Really fucking impressive.
“Parker, you need to rest,” Charles says. “We’ll come up with a plan. You don’t need to?—”
Cal tries to slide the laptop away from me, and I slap his hand away without breaking my eyes away.
“Parker,” Jace says, his voice gentle. “Talk to us.”
“I’m working,” I say, my fingers already flying across the keyboard. Pulling up command lines, accessing system architecture, tracing Aria’s digital fingerprints.
“You need to—” Charles starts.
“If you’d actually done what you said you were going to do—what you’ve been bragging about for months—and actually kept us all safe and got her out of here, we wouldn’t be dealing with this,” I say, still focused on the screen. “And maybe Silas would never have been forced into Aria’s hands in the first place. But instead, you gave her time, access, and a reason to escalate. Everything you did—and didn’t do—helped push her here. So stop telling me whatIneed to do.”
“Parker—” Charles tries again.
“Shut up,” I say. “I’m fixing this.”
My fingers move faster now. Pulling apart Aria’s code, understanding her logic, seeing where she was brilliant and where she got sloppy.
Because she did get sloppy. Just a little. I’ll let her know later.
She was so focused on getting access that she didn’t fully secure her own backdoors. Didn’t anticipate someone coming behind her with the knowledge to dismantle what she built.
Oh, how vanity and pride blind the gifted. It’s so cliche it’s almost sad, but I start building. New security protocols. New encryption layers. Closing the doors Aria opened and locking them so tight that even God himself would need a battering ram to get through.
“What are you doing?” Cal asks, leaning over my shoulder to see the screen.
“Fixing your mistake,” I say.
“Angel, that’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?” I pull up another command line. “You’re supposed to be the tech genius. The one who sees everything. And you missed her completely. Missed that Dominic’s trophy wife was actually capable of sophisticated cyber warfare.”
“We all missed her,” Charles says.
“Yeah, well, congratulations. Your collective misogyny cost us Silas.” My voice cracks on his name, but I push through it. Keep typing. Keep building.
The code flows out of me. Just because I mastered in one subject doesn’t mean I have only one path in business. It’s never too late to learn new things because as you live on and the world advances, not learning new skills could get you killed.
I build walls. Digital fortresses. Encryption so complex it would take quantum computing years to crack.
And then I go deeper into Aria’s backdoors. Into her access points. And I don’t just close them, I turn them into traps.
Anyone trying to use the access Aria created will trigger alerts and will find themselves traced, tracked, and their systems compromised in return.
“Parker, what...” Cal’s voice trails off as he watches the screen. “How are you doing that?”
“I’m smarter than you thought,” I say.
“I always knew you were smart. But this is...” He leans closer. “This is genius-level work.”
“Learned from the best,” I say, my fingers not stopping. “And then when you weren’t there, I taught myself.”
It takes me two hours. Two hours of pure focus, of channeling every ounce of grief and rage and desperation into code. Into building something unbreakable.
When I’m done, I sit back and look at the screen.
The Carter organization’s digital infrastructure is now more secure than it’s ever been. More secure than most government systems. Aria’s access is gone. Her kill switch is neutralized. Her backdoors are now traps that will catch anyone stupid enough to try using them.
