I pick up the phone, then set it down again. Not ready yet for conversation, but maybe getting closer to understanding what ready will look like.
Ready will look like accepting that love in our world requires transformation. That building something worth having requires becoming someone capable of protecting it. That sometimes the greatest gift you can give someone is the willingness to become someone new for their sake.
Ready will look like choosing the future over the past, partnership over isolation, love over fear.
Ready will look like saying yes to the man who chose me over everything else, even when choosing me meant becoming someone he never thought he could be.
But not today.
Today, I’m still processing. Still figuring out how to be grateful for being alive when staying alive required such devastating sacrifice.
Tomorrow, though.
Tomorrow I might be ready to build something from the ashes of what we’ve destroyed.
Tomorrow I might be ready to love him back with the same absolute commitment he’s shown me.
Tomorrow I might be ready to become the woman worthy of being saved by someone willing to damn himself for her sake.
But for now, I’m content to sit in the silence and prepare for the transformation that’s coming.
The transformation that will make us both into people we never thought we could be.
The transformation that will prove that sometimes love looks exactly like the thing that destroys everything you used to be, right up until the moment it saves everything you’re meant to become.
CHAPTER 42
Rafa
The driveback to my apartment takes forty-three minutes through pre-dawn Manhattan traffic, giving me just enough time to sober up and start doubting Luca’s advice. By the time I’m sitting in front of my workstation, surrounded by the familiar blue glow of multiple monitors, the alcohol-fueled confidence has evaporated completely.
What am I supposed to do? Send her a love letter through encrypted channels? Code a digital apology into her firewall? The idea seems ridiculous in the harsh light of sobriety and fluorescent bulbs.
But it’s the only idea I have.
I pull up her network protocols, the same systems I’ve been respectfully avoiding for two weeks out of some misguided notion that giving her space means staying out of her digital world entirely. My fingers hover over the keyboard, muscle memory ready to execute intrusion routines I could perform in my sleep.
Instead, I get a connection timeout error.
Then another.
Then a access denied message that makes my stomach drop.
She’s locked me out. Completely. Not just from her personal systems, but from every network, every shared platform, every digital space where we used to collaborate. I try seven different entry points and get the same result each time: BitVenom is persona non grata in the kingdom of NyxBinary.
“Shit,” I mutter, leaning back in my chair.
But if there’s one thing years of hacking have taught me, it’s that no system is truly impenetrable. Every fortress has a weakness, every code has a flaw, every barrier can be overcome with enough patience and skill.
The question is whether I’m willing to cross that line—to actively hack the woman I love instead of waiting for an invitation.
Looking at my reflection in the black screen of my secondary monitor, seeing the stubble and exhaustion and desperate need in my own eyes, I realize I passed that line the moment I walked away from her hospital room door.
Some things are worth becoming someone you never thought you’d be.
I start with her older systems first, networks she established months ago that might not have been updated with new security protocols. Dead ends, all of them. Then I move to shared platforms from our collaboration period, hoping she might have overlooked some legacy access. Nothing.
For eight hours, I throw everything I have at her digital fortress. Custom viruses, social engineering attempts, brute force attacks on outdated authentication systems. Every technique in my considerable arsenal, deployed with the kind of focused intensity that’s made BitVenom legendary in certain circles.
