Page 34 of Alien War Daddy's Got Rizz
The first timeI see the CY8 building in daylight, I laugh.
It’s glass and chrome and too many goddamn windows. Like a hollow tooth polished to gleam, pretending there's no rot inside. The kind of place meant to distract you from the fact that its guts are being eaten alive.
But I know rot when I smell it.
And I smell it the moment I step close.
I don’t go in right away. I spend two full days watching. From rooftops. From the sidewalk. From the inside of a hover freight parked across the street with fake credentials and a coffee cup I never touch.
Yara’s name is on the building. Her fingerprints are all over the upper floor security algorithms. But she’s not running the show.
Not really.
She’s trying to.
But the system is built to grind her down.
Inside, every second person is too slow. Too nervous. Too good at smiling while doing nothing. The holopanels flicker on a delay in the main reception—low priority maintenance tickets left to rot. Expense accounts inflated and poorly hidden. I watch a mid-level exec ‘accidentally’ leak a memo to a competitor.
It’s not incompetence.
It’s sabotage.
Corporate warfare dressed up like confusion.
Like the lights that always take an extra second to respond to Yara’s biometric scan.
Like the way her schedule is always packed with redundant meetings that end just as something important goes wrong somewhere else.
I’ve seen it before. In Syndicate territory, they call it ‘slow bleed.’ Death by convenience.
But the worst part?
The man behind it has a name.
Jonathan Tidball.
He looks like nothing. A soft man in a too-tailored suit. Warm eyes. Easy voice. The kind of man who offers you tea while slipping poison into the cup.
And she trusts him.
Worse—she leans on him.
He’s always there. Hovering just a few steps behind, smiling like a goddamn priest at a funeral. Always ready with advice. Always too ready.
My instincts scream.
Every time he puts a hand on her shoulder, I have to stop myself from taking it off at the wrist.
But I don’t act yet.
I dig.
Quietly.
Systematically.
I hit the underworld channels. The whisper webs. The black-market data nodes that don’t ask who you are as long as your credits bleed clean.
