She takes the thermos, her fingers brushing mine. Her skin is ice cold. She takes a sip, then another, and I watch as the color slowly starts to return to her cheeks. We sit in silence for a while, the sounds of the city traffic behind us and the waves lapping against the pier below.
"I saw her today," Demi says suddenly, her voice low. "Thorne. She was laughing about some settlement she had to pay out. She called the victims 'statistical anomalies.'"
I turn to look at her. The rage is there, simmering under the surface, but it’s brittle, fragile.
"She’s a monster, Blue. We know that."
"It’s not just that she’s a monster," she whispers, setting the soup down on the bench. She wraps her arms around herself. "It’s that she’s... normal. She goes to lunch. She talks about her Pilates class. She has pictures of her nieces on her desk. Shedestroys lives with a signature, and then she goes home and sleeps soundly."
She looks up at me, and the pain in her eyes feels like a physical weight in my chest.
"When my mom was sick," she continues, the words tumbling out now that the dam has broken. "It wasn't just that Lamott jacked up the cost of her medicine or Hensley denied the insurance claim. Thorne came after us for the medical bills we couldn't pay. I had to take my mother home to our shitty apartment because we couldn't pay the hospital anymore. Thorne bought that debt from the hospital and sent debt collectors after us. They threatened us, told my mom she was guilty of fraud and that they would take us to court."
I clench my jaw, a cold fury settling in my gut. I knew the broad strokes of the debt, the death, but the cruelty of the details... it paints a picture of a woman who doesn't just deserve to be robbed. She deserves to be dismantled.
"My mother died thinking she was a criminal," Demi says, a tear slipping out from under the ugly glasses. "She died terrified that they were going to take me to jail because she couldn't pay. That’s what Aris Thorne did. She stole my mother’s peace in her final days."
I reach out then, covering her cold hands with mine. I don't try to fix it or offer platitudes. I just try to be an anchor for her.
"Then we take her peace," I say steadily. "We don't just take her money, Demi. We take her reputation. We take her legacy. We strip her bare and leave her with nothing but the truth of what she is."
She looks at me, searching my face. "You really mean that, don't you? This isn't just a job for you anymore."
"It never has been just a job. You think Andre and Damon are the intense ones? You haven't seen me when someone hurts what’s mine."
Her breath hitches at the word mine, but she doesn't pull away.
"I built something for you," I say, shifting the mood before it gets too heavy for her to handle. I pull my laptop out of the bag and wake it up.
"For me?"
"For the heist." I turn the screen toward her. It’s a complex schematic of the Heart-Box’s digital architecture. "I’ve been running simulations on the prototype specs you obtained. By the way, that's pretty impressive that you managed to get them and someday you'll have to tell me how you did it. Anyway, the internal processor has a flaw. It creates a temporary cache file every time it runs a scan."
Demi leans in, her Martha persona falling away as her hacker brain engages. "A cache file? Can we exploit it?"
"We can," I point to a line of code I’ve highlighted in green. "I wrote a script. If you plug into the maintenance port, this script will flood the cache with dummy data. It forces the system to reboot into diagnostic mode. In diagnostic mode, the biometric requirements are suspended for thirty seconds."
She looks at the code, her eyes darting back and forth. "Thirty seconds? That’s tight."
"It’s tight," I agree. "But it bypasses the need for Thorne’s eyeball. You just need to be plugged in."
She looks up at me, and for the first time all day, there’s a genuine smile on her face. It’s sharp, dangerous, and beautiful.
"You built me a skeleton key," she breathes. "This is a game changer."
"I built you a sword, a tool for your mission. But you’re the one who has to swing it."
She closes the laptop and hands it back to me. Then, she does something that surprises me. She leans forward and rests her forehead against my shoulder.
"Thank you, Damon," she whispers. "Not just for the code. For... listening. For the soup."
I rest my cheek against the top of her wig, wishing I could feel her real hair, but content to just hold her for a moment in the wind.
"We’re a team, Blue," I say softly. "At least we want to be. Andre can be your muscle. Marcus is the distraction. I’m the structure. And you..."
"What am I?" she asks, pulling back slightly to look at me.
"You’re the heart," I say. "You’re the reason we’re doing this. You're the reason we want to do this. Don't forget that. We can handle the logistics. We can handle the danger. You just keep that fire burning."
