“Not gonna happen.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I designed it to be a reflection of you. Delicate on the outside. Strong on the inside. Trust me, buttercup. This”—he tapped his finger against the gold on her wrist—“isn’t coming off unless you want it to.”
CHAPTERTHIRTY-ONE
Next to his computer keyboard,Jay’s phone pinged a notification, the screen lighting up with an incoming text message from Eve. Family meeting in the great room. Her way of bringing everyone together after Adam briefed her on the extent of the threat they faced.
A threat he had a hand in creating.
A hit of guilt had his insides twisting. He hadn’t known. Fuck his off-the-charts IQ. Screw his advanced computer skills. Stick a dick in his eidetic memory. He hadn’t known. Too caught up in the drama of his own life to consider the possibility of Dominion being actualized, he hadn’t paused to fully appreciate what would happen if the wrong people got their hands on the codes.
Besides, it had been an exercise in theory, for fuck sakes.
The scripts were never meant to be combined. Never meant to be viable. Never meant to be commandeered by a select few. The MIT project had been shut down. The student group disbanded.
Xiu Li’s departure from the program not long after should have been a red flag. But what did he know? Nothing. He’d just been a cocky kid, too full of himself to see the truth dangling right in front of him.
Diane Heughan had used him. He’d trusted her, and she’d lied to him. Shipping him off to MIT instead of prison had been for her benefit—not his—and now look at the mess they were in.
Incarcerating his ass would have been the smarter choice.
Anger at Diane, the CIA, Jonas Johnson, and the assholes behind the Imperium Council replaced his guilt as he hammered his fingers over the keyboard, typing lines of code from memory. He didn’t need his brain to focus to get the sequence right, he’d been doing this for so long now, he communicated better in JavaScript than he did in English.
He hit enter, sent his encrypted message into the ether, and sat back with his eyes glued to the screen while he waited for a response. Her reply came back in the equivalent of a fuck you typed in all caps as the characters on his screen morphed into a digital image of the middle finger aimed straight at him.
Safe to say, Rebecca wasn’t happy about his attempt to connect—or rather—attempts. He’d been trying to covertly discover her location for months to no avail. An expert at covering her tracks, she’d managed to stay hidden behind her firewalls, despite his throwing his best malware at her.
Four days ago, he’d given up all efforts at subterfuge, revealed his identity, and gone after her hard. So far, she’d managed to outmaneuver him, evading his attempts to break into her systems to discover her location.
Yeah, she’d been a talented coder before. Back when they went to MIT, and she’d studied international politics.
She was even better now.
And he needed her.
Without Becca, there was no key.
No kill switch. No way to control the virus. No way to stop it. No way to prevent the catastrophic meltdown of the world’s supercomputers. Without her codes combined with his, they were dead in the water.
The JTT, Diane, the CIA, his MIT team all had one thing wrong when it came to Jay’s role in the project. He was the lock. Not the key. Two sets of code were required to catch and control the virus.
An extra precaution he’d taken at the time, never thinking about the possible implications of involving his girlfriend in a hypothetical exercise. And a secret he’d never shared. No one knew of her involvement in the project. No one knew she held the key to controlling Dominion in her gorgeous head.
Not even her evil twin Maya—his classmate and the reason Becca had ended their relationship—knew the truth.
Yeah, he needed Becca.
Needed her found and brought to the JTT’s Montana base.
And not just because she held the key.
She knew something. She had to. Why else would she be gathering intel on Johnson by hacking into secure databases she had no business accessing? He’d caught wind of her shortly after they’d fled Palo Pinto, recognizing a string of code in a computer language rarely used anymore.
He’d known it was her the moment their programs crossed paths, and he’d been searching for her ever since. Now? Now that Diane had revealed the truth about what they were facing, it was time for the gloves to come off. Without Becca, there’d be no stopping the virus.
Dominion was a sophisticated piece of malware. A learning software designed to infiltrate and infect any computer or device connected to the internet, replicating faster and faster and spreading farther and farther the longer it went left unchecked.
