Page 59 of Fall Before Her Throne

I rubbed my eyes. “But if I kill it, I lose all the time and effort I’ve put into building those programs. The algorithms I use to track…everything. I’d have to rebuild it.”

“Can you?” she asked. “Rebuild it?”

With a sigh, I braced one elbow on the desk and looked at her. “Yeah, it would just take fucking forever.”

“Kill it, then.” Her hand landed on my forearm. “It’s okay. You can do it again. I can help, too. If you wipe the data, they can’t get it.”

I wanted to scream in frustration. This attacker was just too fast, and I couldn’t keep up. She was right. Wiping the server was the smartest thing to do.

“Okay,” I breathed. In a terminal window, I typed the commands to wipe the entire thing. My cursor blinked as I stared at the lines.

“Push it,” she said softly. “We’ll fix it.”

I hit the Enter key.

Months worth of work, years, disappeared into nothing.

A blank screen stared back at me, the cursor blinking.

My hand throbbed. I sat back, digging my thumb into the tight tissue while my stomach turned nauseous.

“What about backups? We could restore it.”

My head shook while my lips pressed together. “I could, but it would be a copy of what they just broke into. All they’d need to do is expose the same vulnerability, except now they’d know how to get in.”

She squeezed my shoulder. “You did the right thing. It sucks, but we’re safe.”

“If I could have been faster⁠—”

Her palm cupped my cheek and turned my face to hers. “You fought it off. You didn’t let the attacker steal our data. We’re safe.” She kissed me. “That’s a win.”

I nodded and then sighed. “You’re right.”

The whole thing would need to be rebuilt. New programs. New databases. New tracking.

The only silver lining was that I could make it stronger than ever before. A fresh, blank slate could mean new thinking, new ways of doing things.

I pushed away from the desk and hunched over in my chair, head in my hands. My fingers caught in the snarl of tangles in my hair. “Mierda. What a fucking way to wake up.”

“I’m sorry, my love,” she said as she pushed me straight so she could slip into my lap. “Who do you think it was?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Who do we know that is on the same level as me?”

“Lucia.”

My hands tightened on her waist. “Had to be her. The way her attacks went after our weaknesses…she’s fast. She’s smart. She cut right through my patches.”

“She’s good, but you’re better,” Leona assured me.

“If I were, I would have been able to stop her and not have to wipe everything.”

“You did stop her.”

I waved a hand, not wanting to argue. “Thanks for—thanks for saving what you could.”

“We can build everything again together,” she said again. “And since we’re doing it together, it’ll be better than ever.”

I twisted my finger around one of her curls and gave her a small smile. “You’re right. With our two brains at work, maybe we’ll come up with something no one has ever seen before.”