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That job was supposed to crown my reputation, not damn it.

And now Hale has used it to shut down a pharmaceutical logistics hub in Delaware, spoil millions of dollars in critical medications, and trigger the death of a transplant patient, all while making it look like I pulled the trigger.

He didn’t just mimic my style.

He used my actual weapon.

“Come on,” I mutter, eyes darting across the screen as I isolate an IP string buried inside the Delaware server dump I found in a ghost cache Hale left on the darknet.

I run a comparison scan against my old Brazil job data.

Nothing at first… still nothing… more nothing.

Then, a flicker. A match.

“There you are.” Triumph pulls at my lips. “Now, are you real?”

I dig deeper, my smile widening. “Yes, you are.”

It’s a routine I coded to override container grid logs in São Paulo. A stealth redirect loop that rerouted container manifests without altering their timestamps. I never deployed it because it was too unstable.

But Hale used it. Modified. Refined. Weaponized.

And worse?

He left in my signature.

Not my name. Not a tag. Nothing that obvious.

Just a subroutine buried inside a nested shell, one line written in Italian.

Se non ritorno, sappi che ho provato. If I don’t return, know that I tried.

I added it during a low point of missing Isa so much it hurt on a job years ago. Sloppy. Personal. Human.

“You bastard…”

My hands curl into fists.

It’s not just a setup. It’s a message. Hale wanted me to find this. Hewanted me to know it was my hands that made the gun, even if I never pulled the trigger.

The weight of it presses on my chest like lead.

I armed the man who tried to take Isa, who’s trying to destroy me.

The hacker world will believe I did it. The media will. And the agencies that already had me on quiet watchlists will have a reason to turn whispers into manhunts.

Fuck.

But then…

My eyes catch on something, and the more I study it, the more it stands out.

A flaw.

A vanity error code, buried in the Chicago relay Hale used to scrub his trail.

Sloppy. Overconfident. A kernel that doesn’t match the rest of the architecture.