April
THEY REACHED THE REINFORCED STEEL DOOR, and Jax was already there. Black hoodie. Rings on four fingers. A circuit-board tattoo disappearing under his collar.
"Love the intimidation cosplay," he said. "But you can't come in."
Arthur didn't move. "I'll stay."
Jax lifted his tablet. "Server room. Sensitive equipment. Also: you’re hot."
Arthur's stare went flat.
"It's not a come-on, it's a temperature fact. You breathe near rack four and the alarms call the police." He tapped the screen. "Door locks from the inside. She's safer in there than out there with—" He gestured vaguely at the hallway.
Arthur's jaw tightened and he gave April a look.
She nodded.
With a grunt that sounded like a tectonic plate shifting, Arthur stepped back to lean against the opposite wall, arms crossed.
Jax keyed in. They entered and the door hissed shut behind them, magnetic locks engaged with a loud, final clack.
The room was freezing, filled with the blue glow of blinking LEDs and the roar of cooling fans. It smelled like cold metal and electricity.
Jax was already moving. Fingers flying across a keyboard, eyes bouncing between three different monitors like he was conducting an orchestra made of data.
"First thing, we lock you down.” He pulled up a terminal. "End all sessions. Force re-auth. New password. New MFA."
April watched him work, windows populating and closing. Her eyes wandered across the room. Then caught on one of the other monitors. A dashboard. Heat map. Red clusters. Tabs across the top.
"What is that?" she asked.
Jax's fingers paused for half a second. "That's Chad. I've been tracking him for eight months."
April moved closer. The dashboard glowed angry red.
CHAD STERLING - COMPLIANCE TRACKING
Last Updated: 14 minutes ago
| PASSWORD HYGIENE | ? CRITICAL |
| POLICY VIOLATIONS | 17 ACTIVE |
| IMPACT RADIUS | GROWING |
| SECURITY TRAINING | OVERDUE (47 DAYS) |
| PHISHING TEST RESULTS | FAILED (3 OF 4) |
| VPN USAGE | NEVER |
| UNAUTHORIZED SOFTWARE | 6 DETECTED |
| DATA HANDLING VIOLATIONS | 12 FLAGGED |
April stared. “You’re tracking him?”
"I didn't mean to build this," Jax said, nodding at the dashboard. "It just... happened. Like mold. Or a #REF! error that takes over the whole spreadsheet. Chad kept tripping flags. Over and over. So I added tracking. Then logs. Then a heat map."
“I reported it to HR. Multiple times. They brushed it off. So I kept documenting. Because he’s a serious compliance risk."
A list of login attempts filled the screen.
APRIL-IPHONE (password reset attempted - source: CHAD-IPHONE)
APRIL-LAPTOP (login attempt failed - source: CHAD-IPHONE)
APRIL-WORK-ACCOUNT (password reset attempted - source: CHAD-IPHONE)
April stepped closer, leaning in until the screen filled her vision.
"That's..." She pointed at the source field. "That's my phone."
"Yeah. I tracked the attempts back to him. He's been trying to get into your stuff since this morning." Jax's eyes flicked to her hand and the ring catching the blue server light.
"Started with security flags, password resets, failed logins.
Standard monitoring." Jax pulled up more windows, incident reports, timestamps, location data.
"This guy clicks through security warnings without reading them.
Saves his password in Chrome. Emails himself restricted files so he can work from his personal laptop.
He joins airport WiFi and random hotspots.
He installed a browser extension last month that's definitely malware because it promised 'productivity hacks. '"
"Oh, and I locked his badge out of the snack room this morning. He's stuck eating that kale cleanse."
Despite everything, the corner of April's mouth lifted before falling again.
The dashboard blinked.
NEW INCIDENTS DETECTED
A new window opened. Calendar logs, deletion history.
Entries populated in real-time.
DELETED: "Happy hour w/ spreadsheet girls" - 2 hours before event
DELETED: "Lunch - Laura" - replaced with "Lunch - Chad"
DELETED: "Dentist 2pm" – new event added "Golf - Chad 2pm"
April's vision narrowed down to just those lines of text. The air left her lungs in a way that felt like falling. The list kept growing.
"He's been doing this for months," Jax said. "He's been in your calendar. Your shared drives. Your email filters. Mostly when you already had conflicts.”
The screen kept updating like a slot machine that only paid out in humiliation. The server fans roared around them. The blue lights blinked.
She’d spent three years hearing “Why are you making this weird?” and “April, you said you’d do this.” Three years of backing down because his version sounded steadier than hers.
And here was eight months of documentation that all of it was a lie. Someone else had identified it. Built the receipts. Presented it to her as a tracker of red flags.
