I cracked my knuckles.
For years, I had been the rule-follower. I had been the Class President who sat in his chair while Tessa Kane fell apart because protocol dictated I stay seated. I had trusted the system to handle it. I had trusted security to be gentle. I had trusted the administration to protect the student.
I was done trusting systems. I was the system now.
"Watch," I told Simon.
I went to work.
I didn't just patch the holes; I poured concrete. I started a hostile takeover of every domain name remotely associated with Tessa Kane, T.L. Rose, and even the misspelling of her pseudonym. I routed the purchases through a labyrinth of holding companies in the Cayman Islands and Singapore, creating a digital maze that would take the NSA six months to unravel.
Then I went for the throat.
I located the hosting provider for the forum thread. A mid-tier company in Nevada.
I didn't send a polite request. I drafted a legal nuclear strike. I cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, defamation statutes, and implied an imminent lawsuit that would bankrupttheir grandchildren. I attached the digital signature of my firm’s litigation department, the one known in the industry as " The Shredder."
Send.
The thread vanished in forty-five seconds. The user account was banned.
Clack. Clack. Enter.
I moved to video sites. "Graduation Girl." The bane of her existence. The viral clip that had driven her into this isolation.
It was still out there, lurking on mirror sites and "cringe compilations."
I deployed the crawler bot I had commissioned last year. It was a nasty piece of code designed to flag biometric violations in media hosting. I manually tagged the video as "Non-Consensual Medical Episode/Biometric Data Leak."
It wasn't just a copyright strike. It was a terms-of-service violation that triggered automated liability filters.
One by one, the red lights on my dashboard turned green. The links died. The mirrors shattered.
"You're erasing her," Simon breathed, watching the screen with a mix of horror and awe.
"I am fortifying her," I corrected. "I am building a wall that no one can climb."
I was sweating. My shirt stuck to my back. The adrenaline was different from the crisis in the kitchen. That had been reactive panic. This was proactive violence. I was hunting down every digital ghost that had ever haunted her and putting a bullet in its head.
A shout from the bedroom broke my concentration.
"Daniel!"
It was a scream of shattered release. A high, ringing cry that spoke of a pleasure so intense it bordered on pain.
My fingers froze over the keyboard.
The sound was followed by a silence so heavy it felt like the air pressure in the house dropped. Then, the low, rumbling murmur of Daniel’s voice, offering aftercare.
My stomach twisted into a knot of hot, jagged iron.
"He fixed the pain," Simon whispered, looking at the hallway.
"Yes," I said, my voice tight. "He fixed the pain."
I looked down at my screen, at the green lights, at the scrubbing reports. Daniel could fix the pain. Simon could immortalize the beauty. But I was the only one who could make sure the world never hurt her again.
I closed the laptop with a snap that echoed like a gunshot.
