David shifted in his chair, the leather creaking beneath him. His office loomed too large, too empty. He’d never minded working alone before. Hell, he’d preferred it. But now the silence pressed against his ears like static, filling the void where Lena’s voice should be.
When had that happened? When had he started listening for her footsteps in the hallway, cataloging the specific cadence of her walk? When had the absence of her laugh become something he missed?
He rubbed his eyes behind his glasses, regretting it when his vision blurred. Exhaustion pulled at the edges of his consciousness, but sleep remained impossible. Not when his mind kept replaying their last conversation—if you could call it that. She’d barely looked at him, and when she had, her eyes had been distant, remote. She’d nodded at his questions, offered monosyllabic responses, and excused herself at the first chance.
Like she couldn’t stand to be near him.
The thought twisted something sharp behind his ribs. David laid his palm flat against the tablet’s surface, seeking the familiar comfort of the network’s rhythm. Data flooded his awareness—clean, logical, comprehensible. So much easier than human emotion.
He glanced at the camera feeds displayed across his secondary monitor, eyes flickering over timestamps and angle shifts. The feeds from the lobby showed the night shift going about their routines. A couple was checking in late. A maintenance worker was replacing a bulb. Ordinary moments, all catalogued and recorded.
At least the machines made sense. They didn’t ghost you emotionally and then act like nothing happened. They didn’t look at you with those turquoise eyes—god, her eyes—and turn away like something disappointed them.
David’s jaw clenched. He was being ridiculous. Melodramatic. Lena had every right to maintain professional boundaries. They’d crossed lines that shouldn’t be crossed, and maybe she was being smart to retreat before things got messy.
Except it already felt pretty damn messy from where he was sitting.
Focus. He needed to focus.
He pulled up the resort’s system logs again, diving deeper than before. FTP traces. Shift access logs. Personal email metadata—all legal hauls under corporate policy, given theongoing sabotage threats. The familiar territory of ones and zeros surrounded him like a blanket, muffling the ache in his chest.
His fingers flew across the screen, accessing data streams and cross-referencing patterns. This was what he was good at. Not feelings, not relationships, but this: finding the invisible threads that connected seemingly random events. Seeing patterns no one else did.
There—he zoomed in on a blip in generator activity that had gone unnoticed yesterday. The timestamp caught his eye—3:47 am. Right in the dead zone when even the night audit staff were at their groggiest. Someone knew that. Planned for it.
“Gotcha,” he muttered, isolating the pattern.
His pulse quickened, the rush of discovery pushing aside his personal turmoil. Someone pinged the maintenance system from the staff comms center. The access was subtle, buried beneath routine diagnostic queries, but it was there. Whoever it was knew the approximate service cycles and stayed below the disruption threshold. Almost invisible.
Almost.
David sat forward, his entire world narrowing to the screen before him. He placed both palms flat against the tablet’s surface, closing his eyes. The network opened up to his touch like a book written in light and electricity.
The feed crackled in his mind.
It wasn’t sound, per se—more like sensation. A voice, not a person’s, but something deeper. An awareness. The network spoke to him in the only language it knew, showing him patterns and anomalies that no standard diagnostic tool detected. It showed him buried code masked by system-level permissions, hidden in the spaces between legitimate commands.
David’s psychic connection to the network simmered hotter when he pressed his thumb harder against the smart glass, andhe felt it. Static in the layers. Interference where there should be none. A handprint left by an attacker wearing gloves too perfect—someone who understood how to minimize their digital footprint but hadn’t counted on David’s abilities. Because, of course, they shouldn’t exist.
Someone who understood the network, who knew its vulnerabilities. Someone who’d had time to study them, to map them, to exploit them with surgical precision.
“Someone knew the system’s vulnerabilities. From the inside.”
The conviction hit him like ice water. His eyes snapped open, his hands jerking back from the tablet in shock. His heart hammered, each beat echoing in his ears.
Oh, he realized employees were facilitating the sabotage: they’d found some had been paid off to hand out a password or insert a USB drive. But this was different.
A tech insider. Not some external hacker or corporate rival. Someone who walked these halls. A staff member who smiled at guests and collected a paycheck and betrayed them every single day. A team memberfrom his own staff, someone he worked with every fucking day.
His lips parted. Confirmation bloomed cold in his gut, spreading outward until his fingers went numb.
This changed everything.
When he leaned back, the screen held a frozen frame of staff terminal access timestamps. David didn’t move for several seconds. He couldn’t. His mind was racing too fast, connections forming and reforming, implications cascading through his thoughts like dominoes.
How long had this been going on? How deep did it go? Was it one person, or were there others? And what did they want—money? Revenge? To destroy everything Nick had built?
Everythingthey’dbuilt, David corrected himself. This wasn’t only Nick’s dream. It was his too. And Zach’s. It was every employee who depended on Ivory Tower for their livelihood, every guest who trusted them with their vacation, their celebration, their escape.
