Page 78 of One Shattered Crown
Wesley’s eyes find mine. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m just fine.” I look at his bruised, bloodied face. “Please tell me you did some damage in return.”
“One guy is still knocked out.”
A smile breaks out before I can stop it. “Good on you.”
Sylveria’s gaze slices across us both. “Figure out what’s wrong with my diamonds, or you both die today.”
I glance at the damaged stones, at Wesley, at the servers. He doesn’t know what I did to Thorn.
He leans in, voice low. “Do you know what’s wrong with the diamond?”
“It wasn’t me,” I say, answering the question he hasn’t asked. All right, so he doesn’t know, but he’s smart enough to suspect. That’s why I like him.
“Really?” His eyes darken as he studies me.
Man, he’s cute. Not dangerous. Not like Justice. Just … good-looking, even broken up like this. “It wasn’t me.”
He winces. “Then we have a problem.”
“No kidding.” I glance over the servers, heat rising inmy chest. “If you want me to backtrack through this mess, I need full access, Sylveria.”
“You’re already logged in,” Sylveria says. “I don’t have a choice.” She steps toward the door, skirts brushing the floor. “If you help me, I’ll help you. Maybe we can reach an agreement for both of us to run TimeGem Moments. For now, you have two hours. If you haven’t figured it out by then, I’m cutting off the oxygen to this room.”
She doesn’t wait for an answer. The door hisses shut behind her, locking us in.
The hum of the servers presses in, steady and cold. For a moment, it’s just me and Wesley. He wipes blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing it across his jaw, and breathes out slowly.
“Two hours,” I say. “She makes it sound like a courtesy.”
“I think she’s serious.” His voice is rough, worn at the edges, but steady.
We head toward the server bank. The room is lined with tall black towers, lights blinking in an uneven rhythm. The air is cool, too sterile, the scent metallic. Not healthy. Yellow and white indicators stutter where green should pulse.
I sit at the console, the glass desk humming faintly under my hands as the keyboard lights up. Wesley leans in close, close enough I can see the swelling at his jaw, the cut on his lip. He looks like hell, and something inside me twists. He doesn’t deserve this.
Not after everything I’ve already done. We haven’t slept together, and we weren’t exclusive, but I still should’ve ended things before I slept with Justice. Not that I planned that. At all.
The screen fills with scrolling code. White text over black, endless strings of commands.
“There.” Wesley’s voice is sharp, focused. He points at a line of replication errors. “Cycle’s broken. The diamond’s not powering the secondary clusters.”
“Yeah,” I mutter, fingers moving fast over the keys. “But look at this. It’s not just broken—it’s blocked. Checksums don’t lie.”
He’s quiet for a beat. “You’ve seen this before.”
My chest tightens. The code is similar to the virus I uploaded to hurt Thorn, but it has been tweaked and dulled, as if someone took the edges off. I can still see the shape of it, the bones of what almost killed him.
“It looks familiar,” I hedge, keeping my tone even.
Wesley studies the code, the glow of the monitor deepening the shadows on his face. “This isn’t an outside attack. It’s already inside, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” I push deeper into the logs, scrolling through corrupted time stamps and half-erased functions. “It’s not new. It’s been sitting here for a while, feeding slow. That’s why the diamonds are sick.” But I see a few mutations where the virus has been slowed down.
Who mutated the virus? Is it possible they have a cure for it? For Justice, too?
“We need to pull it out before the whole system collapses.” Wesley’s voice is calm, practical, but I can feel the weight of his eyes on me. But he doesn’t ask any questions.
