Chapter 9 Wyatt
The heavy door of the SUV clicked shut, instantly killing the raw, wet howl of the Bridgeport wind. Wyatt sat there in the dark cabin, his hands resting on the steering wheel while the engine idled with a quiet rumble under the floorboards.
He’d walked her down all forty-two flights of dark concrete stairs, keeping his pace slow and steady so she wouldn't trip in the gloom.
He had kept his large hand hovering just an inch from the small of her back—not crowding her, but letting her know the boundary was there.
When they finally stepped out of the alley, he had fully intended to follow her straight to whatever car she was driving.
A girl that small had no business walking around the industrial sector alone after dark.
But she had dug her heels in the second her sneakers hit the sidewalk, clutching her canvas bag to her chest like a shield.
“I can walk from here,” she’d whispered, her voice tiny but absolute, her eyes darting nervously toward the dark shipping grid two blocks over.
“The big street has lights. I don't like people watching where I park.”
Wyatt had studied the pale, sharp lines of her face under the orange glow of the distant streetlamps.
He wanted to refuse. He wanted to demand her keys, her registration, or at least the make and model of her car.
But he could see the frantic, rapid flutter of her pulse against the skin of her throat.
She was skating right at the edge of her capacity, her little headspace holding on by a thread.
If he pushed her too hard before she had a secure floor beneath her feet, she would bolt, and he might never track her elegant code again.
So, he had compromised. He pulled his phone from his overcoat pocket, flipped it to a blank contact screen, and held it out.
“Put your number in,” he ordered, his voice low and heavy. “Now, little one.”
Her small fingers had crept out of her oversized sleeve, trembling as she typed in her ten-digit string and carefully tapped out her name right beneath it.
The second the phone was back in his hand, Wyatt looked down at the new contact—Bitsy—before sending a direct text, the alert buzzing instantly inside her bag.
Enigma Executive Suite. 300 Atlantic Avenue. 9:00 sharp. Do not be late, little girl.
She looked at the screen, gave him one tiny, submissive nod, and turned quickly toward the public transit grid near the docks. Wyatt had waited until the soft pink of her hood vanished entirely into the shadows before turning back to his own vehicle.
Now, sitting in the quiet of his SUV, he finally shifted into drive and rolled out of the demolition zone.
The drive across town to his penthouse was pure analysis.
Wyatt navigated the slick, rain-washed streets automatically, his mind completely occupied by the girl on the milk crate.
For weeks, he had been hunting a ghost—a sophisticated, lethal corporate entity backed by foreign capital.
He had prepared himself for a war of logic grids.
Instead, he had found a little girl.
There wasn't a single doubt in his mind about what she was.
Wyatt had lived this lifestyle long enough that he knew the exact psychological markers of a headspace requiring absolute authority to feel safe.
He had seen the way her posture straightened the moment his voice dropped into a corrective, disciplinary tone.
She hadn't run because her inside self recognized the rules.
She had cowered, she had cried, and she had apologized with a heartbreaking, frantic sincerity, but she hadn't fought the structure. She had craved it.
He killed the engine, grabbed his tablet from the passenger seat, and took the elevator straight to the top floor.
His penthouse was minimalist and quiet—all clean lines and dark polished concrete looking out over the harbor. Usually, the absolute silence was his sanctuary. Tonight, it just felt empty.
He set his keys down on the kitchen island, his mind still tracking the memory of her battered device—the deep scratches in the old plastic casing and the crude, hand-soldered copper voltage regulator held together by green electrical tape.
It was an absurdity. It was a miracle of raw, intuitive genius.
He had left the physical machine with her so she could take it home, but he had the digital signature burned into his brain.
He pulled out his phone, opening the group chat that connected him to the guys.
Wyatt: The 4th and Main anomaly has been isolated and dismantled. The asset has been secured. No foreign capital involvement. No corporate data bleed. I’m handling the transition internally. Full brief in the executive suite tomorrow morning.
He tossed the phone onto the counter, not waiting for the inevitable string of questions from Zane or the acknowledgement from Silas.