Three years of thinking maybe I was remembering wrong while my brain quietly archived everything that felt off.
She tried to make it smaller. Maybe it was accidental. Maybe I’m—
No.
She stared at the deletion logs. At years of calendar adjustments she'd thought were her own mistakes.
"He trained me—" April said, and her voice ran out of air halfway through like it had tried to sprint up stairs it didn't know were there.
To trust his version. Like my brain was a Wikipedia page and he had admin access.
“He used my niceness. He used the fact that I smooth things over. That I don't make waves. He took that from me. Over and over. Because I kept being the easy option.”
Her chest started heaving, her body was trying to cough up three years of ‘you're being dramatic.’ Her hand found the back of Jax’s chair, she used it to straighten. “Take him out of my calendar.”
Jax didn’t hesitate. His fingers moved fast, already building a plan in his head while his hands caught up. Chad’s access disappeared in a clean gray flash.
"I can do more than lock him out of the snack room," Jax said.
"What?"
"I can stop his car. Middle of the freeway. Reroute his paycheck. Lock him out of his apartment and his phone so he can't call for help."
He was looking at the screen like he was reading off a menu.
"I can make sure he never works in this industry again," Jax continued. "I can make sure every background check flags him. I can—"
"Jax."
"—brick his devices. Corrupt his backups. Make his entire digital life—"
"Jax."
He stopped. Looked at her. His face was completely calm. His eyes were not.
"You're serious." She took a half-step back.
"Yes."
"You'd actually—"
"Yes."
The server fans filled the silence.
"That's not what I'm asking for."
"He hurt you. For years. He made you doubt yourself. That’s—" He stopped.
"I know."
"So let me—"
"No."
April pressed her hands flat against her thighs. "I'm angry. I'm so angry I can feel it in my teeth. But I'm not going to let it turn me into someone I don't recognize."
She looked at the red lines filling the dashboard.
"So what do you want?" Jax asked.
"I want—" April searched for the word. "I want direction. I want my anger to have a job that isn't be cruel back."
Jax leaned in, "Name it," he said. "Any version of pain you want him to feel—I'll make it happen."
“I want to ruin his Tuesday."
Jax blinked. "His... Tuesday."
"Yes. Tuesday."
Jax stopped typing. Scrutinized her with his nose scrunched. "Tuesday?"
"Yes."
"You're serious."
"Yes."
"Okay. That's—" He pulled up a blank terminal. "Okay. Define Tuesday."
April's hands moved, trying to shape the concept.
"Like when it starts raining and you try to pop your umbrella but it's stuck, so you're standing on a crowded sidewalk aggressively wrestling with a cane that's supposed to be shelter. You look like an old man shaking your fist at the sky—trying to start a fight with the weather. But it just won’t open, it won’t.
And the rain wins. And it's laundry day, so you're wearing a neon pink bra under a white shirt, and suddenly you're a high-visibility cautionary tale. "
Jax blinked. "That definitely happened to you," he said slowly. "And I wish I had a video."
April felt heat crawl up her neck. "The point is—"
"I have no idea what the point is," Jax admitted. "But keep going."
April tried again. "Like crying in a closet so you aren't a Slack notification."
Jax’s eyes narrowed, like he was trying to translate her. "Okay," he said. "Keep going."
"Like... mustard. On a shirt. Before a big meeting. You can't fix it. Everyone sees it. You're embarrassed all day. But by tomorrow it's just laundry."
Jax blinked. "So... public humiliation via poor choices?"
"Kind of?" April felt her brain reaching for the next one. "Like when autocorrect changes your professional email to something inappropriate and you don't notice until after you hit send."
Jax's eyes lit up. "Oh, I can absolutely—"
"No wait, not that specific—" April paused. "Actually that one is okay."
The chair stopped rocking. His hands stilled on the keyboard.
"Visible damage. Zero actual harm. Time-limited embarrassment. Just… aggressively inconvenient," he said slowly.
"Yes."
"God, that's hot," he said under his breath. Then he pulled the terminal closer and started typing. "Okay. Tuesday. I can work with Tuesday."
April found herself standing behind his chair, close enough to see the screen over his shoulder.
TUESDAY—DEFINITION REQUIRED
Jax typed fast, muttering as he went. "Reversible. No financial damage. No job impact. No personal accounts."
He glanced back at her. "When you wake up tomorrow would feel like relief?"
April thought about it. "Knowing he looked like an idiot. But couldn't prove I did it."
"Publicly embarrassing, privately deniable," Jax typed. He added another line: Rollback: 00:00 (midnight).
Then he turned the screen toward her. "This work?"
April read the list. The parameters she’d just handed him. She nodded.
"Good." Jax cracked his knuckles. "Let's build it."