Page 86 of Her Soul to Own

So I’m alone. Utterly.

Except for him.Silas.

The one man I trust, and the one who won’t even meet my eyes anymore. Not since the video leaked. I know he watches me like I’m fragile glass and he’s trying to decide whether to catch or let me shatter.

And fuck, maybe I need to shatter.

I walk back inside, and the air tastes like regret. I stop at the vanity and stare at the cracked mirror. The fracture cuts across my face like a scar, permanent and imperfect.

It belongs there now. Like a crown.

I lean in closer until I can see every shattered inch of myself—my bloodshot eyes, the split in my bottom lip that I didn’t even feel happen, and the mascara smudges that never washed off completely.

They want me to disappear. They want me ruined. They want the good girl to bleed out quietly on satin sheets.

But that’s not who I am anymore.

“I’ll give them a monster in heels,” I whisper to my reflection.

My lip curls, sharp and wicked.

Hours pass.

Then I hear Silas’s footfalls on the stone path outside, heavy like thunder rolling in before a storm.

I don’t go to the window, but I don’t close the curtain either.

I’m not hiding anymore. I don’t even have the strength to pretend.

Let him see me. Let the world see.

There’s nothing left to protect.

Chapter 20 – Silas – Firewalls and Fault Lines

The surveillance hub is alive, a flickering shrine to controlled mayhem. Caffeine, circuitry, and my own quiet brand of fury. I haven’t left this room in thirty-six hours, and I’m starting to smell like regret and war crimes. I’m in sweats and a fitted T-shirt that might’ve been clean in a previous life. My Glock is on the desk, along with an uneaten protein bar that’s dissected in half like a murder scene.

The monitors glow in front of me like pale blue ghosts that don’t blink. But I do, though. Barely.

One of the feeds catches my eye. It’s of her bedroom balcony.

Lyra.She’s standing there in nothing but a robe and those stupid, perfect heels, looking like she’s about to walk a Milan runway instead of pacing through hell. The wind curls her hair around her face as smoke trails from a cigarette she doesn’t even like. She’s all angles and elegance, even when she’s broken.

She looks like she’s made of glass and venom. I want to go to her. God, I want to go to her.

But there are things that need cracking first. I’ve been on this for hours… days even, and I can’t seem to stop the online hate.

My fingers return to the keyboard, a blur of motion and consequence. The laptop screen is lit up with thread trails from burner forums, encrypted nodes, and onion routers. This isn’t just code. It’s a warpath.

I’m not just deleting distribution links anymore. I’m erasing footprints, ghosting the digital battlefield, cleaning upthe crime scene, and rigging the floorboards with C4. One click at a time, I’m rewriting reality like a vengeful coder on a bender.

Bot lists? Gone. I isolate every known IP that ever hosted, downloaded, or reposted the video, even if it was just cached in someone’s browser for two seconds, and blacklist them. Then I take those IPs and feed them into cybersecurity forums where the admins treat spam threats like personal vendettas. Within hours, those assholes won’t be able to log into a Facebook page, let alone their bank apps.

Leaker nodes have been stripped and exposed. Some of these idiots thought VPN hopping would protect them. Amateurs. I triangulate soft metadata leaks between timestamps and encrypted pings, then ping their home routers with so much phantom packet traffic that their firewalls cry for mercy.

Declan’s trail leads back to an abandoned domain he tried to scrub six months ago. I revive it like a necromancer, upload a honeypot to trace who still accesses it, and disguise it as a portfolio site. Anyone who opens it gets a keylogger laced into their system. Surprise, motherfucker.

Pierce Holdings’ HR portal now has a hidden packet injector running in the background. It’ll send fake internal alerts about “suspicious behavior” tied to one of their VPs, someone Declan’s very cozy with. Just enough to trigger an internal audit. It’s the corporate version of lighting a match near a leaky gas line.

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