The night hums. The window lets in faint sirens and the ghost of laughter from the lot below. I think maybe, just maybe, this is what peace sounds like when it’s learning to speak.
Carter’s breathing evens, eyelids heavy. I brush my lips against his shoulder, right over the scar, a silent vow to always be here for a man who has never tried to cage me. One who loves me as much as I love him, even if we haven’t said it to each other yet. We don’t need to. The way he watches me, takes care of me, and the way he always has my back is proof.
That’s when Divine’s alarm cuts through the quiet. A shrill, metallic chime that doesn’t belong in this kind of silence.
Carter’s eyes snap open. “That’s the perimeter feed.”
I’m already off the bed, grabbing my jeans and cut. “No one’s supposed to be near the grid tonight.”
Carter’s on his feet, half-dressed, checking the pistol he left on the dresser.
“Divine, talk to me.” I growl as I put my ear wig in. Carter does the same.
Divine’s voice erupts through the comms, tight with panic. “Systems under siege. External breach. Someone’s inside the network.”
“How bad?” I demand, yanking my boots on.
“Bad enough that if I can’t lock it in the next sixty seconds, they’ll have every file tied to the shelter, the kids, the club. All of it.”
Carter meets my eyes. “We just lost normal.”
“Yeah,” I breathe, loading my gun. “And it was nice while it lasted.”
He grins, fierce and ready. “Let’s take it back.”
We run. Barefoot hearts, armed souls. Back into the noise, into the fight, into the fire that never really went out.
19
REBEL
The hallway smells like steel and panic. Divine’s alarm still screams in our comms, high, digital, and jagged. The sound drills straight through my skull as Carter and I hit the main room. Divine’s at her computer, hair yanked into a knot at the base of her skull, screens vomiting code and static. French is half-dressed, gun in one hand, coffee mug in the other.
“What the hell happened?” I bark.
Divine’s fingers fly over the keys, eyes locked on the scrolling data. “External breach. Not a ping, they’rein.Whoever it is, they bypassed our firewall like it was tissue paper.”
“Vultures?” Carter demands, scanning the windows.
“Maybe. But they’re using ghost proxies. Half the signal’s bouncing off Amsterdam, and…” She stops cold. “The other half’s coming fromour own network.”
My stomach twists. “Inside?”
“Not physically. But they’re riding one of our IPs. It’s like someone cloned our system.”
The lights flicker, once. Twice.
Then every screen in the safehouse turns black.
“Divine?” I press.
Her voice goes thin. “The shelter’s servers just went down. Not lag.Gone.They wiped our external backup.”
“What does that mean?” Sloane shouts from the hall, shotgun slung over her shoulder.
“It means the Vultures know everything,” Divine replies, voice cracking. “Our donor routes. Bank ties. The names of every woman and kid registered under the shelter program.”
French swears. “How far’s the bleed?”
