Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 36: Trojan Part 2

The words were simple. Not a plea — Marcus Hayes did not make pleas. Not a performance of sincerity. Just two words in the direct, undecorated tone of a man who meant them specifically and had chosen them because they were the accurate thing to say.

Diana looked at him.

Something happened in the space between the words and her response — a brief, involuntary pause that she didn't intend and didn't know how to account for. Something about the way he said it. The absence of justification around it, the complete lack of the elaborate scaffolding that people built around statements they weren't sure of.

He had said it the way people said things they knew were true.

She thought about the hundred million Ryan had offered him.

She thought about Catherine's ten million and the modest smile and that wouldn't cover my monthly expenses.

She thought about a man who turned down Elizabeth Steel's f*e this morning without hesitating.

"You turned down more than you're supposedly stealing," she said.

"Yes," Marcus said.

She looked at him.

"That doesn't prove anything," she said. But the certainty in her voice had developed a small, structural crack that she was aware of and could not immediately repair.

"I know," Marcus said. "But it's worth thinking about." He paused. "May I see your phone?"

Diana blinked. "What?"

"Your phone." He held out his hand — the plain, direct gesture of someone making a request they consider reasonable. "I want to look at something."

"Why?"

"Because I have a theory," Marcus said, "and your phone will either confirm it or it won't."

Diana looked at his outstretched hand.

She looked at his face.

She thought about everything she knew about him — which was simultaneously more than she had expected to know at this point and less than she needed to know to feel secure about any of it — and made the calculation that had nothing to do with trust and everything to do with the fact that if he was right, she needed to know, and if he was wrong, she would still have the same evidence she had now.

She picked up her phone from the counter.

She held it for a moment.

Then she put it in his hand.

Marcus looked at the screen. He navigated through it with the focused, practiced efficiency of someone who knew exactly where they were going and what they were looking for — not the hunting exploration of someone learning a device, but the direct path of someone who has done this before in contexts where speed mattered.

Diana watched him.

He went through three layers of the phone's system settings, then opened a diagnostic she hadn't known existed, then navigated to something she didn't recognize and stopped.

He looked at the screen for a moment.

Then he looked up at her.

"Your phone has been compromised," he said. "There's a trojan in the system — keystroke logging software, the kind that captures everything you type. Banking credentials, login information, authorization codes." He turned the screen toward her so she could see it — a line of code embedded in a background process, running silently behind every application she used. "This has been in here for at least two weeks. Possibly longer."

Diana looked at the screen.

The line of code was there. Small. Patient. Invisible to anyone who wasn't looking for it.

"Someone," Marcus said quietly, "has had access to everything you've typed on this phone. Your banking portals. Your company login. Your authorization credentials." He met her eyes. "They didn't need your permission to move money from your account. They had your password."

The kitchen was absolutely silent.

Diana looked at the code on her own phone's screen and felt the floor of her certainty shift — not collapse, but shift, the way ground shifts when what you thought was solid turns out to be built on something that has been quietly moving underneath it.

"Who," she said.

Marcus looked at her steadily.

"That," he said, "is what we need to find out."