Page 163 of Sexting My Best Friend's Brothers
“I don’t know,” I say, standing up as the warrior mode fully re-engages. “Stay here. Rest.”
“Asher,” she calls out as I walk to the door.
I stop. “Yeah?”
“We’ll talk,” she says, her voice thick with heavy emotion. “When this is over. We’ll talk.”
“Understood,” I say, giving a sharp nod.
I close the door, leaving her in the absolute safety of the dark. I walk into the living room and grab my laptop, sitting onthe couch to crack my knuckles. The screen glows bright blue, illuminating the empty room.
System Reboot Complete. Firewall: Active. Confessions Database: Secure.
A message flashes brightly in the terminal.
[Unknown User]: Well played. You flipped the board. But tell Ethan to watch his back. The toll is still due. My eyes narrow.
Vance is going to keep coming for us.
The connection severs, and they are gone.
I lean back, the heavy adrenaline crashing rapidly out of my system. We survived. The blackmail failed, and the Confessions are safe.
But as I look down the dark hallway toward the bedroom where Tessa is sleeping, I realize the real crisis has not even started yet.
I pull up a new window, opening my personal log where I strictly track the Unit’s vitals.
Subject: Tessa. Symptoms: Pallor, Tremors, Nausea, Dizziness, Acute Stress Response.
I stare at the data points, aligning the physical symptoms with the exact timeline of our behavioral shifts over the last month. The variables converge rapidly, locking together to form a singular, irrefutable biological pattern.
The realization hits me with enough force to knock the air completely from my lungs.
I aggressively close the window before the thought fully forms.
The variable remains undefined.
And I need absolute proof.
28
OWEN
The office is loud for a Saturday.
That’s the first thing you notice about Mosaic when the dev team is in crunch mode. It’s a cacophony of mechanical keyboards, aggressive techno music leaking from headphones, and the hum of servers working overtime to patch the cracks in our security.
But to me, it’s dead silent because she isn’t here.
I stare at the empty desk in the center of the pit. The monitors are dark, and the space feels like a gap in a smile. I know what’s there: a pristine desk, a cold cup of coffee from three days ago, and a ghost.
“Owen,” Ethan says, walking past my desk with a stack of compliance papers. He looks like hell—dark circles and stubble that’s pushing past scruffy into homeless chic. “Sterling’s auditors are asking for the updated user privacy logs. Did Asher finish the patch?”
“Asher’s in the cave,” I say, gesturing toward the server room. “He hasn’t slept since the breach started. He’s rewriting theentire encryption protocol because he’s paranoid Greg left another backdoor.”
“Good,” Ethan says, his voice tight. “We need to be paranoid.”
He ignores her empty chair, refusing to even glance through the glass of his own office at the floor. That’s Ethan’s coping mechanism—if he can’t fix a problem immediately, he compartmentalizes it until it ceases to exist.
