Only then did Lyric turn to the phone. “Lyric,” he introduced himself.
Jamie stepped to the foot of the bed where Caleb could see him as well. His voice was quiet, but there was a weight to it—a low, heavy warning cutting through the tension. His posture was still, but he tracked every flicker of Lyric’s expression, as if he was trying to read beneath the surface. No theatrics, no raised voice—just the kind of cold control that told everyone in the room that he was hanging on to his temper by a thread. The kind of quiet that meant he was past shock, past disbelief, and deep into the territory where damage control met fury.
“Nine times, Lyric. You’ve had a contract on you nine freaking times.”
Lyric blinked, his lips parting as if he wanted to argue, but nothing came out.
“All traced back to the LyricNight AI security system, which apparently wants to kill you,” Jamie continued.
They tossed words around—pings, nodes, sandboxes—and I tried to keep up, but it was just noise. All I really caught was that whatever they’dfound had Lyric’s name written all over it, talking in a language I could never hope to follow. Instead, I stared at Lyric and was ready to move if Jamie lost his shit over anything.
“I know,” Lyric murmured.
“LyricNight isn’t just mirroring system activity—it’s logging behavioral telemetry, feeding it to a weighted AI decision engine, and using it to auto-generate bounties.”
“Yeah.” Lyric sounded beaten down.
“Kessler doesn’t have to lift a finger. The system self-updated, self-deployed, and flagged you as a high-value target nine freaking times. How did you find a way in to trigger this response?”
Lyric exhaled, a slow, tired breath, his voice flat and distant as he spoke. “Fuck, Jamie. It’smycode.”
“The fuck?” Jamie snapped.
“When I worked with Kessler…”
I felt the words crack through the room. Rage surged up so fast it made me dizzy. He’d worked withKessler?
I clenched my fists, jaw tight, muscles tensing as if I was ready to throw someone through a wall. I thought Jamie was cool with Lyric—that he wasn’t one of the bad guys—but if he was working with Kessler, then had Lyric manipulated us? It made myskin crawl, and Lyric was staring down at the half cookie in his lap. Maybe he felt it—the heat of my fury blistering the air between us?
He glanced at me. “Let me explain. We were partnered on this project, and I thought it was just a matter of sharing theory and conducting a peer review, but he was stealing my work, albeit not initially. I didn’t know until the code started appearing outside of our test sandbox—until things I hadn’t published started turning up in his software builds. When I realized, when I logged it as an issue, hell, that was the first time someone tried to kill me. And maybe I should’ve seen it coming.”
“Kessler stole your code?” Jamie pushed.
Relief pricked me—he hadn’t been working with Kessler? And Jamie seemed calm and wasn’t accusing Lyric of anything. Which made Lyric what? A victim?
“He’d built in backdoors, so subtle that even my sandbox environments didn’t flag them. The program was sold to support investment and law enforcement, with its hooks in bounty hunting, location checks, influencing the outcomes of jury cases, exonerating the guilty, and supporting dark web movements. Shit, I had to try and stop it, because he was getting richer and more powerful,removing opponents to legislation, tampering with juries without being noticed, murder by contracts, and it wasmycode that was the foundation for it all.”
“Shit,” Caleb muttered.
Jamie didn’t take his eyes off Lyric. He just gestured silently for him to go on.
Lyric stared at Caleb, then back at Jamie, jaw clenched before he continued, quieter. “Every system-level event. Every script revision. Each time I tried to hack in and modify the prediction engine or optimize the neural net feedback loop, I tracked how the software was evolving, and—fuck—itwasevolving. Reinforcement layers in the model were beginning to rewrite themselves.”
I didn’t understand any of this, but Jamie looked murderous. Was that at Lyric? Or the system. Or Kessler?
Lyric swallowed hard and dropped his gaze for a beat before he talked in a flat tone as if it hurt to remember. “When Kessler dropped out of MIT to start KessTech, I used my own backdoors into the criminal justice side of the software he created. Started spotting payout patterns. Anonymous transactions. Contracts showing up on dark web forums—carefully phrased, encrypted hits, runningoff my code in his platform. They were random at first, as if Kessler was stress-testing the system…”
He went quiet for a second. Then: “But when I tried to take the contracts offline, the AI turned on me. It mirrored the triggers and launched a contract against me.”
Caleb’s voice was soft but clear. “Kessler wanted you dead?”
Lyric gave a short, bitter laugh. “Thesystemwants me dead. LyricNight wants me dead. Kessler, whatever was left of him in control, wants me captured. I was a proof of concept for the AI’s darker operational mode. It learned from me—and then, it came for me. This?” He gestured vaguely at the bandages. “Attempt number ten.”
“Fuck,” Jamie said, gripping his lighter and flicking it on, then off, a familiar habit when he was tense or thinking hard. “The system could’ve tracked you right to our doorstep.”
A beat of silence followed. The room shifted, subtle weight in every glance exchanged.
“You were the most random connection I could think of, and I covered my tracks. There’s nothing online, and I haven’t accessed the system. As far as the AI and Kessler are concerned, I died in theaccident that killed the assassin who’d taken the contract.”
