He smelled like Wrecker; oak and steel and that faint, raw bite of oranges. I wanted to say something, anything, but all I could do was shudder in his grip, my face mashed into the black cotton of his shirt. The door slammed behind us, a shotgun blast in the dark.
He set me down on the entryway tile, but didn’t let go. His hands—huge, calloused, trembling at the knuckles—clamped on my face his thumbs caressing my cheeks. The warmth was animal, overwhelming, and for a moment I thought I was going to puke from the rush of it.
He spoke first, his voice scraping the roof of his mouth. “I watched the whole fucking thing,” he said, and the rage in it made my eyes snap open. “It took everything I had not to drive straight there and kill him with my bare hands.”
I shook my head, but the movement wasn’t mine. My body was working on a different logic now, something older than words. I tried to form a sentence, but nothing made it out of my mouth except a gasp.
He guided me into the living room where Rocket came flying in from the hallway. He jumped into my lap as the big couch swallowed me whole. “Hey buddy.” I whispered. “I’m happy to see you, too.” I told him as I laid him beside me. Amazed at how just that silly little guy’s presence had started to calm me.
Wrecker knelt in front of me, hands on either side of my jaw, eyes boring into mine. “Are you hurt?” he demanded, but there was a softness buried under the grit. He reached for my neck, fingers pulling down the collar of the turtleneck. He traced the outline of where Silas’s meaty hand had squeezed. I flinched, and he snarled, a raw sound meant for killing.
“Answer me, Parker. Did he touch you anywhere else?” The question hung in the air like a blade.
I managed to shake my head again, this time with meaning. “No. Just—” I lifted my hand, showed him the band ofbruises already rising on my throat. “He wanted to make a point.” My voice was sandpaper, shredded to nothing.
His shoulders slumped, just a fraction, but enough to show the relief flooding through him. He let out a breath and closed his eyes, then pressed his forehead to my knees. We stayed like that, locked together. I leaned over, my forehead on the back of his head. I started to cry for real.
Not big, cinematic tears. Just the slow, stupid kind that ran down your face when you’re too tired to fight them. He pulled away and sat up. Gently, he wiped my tears with his thumbs, and I hated how good it felt to be touched by someone who wasn’t trying to break me.
I sat shivering while he went to the kitchen and came back with a cup of tea. He handed it to me, then wrapped a throw blanket over me. His eyes never left my face as he sat on the coffee table across from me.
I sipped, then choked, then set the cup down next to him. “I did what you told me to do,” I said, my voice a whisper. “I planted the first micro-cam at the entrance. Another in the main hallway, right by the office. I got two on the doorframe of his office—one high as I could, one low. I uploaded the Trojan to Silas’s laptop when I showed him the account logs. And I…” My throat closed up. I looked at my hands, the way they shook on the blanket. “I got extra lenses onto his computer monitor and his bookshelf. But I couldn’t get one on the credenza. I never had the opportunity to get close to it. I’m sorry.”
He made a noise, not quite a word. He sat next to me on the couch and gathered me in his arms. “It’s enough,” he said. “You did more than anyone could’ve.” His palm landed on the top of my head, heavy and safe. “You did perfect, little bird.”
The phrase made something in my chest twist. A tight knot of shame and pride and the bone-deep need to be good for someone, even if it meant bleeding for it.
He picked Rocket up and set him on the floor. “I’m gonna take some time with our girl, Rocket. Go lay in your bed, buddy.” The sweet pup went right to his bed and curled up. Amazing.
Then he shifted my legs, so they draped across his lap. He started rubbing my calves, slow and methodical, like he was working the poison out of my muscles with each sweep of his hand.
“Silas believed it?” he asked, voice low.
I nodded, eyes blurring. “He was convinced the money’s already on the move. He thinks I’m going to trigger the next worm tomorrow.”
Wrecker’s jaw ticked, the scar on his chin going white. “Good. Let him think he’s winning. We’ll burn his world down when he’s not looking.”
I tried to laugh, but it came out a cough. “He’s going to come for me. You know that, right?”
He shrugged, the motion like an avalanche under my thighs. “Let him come. He won’t make it past the porch.”
“Come on,” he said, and I followed him down the hall, feet bare and numb.
The den was lit up with his monitors, each cycling through security feeds, code overlays, and a snarl of encrypted messaging threads.
He booted up his main rig and motioned for me to sit. He didn’t look at me, just typed in a string of passwords that would have made a cryptologist cry, then unlocked a drawer and fished out a thumb drive. The drive was marked with a strip of blue tape, a single letter on it: P.
He plugged it in and dragged a file onto the main screen. “This is what Silas is seeing,” he said, and the blue light washed over his face, turning his eyes into steel.
The desktop was a perfect mimic of Iron Valor’s financial server—every log, every balance, every false note. But as he clicked through, I could see the seams in the forgery, like faint scars under new skin. The real magic was in the subroutines: everyattempt to “patch” the worm only embedded it deeper, every security alert routed to a dead drop. It was a digital ouroboros, feeding on itself.
“I’ve set it up to make it look like we’re trying countermeasures but failing,” he explained, voice low. “We push back just enough to make Silas think he’s got us. But the real payload…” He zoomed into the code, flicked a finger at the monitor. “Here. See it?”
I did. The infection wasn’t just a worm. It was a relay. Every byte Silas stole, every message he sent, bounced through our ghost servers first. It was genius, and it made my heart lurch with something ugly and envious.
We watched the feeds together, side by side. The audio stream from Greenbriar’s den was live—crackling, full of echo, but every word was crystal clear. I could hear Dagger’s laugh, Vex’s cursing, even the tick of Marrow’s nails on the conference table.
At the head of it all, Silas’s voice, slick with victory: “All the accounts will hit at midnight. They’ll never see it coming.”