He walked into his master bathroom, stripping off his heavy layers and stepping into a hot, high-pressure shower to wash the scent of damp concrete and dead winter air from his skin.
But as the water beat against his shoulders, his mind kept returning to the image of her small, red fingers.
She was working midnights at The Brig. The thought made a cold, protective anger settle deep into his gut.
He knew that dockside dive; it was an unmonitored cesspool of transient labor and aggressive alcoholics.
A creature that fragile, operating in a headspace that left her entirely unprotected, had been carrying trays and dealing with the scum of Bridgeport until twelve o'clock at night.
The sheer lack of protection made his jaw lock; she had been entirely exposed, with no one standing between her and a world that would chew her up without a second thought.
Once he dried off, he pulled on a pair of dark sweatpants and went back to the kitchen.
He spent the next three hours sitting at his terminal, completely dismantling the patchwork routing scripts he had pulled from her device before killing the feed.
The deeper he dug into her logic loops, the more his chest tightened with a heavy, protective demand.
She didn't have any formal syntax. Her coding was entirely spatial—she built defensive walls the way an architect built a fortress, sealing herself inside the data streams where nothing could hurt her.
He wanted to Daddy her. The realization wasn't a shock; it was just a fact.
He wanted to pull her straight into his circle, strip those wet, cheap sneakers off her feet, and establish a rigid, non-negotiable routine that kept her hands warm and her mind protected.
But he couldn't rush it. She was a guarded, fragile little thing, clearly surviving on the absolute margins of the city, and he still knew nothing about where she went when she left that diner or who she had waiting for her at home.
If he pulled the tether too tight before she understood that his authority was a shield rather than a cage, she would snap the line.
He finally shut down his terminal at two in the morning and went to bed.
By seven-thirty, Wyatt was already walking through the secure glass partitions of the Enigma executive suite. The club downstairs was dark and dead, the weekend rush entirely silent, leaving the upper floor smelling faintly of citrus polish and clean carpet.
He didn't expect anyone to be up here at this hour. But the moment he walked into the main lounge area of the suite, he stopped.
Silas was sitting on the leather sofa, a cup of black coffee on the table in front of him as he flipped through a stack of municipal zoning ledgers.
Zane was leaning against the bar with his laptop open, already typing away, while Hudson was leaned back in one of the armchairs, staring thoughtfully at a set of schematics on his tablet.
Wyatt looked at the three of them, his expression flat. "Don't any of you have homes?"
"Zane’s been losing his mind since midnight because you didn't give us a name in the chat," Silas said, looking up from his ledgers with a faint, knowing tilt of his head.
"And honestly, once we saw the server leak completely drop off the grid last night, we knew you'd caught them.
Nobody was going to sit at home twiddling their thumbs waiting until Monday for the details. Who was on our network, Wyatt?"
Wyatt walked over to the bar, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the pot Zane had clearly made. "Her name is Bitsy. And she’s currently working as a waitress at The Brig down by the docks."
Zane paused, his fingers freezing over his keyboard as his head snapped up. "A waitress? From The Brig? Wyatt, that’s a dockside grease trap. Are you telling me some girl clearing plates has been bypassing our core architecture with an off-the-shelf laptop?"
"She didn't use an off-the-shelf setup," Wyatt said flatly, his dark eyes locking onto Zane with a warning intensity that cut off any further jokes.
"She built a manual frequency regulator out of salvaged scrap and copper wire, tapped a high-pressure line without triggering a single system alert, and rewrote three of my custom encryption buffers on the fly just to mask her streaming speeds. "
Hudson looked up from his tablet, his quiet, analytical eyes narrowing in interest. "What exactly was she siphoning our bandwidth for?"
"Movies," Wyatt said, the word falling heavily into the quiet room.
"Princess movies. She was sitting on a cracked plastic milk crate on the forty-second floor of the 4th and Main demolition zone, in a freezing concrete cavern with the wind howling through the open frame, coloring a picture while our network ran a baseline shield for her video player. "
Hudson looked up from his tablet, a look of sudden realization softening his quiet features. "Coloring? Princess movies? Wyatt... is she a little?"