Chapter 23
twenty-three
She pushed her glasses up into her hair and pressed the heels of her hands against her closed eyes until colored lights bloomed in the darkness.
Seventy-two hours without proper sleep was catching up with her.
The adrenaline that had carried her through the hack was draining away, leaving her hollow and jittery, running on coffee and stale energy bars.
On the main screen, the extraction team’s plane moved across the Atlantic, a small blinking dot making its way home.
Dom’s vitals had stabilized—Tessa had managed to get the bleeding under control—but Sabin’s neural readings continued to show abnormal patterns even through sedation.
Whatever Praetorian had done to him, it wasn’t going to be fixed with a few stitches and some rest.
A soft chime pulled her attention to her secondary screen, where a message window had appeared in the corner.
Titan: You finally found your cousin.
She stared at the words, her exhaustion evaporating in an instant. She sat up straight, fingers hovering over the keyboard.
How did he know?
The extraction had happened less than six hours ago. The op was completely off-book, not even logged in WSW’s own internal systems. There was no way anyone outside the immediate family could know they’d recovered Sabin.
She took a deep breath and typed back.
Lovelace: How do you know about that?
The reply came immediately, as if he’d been waiting.
Titan: I know many things, Love. The question is, what will you do now that you have him back?
Her heart hammered against her ribs. This wasn’t the first time Titan had revealed knowledge he shouldn’t have.
Last month, he’d known about a security vulnerability in WSW’s systems before she’d discovered it herself.
Three weeks before that, he’d mentioned her father’s trip to Singapore before it had been announced to the company.
At first, she’d tried to track him, to figure out his identity. She’d run traces and backtracked signals, deployed spiders and tracking cookies. She’d come up empty every time. Titan was a ghost in the system—there when he wanted to be, gone the moment she tried to pin him down.
Lovelace: You know I can’t discuss that.
Titan: Of course. Professional discretion. Admirable.
A pause, then:
Titan: He won’t be the same, you know. What they did to him can’t be undone so easily.
Her blood ran cold. She glanced at the biomonitor readouts from the plane—Sabin’s neural patterns still spiking erratically despite the sedation.
Lovelace: You know what they did?
Another pause, longer this time. Daphne held her breath, waiting.
Titan: Let’s just say I’m familiar with their methods.
She stared at the words, mind racing. Who was this person? How deep did his knowledge of Praetorian go? And why was he sharing these cryptic warnings with her, of all people?
Before she could talk herself out of it, she typed:
Lovelace: Let’s meet IRL.
The cursor blinked steadily as she waited for his response. One minute stretched into two, then three. She’d surprised him. Good. It wasn’t easy to catch Titan off guard.
Finally:
Titan: Are you sure about that?
She wasn’t. Not remotely. But sometimes the only way forward was to take a leap.
Lovelace: Yes.
Titan: I can’t meet immediately. Two weeks from now.
Lovelace: Why the delay?
Titan: Unavoidable commitments. But I want to meet you, Daphne. More than you know.
Something in his phrasing made her heart rate pick up. She’d never heard his voice, never seen his face, yet she felt she knew him better than most people in her daily life. Was that naive? Probably. But her instincts about people were rarely wrong.
Titan: There’s a cafe in Paris. Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Two weeks from today. Noon.
Paris. An ocean away from her safe, controlled environment. When was the last time she’d left New York? Three months ago for that conference in Seattle, and she’d hated every minute away from her systems.
Lovelace: How will I know you?
Titan: You’ll know.
Lovelace: You’re confident.
Titan: I am. But even if you don’t, I’ll find you. Wear something blue.
She hesitated, fingers hovering over the keyboard. This was insane. Meeting a stranger from the internet in a foreign city, when she didn’t even know his real name? Everything about it screamed danger.
But Titan wasn’t just any stranger. He was the only person who challenged her intellectually, who seemed to understand the way her mind worked, who never made her feel weird or awkward for being exactly who she was.
Daphne: Okay. Paris. Two weeks. Noon.
Titan: I’m looking forward to it.
The message window closed as abruptly as it had appeared, leaving Daphne staring at her reflection in the darkened screen. What had she just done?
The lab felt suddenly too quiet, too empty.
She pulled her glasses back down onto her nose and turned to the main monitor, where the plane continued its steady progress across the Atlantic.
Her family was coming home, bringing Sabin with them.
They’d need her help to understand what had been done to him, to find a way to undo Praetorian’s conditioning.
And in two weeks, she would sit at a cafe table in Paris, wearing something blue, waiting for a man she knew everything and nothing about.
She wasn’t sure which prospect terrified her more.