Twenty minutes later, the bedroom door opened, and she stepped out.
Tessa Kane looked... reconstructed.
She was wearing fresh leggings and an oversized sweater that swallowed her hands. Her hair was damp, brushed back from her face. She was pale, shaking slightly, needing to lean a hand against the doorframe for support. But her eyes, those intelligent, storm-grey eyes behind the glasses she had miraculously found, were clear.
She wasn't the feral creature holding a brass lamp. She wasn't the hallucinating victim on the floor.
She walked into the living room, her gaze sweeping over Simon, who tried to merge with the sofa cushions, and landing on me. There was wariness there, yes. But also a question.
"You're still here," she said. Her voice was scratchy, raw from screaming.
"The bridge is still down," I said, keeping my tone neutral. Professional. "And we operate on a no-man-left-behind policy."
She looked at the kitchen island. At my laptop. At the neatly arranged stack of hard drives and the router I had dissected to upgrade the firmware.
"What are you doing?" she asked, walking slowly toward the island. She moved with a hitch in her step, a physical memory of the cramps.
"Auditing," I said.
"Auditing?" She stopped, gripping the back of a bar stool. "My house puts out a distress beacon, I almost die, and you're doing paperwork?"
"I am doing the job I was hired to do," I said. "Which is managing the asset, and right now, the asset is hemorrhaging security vulnerabilities."
I spun the laptop around.
"Look."
She hesitated, glancing at Daniel, who gave her a slow, encouraging nod from the hallway. She looked at Simon, who offered a tentative, terrified smile.
She stepped up to the computer.
I walked her through it. I didn't use soft language. I didn't use the gentle, soothing tones Daniel used. I gave her the hard data.
"This is your previous security setup," I said, pointing to the red graph. "It was a sieve. You were using a residential-grade firewall for a multi-million dollar privacy concern. Your IP was trackable by anyone with a Reddit account and a motive."
Her face paled. "I… I paid extra for the VPN."
"You paid for a sticker on the modem," I corrected ruthlessly. "It was useless."
I hit the next key. The screen shifted to blue.
"This is what I did in the last hour," I said.
I showed her the list of purchased domains. I showed her the cease-and-desist orders. I showed her the obliterated forum threads.
"I pulled the graduation video from the three major hosting hubs," I said, watching her profile. "I flagged it as toxic content.It’s gone from the surface web. If anyone tries to re-upload it, my bot will kill the link before it finishes buffering."
Tessa went very still. Her hand reached out, hovering over the screen, tracing the list of scrubbed links.
"You deleted it?" she whispered. "Nexus told me... they said it was impossible. They said once it's on the internet, it's forever."
"Nexus was lazy," I said, leaning forward, bracing my hands on the counter so I was eye-level with her. "And they were afraid of litigation. I am not."
I let the scent of bourbon and teakwood roll off me, not aggressive, but solid. Immovable.
"I followed the rules all those years ago, Tessa," I breathed. The room was silent, Simon and Daniel watching us like we were a bomb squad. "I sat in that chair because the handbook said not to create a scene. I failed you because I respected the system more than the person."
She looked up at me. Her grey eyes were wide, searching my face for the boy who had turned away.
