He’s spitting blood. “You’re dead, Reaper. You’re?—”
I crush his other wrist. He screams. Then I lean in close, breath hot against his ear.
“I’m not here to kill you,” I say. “I’m here to burn your future.”
I hand him a chip. Encrypted. Untouchable. Untamperable.
“Deliver that to Tidball,” I say. “Tell him it’s over.”
Jast glares at me.
“Do it,” I growl, voice dropping into the lower register—the one that makes bones hum and hearts stutter.
He nods. Good boy.
By the time I walk out, I can feel it. The shift. Like a weather pattern breaking. Tidball’s empire isn’t dead. Not yet. But it’s bleeding. It’s cracking. It’s scared. And Yara? She doesn’t even know. Not yet.
But she will.
I never left. I just stopped asking for permission. Because she might not want me anymore. But she’s still mine. And nobody gets to hurt what’s mine. Not without consequences.
But physical dismantling is only the first step. To finish this, I have to go deeper than bone.
I don’t just burn it all down. I catalog the ashes. There’s a difference.
This isn’t just revenge. It’s justice, with receipts. The kind you can hand someone without words and still have the whole goddamn room go quiet. I don't just want Tidball to hurt. Iwant him exposed. I want the truth to stick to him like blood—undeniable, permanent, documented in triple-encrypted data packets with no expiration date.
Because if I’m gonna crawl through his empire of rot, I might as well bring back a souvenir.
So I start collecting.
It begins with a whisper—someone drops a name in exchange for keeping all their fingers. That name leads me to a node buried in a defunct logistics company in Port Sector 5. The kind of place that looks abandoned from orbit but lights up like a beacon once I get inside. Old tech. Hard lines. No Holonet access, no external pings. Someone thought they were clever.
They weren’t.
It takes me eight minutes to crack it. Then I’m in. And once I’m in? It’s like ripping the lid off a nest of spiders.
The data floods the screens, ugly and illuminating.
Funds routed through at least four dozen ghost accounts. Bribes marked as “public safety adjustments.” Disbursements to shell companies with names like "Glowpath Consortium" and "Daedalus Resource Group"—the kind of titles no one questions because they sound expensive and boring.
But what makes my pulse slow, what makes my claws tap against the side of the console like a war drum, is the footage.
Visuals. Audio. Meetings. Real ones.
Tidball, sitting in boardrooms not listed on any blueprint, surrounded by men and women with the kind of stillness you only see in killers and strategists. I watch him hand out instructions like candy. I watch him discuss bleeding CY8 in stages. I watch him talk about Yara like she’s a chess piece.
“She’s bright,” he says in one file, sipping that chemical fizz he likes. “But predictable. Groomed her too well, I think. Give her three more quarters and she’ll sign away anything if you frame it as ‘saving the legacy.’”
He chuckles.
Chuckles.
I bare my teeth.
I don’t roar. Not yet. There’s no time for catharsis. No time for rage to eat me hollow. That comes later. Right now? I dig. I build folders. Clean, organized, brutal.
Every file is copied to a black drive I stole off a military courier last year. The encryption is mine. The sequencing, the layering, the redundancy—it’s overkill.