Eliana Vance POV:
I pulled my gaze away from the empty street outside the window. I turned around and walked straight to the sleek, glass-fronted smart home control panel mounted on the study wall.
Dustin loved showing this system off to his wealthy friends. He told them he designed it. He didn't. Five years ago, when his startup was a joke and he couldn't land a single contract, I spent three weeks coding the entire underlying architecture anonymously to build his portfolio.
I raised my index finger. I didn't touch the standard icons for the lights or the thermostat. Instead, I tapped the four extreme corners of the glass screen in a rapid, syncopated rhythm. *Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.*
The screen flickered violently. The minimalist white UI vanished, instantly replaced by a cascading waterfall of glowing green code running down a black background.
A small, hidden command prompt popped up in the center. It demanded the master administrator override key.
I hovered both hands over the virtual keyboard. My fingers hadn't typed a real line of code in years, but the muscle memory was carved into my bones. I didn't even pause to think. I rapidly punched in a brutal, sixty-four-character hexadecimal string.
The screen flashed blue. A mechanical text box appeared: *Access Granted*. The faint blue light cast a cold, hollow glow over my expressionless face.
I bypassed the standard user interface and dove straight into the hidden backend of the security network. It was a backdoor I had built into the foundation of the code, a ghost protocol Dustin didn't even know existed.
My finger dragged across the glass, swiping past the living room and hallway feeds. I tapped directly into the subterranean garage camera.
The video feed buffered for a second before snapping into sharp focus. The timestamp in the corner read ten minutes ago—the exact moment Dustin was standing in this very room, lying to my face about a cross-border conference call.
I hit the rewind icon. The black-and-white footage sped backward, the shadows in the garage dancing in reverse.
I stopped the playback at exactly thirty minutes ago and hit play.
In the grainy footage, the side door of the garage—the one that required a six-digit biometric pin to open—swung wide.
A woman slipped inside. She was wearing a skin-tight bandage dress and towering stiletto heels. She moved with the arrogant confidence of someone who owned the place. It was Jami.
She walked straight up to the Maybach, pulled the passenger door open, and slid into the seat.
My breath hitched in my throat. A sickening wave of violation washed over me. While I was upstairs, agonizing over the perfect temperature for his birthday steak, his mistress had already breached the perimeter of my home. The territorial instincts of my upbringing flared up, making my skin crawl with absolute disgust.
I watched the timecode tick forward. Ten minutes ago.
The heavy fire door leading from the house to the garage pushed open. Dustin walked out, wearing the dark grey suit jacket, walking with a hurried, urgent stride.
He walked to the driver's side and opened the door. He didn't jump. He didn't look surprised. He knew exactly who was waiting for him in the dark.
He threw himself into the driver's seat. Before he even closed the door, Jami launched herself across the center console. She wrapped her arms around his neck like a parasite.
The camera didn't record audio, but the visual was deafening. Dustin grabbed the back of her head, pulling her in. They devoured each other in a desperate, filthy make-out session. The suspension of the heavy car actually bounced slightly under the violence of their movements.
I stared unblinking at the screen. The acid in my stomach violently surged upward. I clamped my jaw shut, swallowing the bile down so hard I tasted the sharp, metallic tang of blood at the back of my throat.
On the screen, they finally broke apart. Dustin reached into his pocket and pulled out the shark-bone bracelet. He carefully, lovingly fastened it around Jami's wrist.
Jami held her hand up, admiring the jewelry. Then, she leaned forward and planted a lingering kiss right on the side of his cheek.
It was the exact same spot Dustin had hovered his lips over when he gave me that fake goodbye kiss upstairs.
A full-body shudder of pure revulsion ripped through me. I reached out and slammed my finger onto the record icon. I captured the footage, encrypted the file, and routed it directly to my secure offshore server.
The video feed showed the Maybach's taillights flaring before the car reversed out of the frame.
I backed out of the camera system. I ran a quick wipe protocol, scrubbing the access logs clean, and restored the panel to its original, boring UI.
I turned my back to the wall and looked across the room at Dustin's massive custom PC rig. The cooling fans were humming softly.
If he was taking his mistress to his downtown apartment, he wasn't coming home tonight. I had the entire night to rip his life apart and see exactly what else he was hiding.
I walked over and placed my hand flat over Dustin's mouse.
"You thought you could hide from the god who created you?"
