She popped it in her mouth and closed her eyes as the flavor exploded across her tongue—dark chocolate with a hint of chili, complex and surprising and perfect.
“Worst timing ever, but damn… still good,” she whispered to the empty beach.
The waves whispered back their agreement, and overhead, the drones hummed on, waiting patiently for someone to tell them it was time to go home.
Chapter 29
Pressure Cooker
The digital trail was cold.
But David’s skin was still warm.
A chemical whiplash of anxiety and regret fueled his every step as he stomped over the shell path toward the generator building. His tablet flickered an amber hue now, guiding him with directional markers through the dark like futuristic breadcrumbs—except this wasn’t the stuff of fantasy. Not tonight. Somewhere, someone was trying to turn their paradise into a pressure cooker.
For five minutes—five undeniably stupid and selfish minutes—he’d forgotten that.
The night air pressed against his face, thick with salt and the cloying sweetness of night-blooming jasmine. Ordinarily, David found the scent pleasant, maybe even romantic. Tonight it suffocated, like the island itself was accusing him of negligence.
The shells under his feet ground together with each step, a soundtrack of self-recrimination that matched the rhythm of his accelerated heartbeat.
He flicked the screen into diagnostic mode without looking down, letting the interface open under his fingertips—a livingnervous system. The manipulation was second nature, like breathing. Unlike breathing, it didn’t make his chest hurt.
The familiar sensation of code flowing through his consciousness should have calmed him. Usually, touching the network was like coming home—a place where everything made sense, where cause and effect followed predictable patterns, where he was never out of his depth. Tonight, though, the connection felt contaminated, violated. Someone else had been here. Someone who shouldn’t have access to his systems, his resort, his?—
His family.
That’s what Nick and Zach were. What this island represented. The only proper home any of them had ever known. And he’d been down on the beach, staring at stars and a woman’s lips while someone, some saboteur, waltzed through their defenses like they owned the place.
The firewall breach had been less than thirty seconds, but whoever it was, they were getting smarter. No brute force attempt this time. No sloppy backdoor code shoved through the temporary maintenance link. This was cleaner. Craftier. More intimate. A precision that said the saboteur now understood how Ivory Sand’s systems spoke. Which meant David had to answer louder.
He dropped to one knee in the dewy grass at the generator bunker, feeling the moisture soak through his khakis. The grass was cool against his knee, almost cold despite the tropical warmth still radiating from the day-heated earth beneath. He laid his palm against the junction box panel, and the metal was warm, humming with electricity and data.
The network connection bloomed into his senses like a direct feed. He didn’t only hear the whine of data—the code pathways lit up like synapses under stress. Information flooded through him in cascading layers: power distribution percentages, voltagefluctuations, system diagnostics running their endless loops. Normally this was his happy place, his zone, where the world condensed into pure logic and solutions.
Tonight, it felt like diving into polluted water, the contamination rampant.
And there, like an echo stuck between heartbeats—it pulsed. A fingerprint. Except… David’s mind spun, chasing the thread of familiarity that made his stomach drop.
No, not a literal fingerprint. But a pattern. A key signature spliced into his own previous troubleshooting routine—someone had mimicked his coding rhythm. Down to the timing lag he used when shifting sensor arrays. Down to the specific sequence he employed when running diagnostics on the environmental controls.
They’d studied him. Studied his work. Learned the digital equivalent of his handwriting and forged it back at him.
Fuck. They weren’t just hacking the system. They were watching him.
The realization sent ice water through his veins. How long had they been observing? How many times had he interfaced with the network, thinking he was alone in cyberspace, while someone lurked in the shadows of his own code?
“I hope you’re listening now,” he muttered, eyes narrowed at the junction box as if he saw through the metal to the ones and zeros beyond. “Because I’m done playing ping-pong with ghosts.”
But as he said it, as he tried to summon the focused anger that sharpened his concentration, a glitch of emotional static wouldn’t stop following him.
Lena.
David leaned his head back against the panel and blew out a breath, his eyes skyward, where the stars were still winking, smug and untouchable. Out here, away from the resort’sambient light, the Milky Way stretched across the heavens like spilled sugar. Beautiful. Indifferent. Eternal.
He’d wanted to share that with her: to see her unusual turquoise eyes reflect that starlight, to make her smile with his nerdy astronomical facts. Instead, he’d left her standing on the beach, most likely thinking he was either a workaholic or an asshole. Possibly both.
He shook his head and tried to reset his focus. Bring it all back to variables and logic. Security protocols. Network architecture. The things he understood, the things that made sense. But the memory of her voice—brittle and brave when she spoke about her mother, her past—and the weight of that unkissed moment sparked a phantom heat behind his ribs.
