Chapter 3 #2
She didn’t know his name. His age. Where he lived. What he looked like. She knew his mind, and for Daphne, that had always been enough. More than enough. It was everything.
She stared at the cursor blinking in the reply field.
Her fingers hovered. The rational part of her brain—the part that had built her career, that protected Wilde Security’s entire digital infrastructure, that understood better than almost anyone alive how dangerous it was to share personal information with an unverified contact—screamed at her to type something neutral. Something safe.
She typed the truth instead.
Lovelace: My cousin was abducted last night. I’ve been trying to find him for eighteen hours. I’m terrified.
She hit send before she could delete it. Watched the message disappear into the encrypted void and felt her stomach drop, the way it always did when she let someone past a wall she’d spent years building.
Seconds passed. Five. Ten.
The reply came.
Titan: I’m sorry. That’s a nightmare. Are you safe?
Not “what happened?” or “who took him?” or any of the dozen prying questions a normal person would ask. Just: Are you safe?
Lovelace: I’m safe. Just useless. I can’t find a single trace of him.
Titan: You’re not useless. You’re the smartest person in any room. You can find him.
She read the words twice. Three times. They settled into the place where the panic lived, and she instantly felt steadier.
Titan: I’m here if you need to talk. Or if you need a distraction. Or if you just need to know someone is on your side, Love. I’m not going anywhere.
Her eyes burned. She blinked hard to push back the tears. She must really be exhausted if she was crying over this.
Lovelace: Thank you. That helps more than you know.
Titan: Good. Now go find him. I’ll be here when you come back.
She stared at that last line for a long time. It was the kind of thing anyone might say. Except no one had ever said it to her and made her believe it the way she believed him.
“Who is that?”
She flinched. She’d forgotten Celeste was still perched on the desk. “Nobody.”
“Nobody has you making that face? That’s not a nobody face. That’s a somebody face. That’s a specific somebody face. Is it him? Mystery man? Titan?”
“It’s a private conversation.”
Celeste set down her coffee and narrowed her eyes. “Daph. Who is he?”
She pulled the laptop closer, angling the screen away. A pointless gesture since Celeste had already read enough.
“It’s complicated,” she said.
“Complicated how? Complicated like he’s married? Complicated like he’s in prison? Complicated like he’s an AI chatbot you’ve accidentally fallen for?”
“Complicated like I don’t know his real name.”
Celeste went still. Actually still. A rare event. “You. Don’t. Know. His name.”
She winced. When Celeste said it like that, it sounded bad. And, okay, yes, it was bad. She’d tried to find Titan once, months ago, but his operational security suggested formal training, not hobbyist paranoia. She’d stopped looking after that. Some doors you don’t force open.
“Oh my God, Daph. How long has this been going on?”
“Almost a year.”
“A year?” Celeste slid off the desk. “Daphne Jewel Wilde. You have been carrying on a secret relationship with a man whose name you don’t know for almost a year, and all you told me was that there was ‘someone interesting’ online?”
“It’s not a relationship. It’s—” She searched for the word and came up empty.
What was it? Friendship felt insufficient. Romance felt presumptuous. Connection was too vague.
“He understands me,” she said finally. “In a way that people who’ve known me my entire life don’t. He thinks the way I think. He sees the things I see. And he’s never once made me feel like I’m—”
She stopped.
“Too much?” Celeste finished softly.
Daphne didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.
Her twin already knew. All their lives, they were both considered “too much” in their own ways.
Celeste had always been “too loud,” “too wild,” “too reckless”—the girl who dyed her hair neon colors and built experimental tech prototypes in the garage and once hacked into the school PA system to play the entire Hamilton soundtrack during finals week.
And Daphne had been “too quiet,” “too intense,” “too cerebral.” The girl who preferred server rooms to slumber parties, who spoke in code before she spoke in complete sentences, who could dismantle a firewall but couldn’t make small talk at a family dinner without wanting to crawl out of her own skin.
Too much. Never the right kind of enough.
Celeste was quiet for a beat. Then she exhaled through her nose and picked her coffee back up.
“Okay. So either this is incredibly romantic or incredibly dangerous. Possibly both.”
“It’s neither. It’s just—”
“A connection with a stranger whose identity you can’t verify, who somehow found the most paranoid cybersecurity analyst in the private sector and got past her defenses.” Celeste raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t set off any alarms for you?”
It did. Of course it did. Daphne wasn’t naive.
She knew the risks, had cataloged them exhaustively in the analytical part of her brain that ran constant threat assessments.
But the thing about Titan was that he’d never pushed.
Never asked for personal details. Never tried to extract information about her work or her family.
“Just be careful,” Celeste said. She leaned down and pressed her forehead against Daphne’s—their gesture, the one that had existed since before they had words for things. “I can’t lose you, too. Not right now.”
Daphne closed her eyes and breathed. “I’m always careful.”
“Liar.” Celeste pulled back and smiled, though it was fragile at the edges. “Find Dom. And tell mystery man I want a full background check before any in-person meetings.”
Then she was gone, the door swinging shut behind her, and Daphne was alone again with six monitors full of nothing.
She gave herself thirty seconds to feel whatever she needed to feel, and then got back to work.