a pulse. A cadence he recognized and now understood.
That foreign signature no longer danced outside his reach—it practically glowed, trembling under the focus of his amplified vision.
But he wasn’t alone in here.
Lena’s hand grasped his like a lifeline, her grip steady—fierce. The warmth of her skin bled into him like a living current, filling in all the dark places, the ones he’d never let anyone else touch. Not even Nick.
He felt her.
Not physically—but deeper. Like a second heartbeat syncing with his, grounding him while giving him more reach, more precision, more power than he’d ever known was possible.
His fingers clenched hers, anchoring him in that connection. It didn’t hurt anymore. He was bursting with energy.
He smiled and went to work.