Nathan didn’t move at first. He couldn’t. The figure beside Liam stepped fully into the dim light of the abandoned relay room, and for a moment Nathan’s mind rejected what his eyes were showing him. Cassandra’s breath hitched softly beside him. Even Marjorie, listening through the earpiece, whispered a stunned, “No… that can’t be.”But it was.The man standing next to Liam wasn’t a stranger. He wasn’t a new hired threat. He wasn’t one more ghost from some forgotten branch of the Hayes empire.He was blood.Dorian Hayes.Nathan’s uncle.The same uncle who vanished years ago after the internal war that tore the company apart. The architect who designed the earliest generation of Hayes systems. The man everyone assumed had died in an off-grid crash—an incident Nathan now realized may never have been an accident.Dorian looked older, sharper, colder. Time had carved new lines on his face, but his eyes were the same—calculating, precise, always watching.Nathan finally found his voice. “Yo

The industrial zone stretched before them, a maze of metal girders, unused conveyor belts, and half-collapsed warehouses. Nathan and Cassandra moved carefully along a narrow service corridor, each step measured, eyes scanning every shadow. Rina followed behind, tablet in hand, feeding live interference scans to Nathan’s portable console.“This place hasn’t seen human traffic in years,” Rina whispered. “If Liam has booby-trapped it, it won’t be obvious.”Nathan nodded, his jaw tight. “Every corner, every beam, every corridor—we assume it’s rigged. We can’t rush. We can’t react. We have to anticipate.”Cassandra’s gaze swept the vast interior. “He wants us tense, nervous. He wants fear to cloud our judgment.”“And he’s already getting it,” Nathan muttered, adjusting his tactical gloves. “But not enough to break us.”They paused at the first junction. The corridor split, one side leading to a partially collapsed stairwell, the other dipping into darkness beneath a rusted platform. Nathan

Nathan sat at the central console of the safehouse, the faint glow of multiple monitors illuminating his face. Cassandra leaned against the table beside him, her tablet displaying anomaly reports and predictive movement patterns from Liam’s last known locations. Rina hovered nearby, fingers dancing across the interface as she analyzed the traces of digital activity that Liam had left behind.“This is his pattern,” Rina said, her voice calm but edged with concern. “Every time we think we’ve cornered him, he adapts. He doesn’t just react—he anticipates. But I’ve narrowed the variables.”Nathan exhaled slowly, eyes fixed on the fluctuating lines of code. “Variables are one thing. Motivation is another. We can predict his moves digitally, but understanding what drives him… that’s something else entirely.”Cassandra tapped her tablet. “I’ve been thinking about that. He isn’t just seeking revenge or power. He’s obsessed with proving himself—to you, to the world, and maybe even to himself. I

Nathan stood in the central command room, the hum of servers and the faint glow of monitors casting long shadows across the walls. The remnants of the previous confrontation with Liam lingered in every corner—encrypted logs, suppressed alerts, and the still-active defensive grids humming quietly as if they were aware of the storm still to come. Cassandra moved beside him, tablet in hand, her expression a mixture of exhaustion and fierce determination. She hadn’t slept in hours, but there was no trace of fatigue in her sharp eyes, only calculation.“Every node is reporting normal activity,” she said, scrolling through the latest data streams. “For now. But I’m picking up subtle anomalies in the secondary access points. Nothing catastrophic yet, but it’s the kind of subtlety only someone who knows our systems inside and out could manage.”Nathan’s hands hovered over the console, fingers brushing lightly across the surface. “Liam,” he murmured. The name sounded like a warning, a curse, a

Nathan didn’t sleep that night. He tried—God, he tried—but every time he closed his eyes, Legacy’s simulated breach replayed in sharp fragments. Liam’s voice echoing through corrupted code. Cassandra’s warning tightening around his ribs. The image of the system tearing itself apart from the inside.By dawn, his head throbbed. He sat in the quiet of the control room, elbows on his knees, hands locked together as he stared at the dim monitors. The compound was still. Outside, the desert wind tugged softly at the perimeter sensors. For once, nothing was screaming.But inside Nathan, everything was.He felt it when the door opened behind him—Cassandra’s footsteps, careful and measured. She always walked with that quiet alertness, as if her mind stayed one step ahead of her body.“You didn’t sleep,” she said gently.Nathan let out a humorless breath. “Didn’t seem like the safest option.”Cassandra sat beside him, turning her chair so she faced him directly. “Yesterday shook you.”“It shook