Revenge Wears a Soft Smile

way. He spent the next few hours sendin

Ava. A house in the hills, a real

ly large mansion, the kind of place Chloe would find acceptable.

to work another day in your life unless you want to,"

fe for us while actively planning a life with her. He saw me as a bank account and a stepping stone, and his clumsy attempts to hide it were almost insulting. He thou

Project Titan. I put everything in a single, encrypted file: the source code, the user data analytics, the marketing projections

would give me a backdoor to any system the code was installed on. It was my own creation, a piece of work so elegant and

h a simple message: "Here's everything. G

gan to era

a over every sector of the hard drive seven times. By the time it was done, not even the best data recovery specialists in the world could retriev

ent of paranoia that I later dismissed. It contained cash, a fake passport and ID, a burner phone, and a change of simple, non-descript clothes. I changed into a plain

e bought me, the awards on the shelf. They were all part of a life th

It had only one number saved in it. A number I hadn't called in over a decade. A number

there was no turning back. I wasn't just leaving Liam; I was running toward the

had taught me when I was a teenager, back when I was just a kid lear

b is broken. Nyx

it

not to this phone. It was a signal flare, a message

elevator. I took the stairs, all forty-two flights down to the ground floor, my footsteps echoing in the empty concrete well. It was a long, hard de

, melted into the lunchtime crowd, and disappeared. He would come back to the apartment expecting his qu

changed. And I was no longer playing for a future with h