Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 77051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
“You don’t even like men with jawlines.”
“I do when they smirk like sin and write sexy commit messages.”
I hate that I know exactly what she means.
I stare into my mug and pretend to be fascinated by the tiny flecks of tea swirling at the bottom. “He’s not my type,” I lie, remembering my no dating anyone I work with rule.
“No? Your type isn’t tall, broody, and weirdly obsessed with passwords?”
My cheeks warm. “You’re projecting.”
“I’m investigating.” She pokes me. “So you wouldn’t care if I asked him out?”
“Of course not.”
I say it too fast. Too sharp. Too fake.
She doesn’t call me on it. Just raises an eyebrow, nods slowly, then gets up to grab a blanket.
“Guest sheets are clean. You can take the pullout or the floor. I’m not picky.”
“Pullout’s fine,” I say. “Thanks, Tash.”
She pauses at the hallway. “Seriously though. If something’s wrong… really wrong? You’d tell me, right?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
Another lie.
When she disappears into her room, I curl up on the pullout couch and stare at the ceiling fan spinning lazy circles above me. My phone buzzes on the nightstand. I don’t check it.
I already know who it is.
Mask.
I should be freaked out. Should be calling someone. Should be doing something other than lying here and thinking about how Gage looked earlier this morning with his stupid half-grin and his unfairly good hair and the way he looked at me when he thought I wasn’t paying attention.
I hate how I feel.
Not just the fear.
The want.
I bury my face in the pillow and let out a sound somewhere between a scream and a laugh.
I’m being hunted by internet psychos, protected by a faceless stranger, and possibly crushing on the one man I swore to hate forever.
Perfect.
Tomorrow, I’ll go back to pretending I don’t care.
Tonight?
I fall asleep wondering what Gage Dawson would sound like if he whispered my name in the dark.
FOUR
GAGE
She stayed at Tasha’s last night.
I know because I watched the building security cams Arrow patched me into, saw her blurry outline walk into the Eastwood apartment complex at 1:42 a.m., hoodie up, tension coiled in every step. I saw the front door buzz open, and Tasha’s silhouette letting her in.
And yeah, I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
Because I’ve seen what happens to people who don’t have somewhere safe to go. The streets are full of them. Forums are full of them. Ghost stories in the making.
River Quinn doesn’t get to be one of those stories.
Not on my watch.
This morning, I’m running on three hours of sleep, a cup of the worst gas station coffee known to mankind, and a metric ton of adrenaline. I sit in my usual chair across the aisle from her empty desk at NovaPlay Studios, pretending to debug something while my real screen is split between work logs, two dark net forums, and the backend of our internal server.
Knight’s on comms from his apartment, Ozzy is monitoring a Cathedral chat crawler from his rooftop (because he claims “airflow improves accuracy”), and Arrow’s in the back room of our place, fingers flying across his keyboard like we’re running black ops instead of vigilante recon.
Render’s… probably taking photos of pigeons and hacking street cams again. Kid’s weird, but effective.
Poe’s … who even knows what Poe is doing.
I’ve even brought on my little sister, Lark, to help. She’s combing the Cathedral forums, looking for any new threads about River.
“Anything from the honeypot?” I ask through the mic clipped to my collar.
Arrow’s voice crackles through my AirPod. “Yeah. Pinged at 3:12 a.m. Someone poked around the test server using her name as a key.”
I grip my mouse a little tighter.
“Credentials?” I ask.
Ozzy chimes in. “Not standard. It was an internal tool—NVisionAudit.”
My stomach drops. That’s our tool. NovaPlay’s proprietary QA log system. Meant for debugging in-game crashes, but with admin access, you can use it to see anything tied to a user account. Chat logs. Logins. Dev sandbox footage. Internal notes.
I minimize the browser and pull up the audit log.
There it is.
Psalm88.zip
Created by AdminMask, downloaded by Ghost88, two hours after River went dark.
“Open it,” I say.
Arrow already has it decrypting. “Password was biscuitbug. Sound familiar?”
I smile, bitter. “It’s what she named her stubbornest bug fix last year.”
He’s targeting her with things only someone on the inside would know.
The zip file opens. Inside:
Chat transcripts.
IP pings.
A stream of messages between Cathedral users referring to River by code name—“the Whale.”
“Jesus,” Ozzy mutters. “They’re hunting her like it’s a game.”
Knight’s voice cuts in, cold and sharp. “Look at this one: ‘I watched her fix Biscuit. She thinks no one saw her cry in the bathroom. She’s wrong.’”
My blood turns to ice.
Arrow says nothing. He doesn’t need to. I’m already pulling the list of employees who accessed NVisionAudit in the last month.
Seventeen users.
Only four with full admin privileges.
Only two who have access to QA tools and have been with NovaPlay longer than three years.