Fuck. He grinned so wide his face hurt. “Executable.”
“Yes!” Her triumphant cry filling the room, she scrambled up and over the back of the couch and rounded the corner of the desk to launch herself at him. “We did it!”
Their chests collided in a hard embrace that stole his breath from the impact, and she wrapped her arms and legs around him tight enough to restrict the flow of blood to his upper body.
He didn’t care.
Prepared to hold her until the end of time, he squeezed her to him and buried his face in her hair. “We did it,” she whispered again, her voice cracking with a level of disbelief and relief he felt down deep.
“You did it,” he whispered back, every syllable carved from the truth.
Without Becca. Without her forethought. Her brilliance. Her sacrifices. There’d be no kill switch. No black rose. No way to stop Dominion. No future for humankind. She had literally saved the world and everyone in it.
Adam approached, and refusing to let Becca go, Jay stepped out of the way to let him pass by. “Is that it?” he asked, bending over to take a closer look at the unassuming file. “That’s the kill switch? It doesn’t look like much, does it?”
“Spoken like a true computer illiterate,” Gray scoffed, and Becca started to giggle. Then laugh. Then outright cackle as the rest of the team looked on, smiling like the tension and tragedies that had plagued them for the past two years had been a mere inconvenience.
“So what’s next?” Cody asked. “How do we—and by we, I mean you two”—he waggled his finger between Jay and Becca—“unleash the beast?”
“We push the black rose through Google’s Tier One DNS relay,” Jay replied. “Their servers sit at the core of global internet routing. Propagating from there means the kill switch will have top-level distribution via CDN mirrors, root server injections, the whole stack. It’ll spread faster than Dominion, and once they come into contact, the virus will start to collapse its structure from the inside out until it no longer exists.”
“How fast?” Jamie asked.
“Airborne fast,” Jay replied. “The kill switch will piggyback onto every legitimate DNS request.”
“Translation?” Adam requested.
“Every time someone connects to the Internet, searches on Amazon, streams Netflix, or refreshes a news page—they’ll unknowingly pull black rose fragments into a local cache where the code reassembles and waits for Dominion’s unique packet signature. Then boom, the rose blooms, the trigger activates, and when the virus tries to rewrite its own code in response to the threat, it falls into a feedback loop.”
“It’s simple,” Becca added, breaking the complex concept down even further as she unhooked her ankles and stretched her feet to the floor. “It’s like trapping the virus in a mirror and then shattering it to dust.”
“Maybe simple for you,” Gray grumbled.
“So what are we waiting for?” Chase grinned.
“Yeah,” Zander agreed. “Light it up, and let’s go the fuck home.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Jamie added.
“What do you say, Bec?” Jay pulled the computer chair out and gestured for her to sit. “Are you ready to go home?”
“Fucking right I am.”
“How long do you need?” Adam asked.
She sat, and grinning up at him, she entwined her fingers and cracked her knuckles. “Ten minutes. Tops.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
Back at the JTT’s secure base in Montana, Jay shifted in his boardroom chair, arms folded, jaw tight. Christ, he needed sleep. They all did. Unfortunately, there were still briefings to sit through, loose ends to tie off, and aftershocks to brace for.
Attention divided, he half-listened to his former CIA director while his thoughts remained upstairs with Becca. Six days since she’d saved the world, and she was spiraling.
She hadn’t left their bedroom since they got back. No pretending. No pushing through. No faking her way toward healing. Not this time. Not with wounds that ran deeper than flesh, old traumas torn wide open, and new ones layered over them like salt on raw skin.
Adrift in a sea of unexpected losses and grief, she’d retreated inside herself. Fortified her defenses. Erected walls so high—no matter how hard he tried—he couldn’t reach her, and with every passing hour, his fears grew.
She needed to fight her way back from the abyss.
