Total pages in book: 58
Estimated words: 60921 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 60921 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
“You didn’t go,” I say, stating the obvious.
“Nope.” She taps the pen against her knee. “Okay, Hayes, you get one follow-up.”
“Why not?” I ask immediately.
That knocks the smile off her face, just a little.
She looks down, pen cap between her teeth, thinking. When she looks back up, her eyes are softer.
“Because I was scared,” she says quietly. “Like… big scared. The kind that disguises itself as a hundred little reasons that all sound logical. Money. Family. Timing. But really? I didn’t think I was… big enough for it. Or good enough. Or that I deserved it.”
A muscle jumps in my jaw.
“You deserved it,” I say.
She shrugs one shoulder. “Maybe. But I stayed. Got a decent job. Joined a Krav Maga gym so I wouldn’t feel like a scared kid all the time. Found some vigilantes to harass. Could’ve gone worse.”
You almost left.
The thought sits heavy.
I would’ve noticed her absence immediately, I realize. The apartment would’ve been quieter. Gage would’ve been more on edge. The air around us would have been less electric.
And she never said a word.
Guilt pricks. How much else have I missed while I was too busy playing lone wolf superhero in front of a monitor?
She flicks the notebook toward me. “Your turn.”
I hesitate.
This is the part I don’t like. The part where the shine comes off and people see the mess underneath. Lark’s been nursing a crush on the sanitized version of me for years—shadowy hacker, sharp banter, occasional saves.
She doesn’t need to know what the code looks like behind the front end.
But the whole point of this stupid game is to stop hiding.
“One patch note, huh?” I say.
“One,” she confirms. “No PR spin.”
I think about giving her something light—my first screen name, the fact that I hate bananas, something easy.
Instead, what comes out is:
“Knight v2.0 learned to code for money at fourteen because I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
Her expression changes.
I commit now, so I keep going.
“My mom took off when I was ten,” I say. “Dad was… around, technically. Mostly drunk, sometimes mean. Rent got harder. Bills piled. By thirteen I was couch-hopping between classmates’ houses more nights than I slept in my own bed. Your brother was the only reason I didn’t end up in a shelter. He snuck me leftovers, lent me his hoodie, made up excuses for why I was always there.”
I stare past her at the wall, seeing a different room entirely.
“I realized fast that a kid with a laptop and poor impulse control could make money,” I say. “Not legal money. Script kiddie stuff at first. Data scraping, brute-forcing accounts, running little fraud schemes for people who didn’t ask questions. I got good at it. Too good. Didn’t care who I hurt as long as I got paid.”
I drag my gaze back to her face.
She’s watching me like I’ve just rewritten her favorite story. Not with disgust. Not with fear.
Just… focus.
“You get one question,” I remind her.
“Who stopped you?” she asks, right away.
I huff out a breath.
Of course she goes straight for the soft spot.
“Gage,” I say. “Kind of. He found out something I was doing for a guy he knew. Confronted me. I told him to back off. We didn’t talk for a week.”
She nods, like she remembers. She probably does—we were at their house less that week.
“Then his dad… your dad… found out too,” I continue. “I was waiting for him to kick me out. To tell me I wasn’t welcome in his house, around you. Instead he dragged me down to the precinct—”
Her eyes widen. “He what?”
“—and sat me in front of a detective he’d worked cases with. Guy read me the riot act. Laid out exactly how fast I’d end up in juvie or worse if I kept freelancing for criminals. Then he told me if I wanted to be useful, I could start by helping them instead.”
A corner of my mouth lifts, remembering.
“He made me run through my scripts. Showed me the back end on how real investigations work. It was the first time an adult looked at what I could do and didn’t immediately treat me like a walking problem. Just… a tool that could be pointed somewhere better.”
I clear my throat.
“I cleaned up my act after that,” I say. “Mostly. Not all at once. Still relapsed into stupid shit sometimes. But your living room was the first place I stayed that felt like… not just a pit stop. So I tried to be someone who wouldn’t get banned from it.”
Lark’s eyes shine.
“Knight,” she says, voice soft, “why didn’t you ever tell me that?”
I shrug, uncomfortable. “Kids don’t need to hear about the shitty parts of the adults in their orbit. I wasn’t going to unload that on you at fourteen.”
“I wasn’t a kid,” she argues.
“You were to me.”
“I still am to you,” she mutters. “Apparently.”