“You deserved it,” I say.
She shrugs one shoulder. “Maybe. But I stayed. Got a decent job. Joined a Krav Maga gym so I wouldn’t feel like a scared kid all the time. Found some vigilantes to harass. Could’ve gone worse.”
You almost left.
The thought sits heavy.
I would’ve noticed her absence immediately, I realize. The apartment would’ve been quieter. Gage would’ve been more on edge. The air around us would have been less electric.
And she never said a word.
Guilt pricks. How much else have I missed while I was too busy playing lone wolf superhero in front of a monitor?
She flicks the notebook toward me. “Your turn.”
I hesitate.
This is the part I don’t like. The part where the shine comes off and people see the mess underneath. Lark’s been nursing a crush on the sanitized version of me for years—shadowy hacker, sharp banter, occasional saves.
She doesn’t need to know what the code looks like behind the front end.
But the whole point of this stupid game is to stop hiding.
“One patch note, huh?” I say.
“One,” she confirms. “No PR spin.”
I think about giving her something light—my first screen name, the fact that I hate bananas, something easy.
Instead, what comes out is:
“Knight v2.0 learned to code for money at fourteen because I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
Her expression changes.
I commit now, so I keep going.
“My mom took off when I was ten,” I say. “Dad was… around, technically. Mostly drunk, sometimes mean. Rent got harder. Bills piled. By thirteen I was couch-hopping between classmates’ houses more nights than I slept in my own bed. Your brother was the only reason I didn’t end up in a shelter. He snuck me leftovers, lent me his hoodie, made up excuses for why I was always there.”
I stare past her at the wall, seeing a different room entirely.
“I realized fast that a kid with a laptop and poor impulse control could make money,” I say. “Not legal money. Script kiddie stuff at first. Data scraping, brute-forcing accounts, running little fraud schemes for people who didn’t ask questions. I got good at it. Too good. Didn’t care who I hurt as long as I got paid.”
I drag my gaze back to her face.
She’s watching me like I’ve just rewritten her favorite story. Not with disgust. Not with fear.
Just… focus.
“You get one question,” I remind her.
“Who stopped you?” she asks, right away.
I huff out a breath.
Of course she goes straight for the soft spot.
“Gage,” I say. “Kind of. He found out something I was doing for a guy he knew. Confronted me. I told him to back off. We didn’t talk for a week.”
