“Well.” His thumbs traced gentle circles on her cheekbones. “Maybe since about five years and three months ago. But who’s counting?”
She laughed, the sound bubbling up from somewhere deep inside her chest, and Reed’s answering smile was so full of warmth and love that tears threatened again.
“I love you,” she said, because she could. Because she was finally free to say it without fear, without hiding, without the weight of a thousand secrets between them.
“I love you too.” Reed pressed a kiss to her forehead, then her nose, then her lips again—a brief, sweet touch that promised more to come. “And when this is over, when Webb is finished and WATCHDOG is destroyed for good, I’m going to spend every day showing you exactly how much.”
Elena was about to respond, to tell him she’d hold him to that promise, when the cabin door swung open behind them.
“Hey.” Walker’s voice cut through their private moment. “Sorry to interrupt, but you guys need to see this.”
The grim tone of his voice snapped Elena back to reality. She pulled away from Reed, though she kept hold of his hand as they turned to face Walker.
“What is it?” Reed asked.
Walker’s expression was tight. “Just... come look.”
They followed him inside, where James was now sitting up on the couch with his shoulder freshly bandaged, and Terrel was hunched over a laptop at the kitchen table. All three brothers wore matching expressions of concern that made Elena’s stomach clench with dread.
“What’s going on?” she asked, moving toward the computer.
Terrel looked up at her, his face pale in the laptop’s glow. “I’ve been monitoring Webb’s systems remotely, tracking the virus’s progress through their network.”
“And?”
“And...” Terrel turned the laptop so she could see the screen. “It’s not working.”
Elena stared at the display, her mind refusing to process what she was seeing. Lines of code scrolled across the screen—diagnostic readouts from WATCHDOG’s core systems—and every single metric showed green. Stable. Functional.
Completely unaffected by the virus she’d spent three years developing.
“That’s impossible,” she breathed. “The upload completed. I watched it finish. The virus should have started corrupting their access protocols within hours.”
“It did start,” Terrel said grimly. “I tracked its initial propagation through their network. It was working exactly as designed—for about forty-five minutes. Then someone triggered a countermeasure.”
“A countermeasure?”
Terrel pointed to a section of code on the screen. “This. It’s a kill switch, built into WATCHDOG’s core architecture. The moment your virus reached a critical system, the kill switch activated and neutralized it.”
Elena felt the blood drain from her face. A kill switch. Of course. Webb had always been paranoid, always building in safeguards and redundancies. She should have anticipated this. Should have known he’d have a defense against exactly the kind of attack she’d designed.
“The virus was disabled,” she said quietly, the words tasting like ash in her mouth. “WATCHDOG is intact.”
“Fully operational,” Terrel confirmed. “As far as I can tell, the auction is still on. Webb might have gotten spooked by tonight’s events, but he hasn’t canceled it.”
Reed’s hand tightened around hers. “What does this mean?”
Elena turned to face him, to face all of them—these four men who had risked everything to help her, who had bled for a mission that had just failed catastrophically.
“It means we’re back to square one,” she said. “WATCHDOG is still active, Webb is still planning to sell access to the highest bidder, and now he knows exactly who’s coming after him.”
James let out a low whistle. “So what do we do?”
Elena looked at the laptop screen, at the mocking green indicators that represented everything she’d failed to destroy. Then she looked at Reed, at his brothers, at the determined faces of men who didn’t know how to quit.
“We make a new plan,” she said firmly. “We find another way to take down Webb and WATCHDOG. And this time, we don’t stop until it’s finished.”
Walker nodded slowly. “Any ideas?”
