Wyatt (Enigma Legacy Daddies #2)
Prologue
The air in Bridgeport always felt like it was vibrating. It was too loud, too bright, and smelled of wet pavement and expensive exhaust. By the time Bitsy’s shift at the diner ended, her skin felt three sizes too small.
She wiped the last of the grease from her hands onto her apron and pushed through the heavy kitchen doors. The neon clock over the counter buzzed—a low, angry sound that made her teeth ache. Nine fifteen.
"See ya tomorrow, Bits," the cook grunted without looking up.
Bitsy didn't answer. She just kept her head down, her fingers twisting the hem of her stained uniform as she hurried out the back door and into the biting night air.
Her car was waiting under a flickering streetlight that hummed in a frantic, uneven rhythm.
The 2008 Honda Civic was a silver ghost, its paint peeling like a bad sunburn, and the passenger side door permanently dented from a hit-and-run she couldn't afford to fix.
The muffler rattled so hard she was constantly afraid it would drop onto the asphalt, but it was the only thing in this city that didn't belong to a landlord or a shelter.
It was the only place she could lock the world out.
The sensory overload of the dinner rush—the clatter of silverware and the shouting of orders—felt like a physical weight pressing against her chest. By the time Bitsy reached her car, her hands were shaking, as they always were at this time of night.
She drove in a blur, the polished streets of downtown giving way to dark, desolate roads until the industrial edge of town came into view.
The building stood as a skeleton of concrete and jagged glass, a decaying monolith slated for demolition that the rest of Bridgeport had long since forgotten.
To everyone else, it was an eyesore; to Bitsy, it was the only place where the signal was strong enough to drown out the world.
She pulled the Honda into the shadow of a rusted fence, the engine’s ticking cooling in the silence of the lot.
She retrieved a faded duffle bag—the only version of herself that felt real—and pulled out her laptop, a powerhouse she’d built herself from salvaged parts during a scholarship run that felt like a lifetime ago.
She tucked the laptop under her arm and stepped out into the grit, locking the doors with a metallic thunk that provided a small, necessary beat of relief.
She didn't hesitate, heading straight for the back entrance.
Slipping through a loose plywood panel, her boots crunched on layers of shattered glass.
She didn't use a light; she knew the path by heart.
The ascent was brutal—so many flights of stairs that her lungs were burning and her chest felt tight by the time she finally hit the forty-second floor.
But as soon as she pushed open the heavy steel door to the corner office, the noise of the city finally started to fade.
It was dark, cool, and smelled of old paper.
She didn't waste a second. Bitsy dropped her bag and stripped out of the scratchy, black pants and top, leaving the "waitress" version of herself on the floor. She pulled on an oversized cable-knit sweater—the one that smelled like the lavender detergent she’d splurged on at the laundromat—and stepped into her white socks with the delicate lace ruffles.
She felt the tension in her shoulders snap.
She crawled onto the pile of dusty blueprints in the corner—her "nest"—and opened the laptop. The screen flickered to life, the blue light reflecting in her wide eyes. She didn't need to search for a network. She just waited for the one she’d named The Ghost.
It was a black-fiber connection, encrypted with a level of sophistication that should have been impossible for a civilian to touch. It came from the penthouse three blocks over—the obsidian tower that loomed over the city like a silent king. Whoever lived there had built a fortress.
But Bitsy was a ghost, and ghosts could walk through walls.
She tapped a few keys, watching the lines of code scroll past as she bypassed the tertiary firewall with the ease of someone who saw the world in binary. Connected.
The speed was breathtaking. It was a clean, silent stream of pure data.
Bitsy felt the static in her brain smooth out as she opened a private tab, pulling up a high-def stream of a vintage cartoon about a princess in a crystal palace.
The colors were soft—all shimmering pinks and iridescent golds—and the music was a gentle, orchestral lilt that made the shadows of the room feel less like teeth and more like a velvet blanket.
She pulled her coloring book from the bag and a single, blunt fuchsia crayon.
Sprawled out on her stomach, her heels kicking up in the air, she let out a long, shaky breath.
The city was still out there—the hunger, the old Honda, the double shifts at the diner, and the memories of a childhood spent in and out of cold, crowded shelters—but in here, wrapped in stolen bandwidth and lavender-scented wool, she was safe.
Bitsy poked the tip of her tongue out in concentration as she started to shade the deep purple hem of the princess’s gown. As long as she had the quiet, she could survive anything.