Caspian's office occupied the top floor, all glass and steel with Manhattan sprawling below like a circuit board. He gestured to a leather chair across from his desk, but I remained standing.
"You hacked my gate security in under thirty seconds." He settled into his chair, fingers steepled. "Impressive. Reckless, but impressive."
"Your protocol's outdated. WEP encryption. I could've cracked it with a laptop from 2010."
His mouth twitched. Almost a smile. "My team assured me it was sufficient."
"Your team's wrong." I placed the printed pages on his desk. "Just like Rhett's team would be wrong if they actually understood what's running Valley Link."
He picked up the pages, his eyes scanning the code. The silence stretched. Outside, a helicopter cut across the skyline, its shadow sliding over us.
"Anyone can print code," he said finally. "Doesn't prove you wrote it."
"Give me ten minutes on a terminal. I'll prove it."
He studied me, his gaze sharp enough to draw blood. Then he stood and led me to a workstation by the window. The setup was beautiful—triple monitors, mechanical keyboard, processing power that made my old PDA look like a calculator.
I sat down. My fingers found the keys like coming home.
"Your firewall has a SQL injection vulnerability in the client portal," I said, already typing. "Your developers patched the obvious entry points but missed the nested query in the session handler."
Caspian moved behind me, watching the screen. I could feel his attention like heat against my back.
The code flowed. I'd forgotten this feeling—the way the world narrowed to logic and syntax, problems becoming solutions, chaos organizing itself into elegant structures. Eight minutes later, I executed the patch and ran the security scan.
Green across the board.
"Your team's been trying to find that flaw for three months," Caspian said quietly. "How did you—"
"Because I think like the person who'd exploit it." I pulled up a file from my cloud storage, the original Valley Link architecture. "Now look at this. The variable names."
He leaned closer, his cologne subtle—sandalwood and something clean. Nothing like Rhett's aggressive designer scent.
"Read them vertically," I said. "Every third variable in the authentication module."
His finger traced down the screen. "Hush little baby... don't say a word..." He straightened. "It's a lullaby."
"The one I sang to my son every night for eight years." My voice stayed level. "Rhett wouldn't know it. He was never there for bedtime. But I embedded it in every major module I wrote. My signature."
Caspian walked to the window, his hands in his pockets. The city stretched below us, indifferent and vast.
"I've suspected for years that Alexander was a fraud," he said. "But suspicion isn't proof. This—" He turned back to me. "This is proof. The question is, what do you want to do with it?"
"I want to destroy him."
The words came out cold and clear. No hesitation.
"That's a dangerous game. The Alexander family has resources. Connections."
"They already destroyed me. I've got nothing left to lose."
He crossed back to the desk, picked up his phone, made a call. "Clear the Riverside property. I need it available tonight." He hung up and looked at me. "You'll need somewhere safe to work. Somewhere he can't find you."
"I can't pay you."
"I'm not asking you to. Consider it an investment in watching Rhett Alexander's empire burn."
---
The safe house was a brownstone in Brooklyn, quiet and anonymous. Caspian's people delivered equipment that night—laptops, servers, monitors, everything I needed to build what I had in mind.
For two weeks, I barely slept. I showered. Ate when someone left food. But mostly, I coded.
The woman in the mirror changed. The exhaustion faded from my eyes. My posture straightened. I stopped touching my wedding ring because I'd taken it off and dropped it down the bathroom sink drain.
The code I wrote was elegant. Vicious. A dormant virus that would sleep inside Valley Link's next update, invisible to every scanner, waiting for a specific trigger—user load hitting critical mass.
Exactly what would happen during Rhett's keynote demo at the Global Tech Summit.
I thought about Westyn while I worked. His small hand in Kimber's. The disgust on his face. "She smells like old grease." Every line of code I wrote was an answer to that moment.
Caspian visited on day thirteen. He found me at the main terminal, three monitors glowing in the dark.
"It's done," I said.
"Show me."
I walked him through it. The exploit. The trigger. The cascade failure that would turn Rhett's triumph into a public disaster.
"You'll have a front-row seat," Caspian said. "I'm bringing you to the summit as my consultant. He'll see you there."
"Good." I saved the file and stood. "I want him to know exactly who's destroying him."
Caspian's expression was unreadable. "You've changed."
"No." I met his eyes. "I just remembered who I was before I made myself small enough to fit into his life."
He nodded slowly. "The summit's in three days. Are you ready?"
I looked at the screens, at the code that would unravel everything Rhett had stolen from me.
"I've been ready for eight years."
