I let him.
We’re all watching Genny.
She sits cross-legged at the dining table, half in a tangle of wires, face illuminated by the glow of three screens. Hoodie sleeves pushed up, hair in a messy bun, glasses slipping down her nose. She looks like a hacker in a thriller movie—if the hacker were nineteen years old and fueled entirely by spite and ramen.
She takes the USB drive—the one she smuggled out of Alistair’s office like a live grenade—and plugs it in.
The click is small.
But the silence afterward?
It’s huge.
“Okay,” Genny says quietly, fingers flying. “I’ve encrypted the connection. They’ll see the email came from Maya’s official student press account, but they won’t be able to trace the upload location to this IP address. We’re invisible.”
She slides the drive across the table toward Maya.
It skitters on the wood before stopping right in front of her.
Maya freezes mid-step. She’s been pacing for ten straight minutes—a tiger in a too-small cage, notebook open, pen tapping against her thigh. She picks up the drive slowly, like it might burn her.
She looks at Genny.
Then at Declan.
Then at me.
“You're sure?” she asks, voice low. “This is it. Once I open this, once I send the inquiry… there’s no walking it back. For any of us.”
Declan doesn’t hesitate.
Not even a blink.
“We're sure,” he says. The sound vibrates through me—low, cold, definite. Not bravado. Not fury. Just truth. His truth.
Maya nods once. Sharp. She plugs in the drive.
The room leans forward—every person, every breath, every pulse.
We watch her read. And we watch her transform. The first page makes her eyes widen. The second makes her jaw clench. The third… she goes still.
Completely. Utterly. Still.
Then she smiles.
Not a sweet smile. Not even a revenge smile.
A predator’s smile.
“Oh, he's not just a bastard,” she breathes, fingers already flying over her keyboard. “He's sloppy.”
“Most wealthy men are,” Genny mutters.
But Maya isn’t listening. She’s already working, already building. She writes like she fights—sharp, cutting, precise. She braids the Poison Pill clause into the emails, into the merger documents, into the timeline she already mapped out in her notebook.
She doesn’t write the story. She constructs it. Piece by piece. Ruthless. Elegant. Brutal.
She’s not reporting. She’s executing.
