Chapter 10 Bitsy #2
Bitsy’s cheeks flushed a bright, burning crimson.
She pulled her hands back into her sleeves, her shoulders rounding as she looked down at her lap.
"I... I wasn't trying to break anything," she whispered, her voice cracking slightly with a sudden spike of shame.
"I just... the server had a really clean frequency baseline.
It didn't stutter when the wind hit the grid. I just wanted to finish the movie."
"I know," he said, his tone softening just enough to soothe the frantic edge of her panic, though the absolute authority remained.
"If you had been trying to steal from us, we wouldn't be having this conversation in my office.
But the logic loops you used to mask your script...
they weren't standard syntax, Bitsy. You didn't learn that in a classroom. "
He leaned in a fraction closer, his large hand resting on the edge of her desk, providing a solid, grounding boundary. "Where did you learn to code like that?"
Bitsy swallowed hard, her chest heaving as she tried to find the words. She was still incredibly wary of him, terrified of giving away too much of the fragile, broken world she lived in. But his eyes were so steady, so completely unblinking, that she felt a strange compulsion to answer.
"I... I spent a lot of time alone," she murmured, her gaze dropping to her own lap.
"When I was little, my dad... he didn't really look after me.
He was angry. Loud. It got bad enough that the state stepped in, and I ended up in foster care.
I moved around a lot down by the docks. A couple of the homes had old, broken desktop computers people had thrown away.
One house had a basement full of outdated textbooks from an old community college course.
I just... I read them because there wasn't anything else to do, and I started taking the junk machines apart to fix them. "
She took a small, shaky breath, her fingers tightening inside her sleeves.
"The software part came later. When you're in places where you don't belong, you learn how to disappear.
I figured out how to do it online first. I started building little scripts to give myself a secure wall, somewhere no one could see what I was reading or watching, and no one could track where I was.
The machines followed the rules if you configured them right. People didn't."
He listened intently, his jaw tightening slightly as his analytical mind processed the brutal reality of her words.
An abusive, neglectful father, a childhood spent floating through the foster care system around the harbor, and a little girl adapting to a hostile environment by teaching herself how to build digital fortresses out of discarded tech.
It explained the spatial, defensive nature of her coding perfectly.
She hadn't just been learning a skill; she had been trying to keep herself safe from the people who were supposed to protect her.
He felt a heavy, protective instinct flare deep in his chest. "And after foster care?" he asked, his tone quiet but firm, testing the boundaries of her current life. "Who handles things for you now, Bitsy? Who is looking out for you?"
"Nobody," she whispered, her fingers twisting together beneath the oversized knit fabric of her sweater. "It's just me. I... I take care of myself.”
She kept her answer brief, completely omitting the reality of her current living situation.
She couldn't tell him how small her world really was, or how little she actually had.
If he knew how vulnerable she was, he might think she was too broken, too high-risk to keep around his clean, expensive world.
He studied her for a long, silent beat. He could see the defensive posture, the guarded shift in her eyes, and the way she held her breath, but he didn't press her for details.
Not yet. He knew exactly how a wild, feral creature behaved when cornered, and forcing her into a corner would only break the fragile trust they were building.
"Well, you aren't down at those docks anymore," he said, his voice dropping into a thick, low register that brooked absolutely no argument. "Your only responsibility is right here, under my direct supervision. I'm the one keeping track of you now."
He reached across the corner of her desk, his massive frame shifting slightly as his long fingers tapped a quick command sequence directly into her mechanical keyboard.
The sleek monitor on Bitsy’s desk pulsed to life, a completely blank, black terminal screen appearing with a flashing white cursor.
"I want to see what that beautiful mind of yours can do when you aren't freezing," he said, his voice carrying a steady, structured weight that felt like a physical shield.
"I've loaded a sandbox environment. It's a standard, simulated high-pressure encryption buffer—similar to the one you dismantled last night, but with a few active anomalies thrown in to disrupt the baseline.
I want you to clear the path and establish a secure perimeter.
No time limit. Just show me how you see the data. "
Bitsy looked at the flashing cursor, the familiar sight of a blank command line immediately acting like a soothing balm on her frayed nerves.
The anxiety that had been choking her since she walked through the gold doors began to recede, replaced by that sharp, intuitive focus that always took over when she faced a machine.
She slid her hands out of her sleeves, her small, pale fingers hovering over the mechanical keyboard. She took a deep breath, looked up at him for one brief, validating second, and then her fingers hit the keys.
The quiet click-clack of her typing filled the office, a steady, rhythmic melody that broke the heavy silence.
He didn't move away. From the edge of her vision, she could see him standing just behind her shoulder, his arms crossed tightly over his chest, his dark eyes fixed entirely on the screen.
He didn't interrupt, and he didn't offer advice; he simply stood there like a mountain, his presence heavy and unmoving as lines of code began to cascade down the monitor.
She didn't use standard commands. True to what she had done the night before, her coding was entirely spatial.
She restructured the sandbox from the inside out, treating the data fields like physical rooms, sealing off the anomalies by building complex, interlocking digital logic walls around them.
It was a flawless defense mechanism turned into software architecture, a reflection of the walls she kept around herself.
As she worked, her posture began to change.
The defensive, rounded hunch of her shoulders softened, and she sank deeper into the comfortable leather chair, completely immersed in her headspace.
She was safe inside the machine, and under the solid, quiet shadow of his watch, she wasn't trembling anymore.
He remained behind her for nearly an hour, a silent, imposing guardian whose focus never left her workspace.
Every time she executed a line of code, she could feel the steady line of his attention tracking it, his quiet gravity anchoring the space around her chair until the vastness of the corporate office felt small, safe, and entirely contained.
Bitsy hit one final, definitive key, and the terminal screen pulsed a solid, clean green. The sandbox was completely stabilized, the perimeter locked down so tightly that not even a simulated ghost script could slip through.
She let out a soft, shaky breath, her fingers retreating back into her purple sleeves as the reality of the room rushed back over her. She looked up at him, her wide brown eyes filled with a sudden, anxious vulnerability, waiting for his assessment.
He looked from the green screen down to her pale face. He reached out, his large hand pausing for a fraction of a second before he gently rested it against the top of her head, his long fingers smoothing down the wild, unruly cloud of her brown hair in a slow, deeply grounding stroke.
"Incredible," he said, his deep voice carrying a heavy, absolute sincerity that made her chest ache with a strange, sweet warmth. "You built a perfect safe room inside that buffer, Little Girl. Your logic is completely flawless."
Bitsy tucked her chin, a tiny, involuntary smile tugging at the corner of her mouth at the praise, her little headspace sinking into a comfortable, secure depth under the heavy weight of his hand.
"Now," he said, his hand sliding down to rest against the back of her chair, maintaining that unyielding boundary of protection.
He leaned in just enough to draw her eyes back up to his, his expression completely serious, anchoring her completely. He didn't explicitly introduce himself, and he didn't need to—the brushed-metal plaque on the door had already carved his identity into her mind.
"Let's talk about your new routine," Wyatt said, his voice dropping into that quiet, absolute register that commanded her entire attention. "Because around here, we have very specific rules, and you are going to learn to follow every single one of them."