The Internet Café

The 24-hour diner on the edge of the county line smelled of stale grease and industrial-strength floor cleaner, but to me, it smelled like an armory. I sat in a corner booth, the fake wood table sticky under my forearms, and pulled out the backup tablet. My hands were steady now—the cold, analytical precision of a CFO overriding the terror of the woman who had just leapt from a second-story balcony to save her life.

Mark thought he had won because he had the physical world. He had the house, the safe, and the gun. He even had the law, courtesy of a well-placed welfare check. But Mark was a builder of wood and stone, and he had forgotten that I was the architect of the air.

I logged into the tablet using a tiered VPN that Leo had taught me to use weeks ago. My fingers flew over the glass. I bypassed the domestic firewall of Vance Construction, entering through a backdoor I’d left open in the payroll server three months ago when I first saw the 'Renovation' folder sync.

I didn't head for the operating accounts. Mark would have those frozen or flagged. Instead, I navigated to the ghost node: Isabella Holdings.

The login screen was a simple, brutalist gray.

*USERNAME: PORTER_1980.*
*PASSWORD: **********.*

I entered the strings of numbers I had memorized from the RSA token before Mark snatched it back. 8-4-2-1-9-9. The digits pulsed in my mind, a rhythmic cadence of betrayal.

*ACCESS GRANTED.*

The dashboard loaded, and the number hit me like a physical breath of air. $3,214,500.00. It was all there. The liquidated assets, the stolen payroll, the life insurance premiums—the entire value of the Vance family, condensed into a single digital hoard.

Mark was likely at a private airfield right now, checking his watch, waiting for the sun to rise so he could board a plane with my sister and the child he’d named after his theft. He was counting on this money to be his fresh start. He was counting on me being too "unstable" to remember the keys to the vault.

I didn't hesitate. I opened the transfer portal.

I didn't move the money to my own account—that would look like the embezzlement he’d already accused me of. Instead, I routed it to a restricted escrow account I had set up under the names of Leo and Mia Vance, with a secondary notification trigger to the FBI’s regional financial crimes division.

If I couldn't have the life I built, neither could he.

I watched the progress bar crawl across the screen, the flickering fluorescent lights of the diner buzzing in sync with my heartbeat. 98%... 99%