And someone was trying to tear it all down.
He should talk to someone. Nick, maybe. Or Zach.
But the truth was, listening to himself unravel the implications out loud—knowing someone among them was undermining what they’d built—might break something he wasn’t ready to face. Speaking it would make it real in a way that data on a screen wasn’t. It would require action, confrontation, possibly destroying someone’s life.
What if he was wrong? What if there were an explanation he wasn’t seeing?
He wasn’t wrong. He knew he wasn’t wrong. The data didn’t lie.
Worse, if he opened up about Lena’s sudden distance, Nick would give him that damn look. The one that said emotional capacity was the cost of being human, not an optional upgrade. The one that suggested David’s preference for logic over feeling was somehow a character flaw rather than a survival mechanism.
Nick meant well. He always did. But his big brother’s easy emotional fluency felt like a foreign language David had never quite learned to speak. Nick read people the way David read code—instinctively, effortlessly. He’d take one look at David’s face and know what was happening.
And David wasn’t ready for that conversation. Not when he didn’t understand it himself.
So instead, he refocused, calling up the coding layers again and moving further into the system, letting the cyber world swallow him—where the variables didn’t lie, and affectioncouldn’t be pulled out from under him like a barstool on a slick floor.
His glasses slipped down his nose, and he pushed them back up with one finger, his eyes already burning from screen glare. He didn’t care. The physical discomfort was easier to manage than the emotional one.
The code scrolled past his vision, beautiful in its complexity. He traced the intrusion backwards, following the digital breadcrumbs left behind. Each command revealed another layer, another decision point, another moment where the saboteur had made a choice.
And with each revelation, David steadied. This was familiar territory. This was solvable.
He’d crack the sabotage on his own. Prove it beyond any doubt before he brought it to Nick and Zach. Present them with a complete picture, not suspicions and half-formed theories.
And if Lena pulled away, he wouldn’t push. He’d wait. And watch.
The thought hurt more than he wanted to admit, but he shoved the ache down, burying it beneath layers of logic and rationalization. He’d probably moved too fast. Maybe she needed space. Maybe he was misreading everything between them. Maybe the connection he felt was one-sided, another variable he’d miscalculated.
He’d survived worse disappointments. He’d survive this too.
Because in tech—and in love—timing was everything.
David’s fingers resumed their dance across the screen, his mind already three steps ahead, mapping out the next phase of his investigation. The empty office pressed in around him, but he barely noticed. He had work to do.
And work, at least, had never let him down.
Chapter 32
Cross Winds
Things were actually feelingnormal today.
Most of the guests camped out near the pool with umbrella drinks and oversized sun hats. Complaints were minimal—the usual gripes about beach umbrellas and the exact hue of linen napkins—and Lena had almost convinced herself that Monday’s almost meltdown had been nothing more than an over-caffeinated spiral of anxiety. A phantom of stress, nothing more. She’d handled it. She always handled it.
Well,handledmight be generous.
Her whole body ached from a week of training sessions with Zach. Every morning at 0630 since the note in her office, she’d met him behind the mansion on a yoga mat that had become her personal battlefield. Forty-five minutes of getting her ass handed to her. Over and over. Breaking a wrist grab (still inconsistent), eye gouges (theoretical, but improving), and how to drive her knee into someone’s groin with enough force to make them reconsider their life choices (she’d stopped pulling back on day three… mostly).
Zach had been patient. Too patient. The kind reserved for toddlers learning to tie their shoes.
“You’re thinking too much,” he caught her arm mid-swing that morning. “Your body knows what to do. You just have to let it.”
Except her body didn’t know what to do. Her body knew how to fold napkins into swans and smile through passive-aggressive complaints about thread counts. Her body knew how to stand for twelve hours in heels that made her feet scream.
It did not know how to fight.
Her thoughts drifted unbidden to David.
