Ineedtwelve minutes.
Lane’s life is hanging in the balance, and I’m not willing to risk my revenge in order to save it. I’m still determined to have both.
I’m a selfish fucking bastard.
I can do this.
The encrypted network interface flickers on my second monitor. Active. Busy. Chat threads, transaction pings, anonymous users moving money and information and people like they’re all just lines in a spreadsheet.
My jaw clenches so hard it aches.
“Okay,” I whisper, flexing my fingers. “Showtime.”
I hover over the execute command.
This is the point of no return. The blackout will ripple outward into temporary chaos. Systems frozen, routers fried, communication severed, anonymous layers stripped bare.
And if it fails—
I press execute.
For half a second, nothing happens.
Then the screens erupt.
Traffic spikes. Nodes blink offline. Encrypted channels collapse like dominoes. Connections start dropping in waves, like someone is turning off the lights in a city one block at a time.
All of my preloaded and automated scripts zip across in ones and zeroes, already siphoning through crypto wallets, offshorebanks, shell corporations. Numbers cascade. Accounts drain. Digital vaults hollow out.
Two minutes.
Phase one complete.
I trigger the deletion protocols. Encrypted fail-safes surface, resist, collapse.
Dead man’s switch is gone. Erased.
Backup triggers are overwritten. Mirrors are wiped. Every contingency my virus finds is unraveled. The system fights back. It always does. Defenses flare, but the blackout chokes them before they can compensate.
Four minutes.
The infrastructure begins to crumble. Archives corrupt. Data fragments. Identity layers collapse.
Six minutes.
My turn.
As much as I want to check in on Lane and Harrison, this is what I’ve been waiting for.
I reroute, sending the payload down a hidden fork, a path no one else knows exists, a last-minute attack that would catch anyone off guard. It tunnels deeper, toward a different network, a different set of servers.
Toward the person who hired a man to kidnap me.
The person who put that man in my path.
The person responsible for that path ending abruptly.
A bead of sweat drips from my chin onto the keyboard, but my hands don’t stop moving.
