The server room pulsed with an artificial hum, low and constant like the heartbeat of the entire building. The overhead lights cast a cool, sterile glow across rows of humming towers. Liam moved through the space with practiced ease, fingertips grazing wires, ports, glass screens. But tonight, something felt… off.
It started with a simple audit. Elena, still shaken from their awkward encounter in the elevator, had barked an order to "triple-check all legacy systems" after a minor glitch in the eastern sector's billing platform. Liam had welcomed the distraction. Anything to keep his mind off the way her breath had hitched when she'd fallen against him or how she hadn't quite pulled away fast enough.
Now, as he dug deeper into the code buried behind Roth Industries' ancient firewall, his chest grew tight.
He blinked at the screen. The color drained from his face.
No. No way.
Line after line of code scrolled past. Obsolete syntax. Primitive patchwork. Sloppy encryption.
And unmistakably his.
Liam's hand froze over the keyboard, breath caught in his throat. It was a ghost. A relic from another life. From another Liam.
He had written this.
Years ago. As a teenager. Hunched over a salvaged laptop in his foster home's attic. Driven by curiosity, by bitterness, by the need to prove he could break into anything especially a billion-dollar fortress like Roth Industries.
His juvenile breach had been clean. Untraceable, or so he thought. He never took anything. Never tampered. He'd looked, mapped, and vanished. He'd told himself it was harmless.
So why was it still here?
Why hadn't Roth's top-tier IT team scrubbed it? Unless… they didn't know it was there. Unless Dominic Roth (Elena's father) left it.
And the glitch that triggered Elena's audit? It wasn't a coincidence.
The ghost wasn't just haunting the system. It was calling him back.
His pulse quickened.
Someone else could find this. Someone like Victor Crane.
Or worse.Elena.
He could hear her voice in his head now, icy and proud: You hacked us? You used me?
Liam's hand hovered over the keyboard.
He could erase it. Cover it up. No one would know. He had the skill, the clearance, the motive.
But he didn't move.
Because something about the file wasn't right.
It had been modified. Recently. A single new line inserted like a fingerprint on glass. And not by him.
> "If you're reading this, it means you're not a stranger anymore."
Liam's heart thudded.
This wasn't just code. It was a message.
From Dominic Roth.
And it was meant for him.
The air in the server room turned heavy, and Liam glanced over his shoulder instinctively. Empty. Silent. But the kind of silence that pressed in, like it knew something you didn't.
He copied the file to an encrypted flash drive, locked it inside his custom container, and shut the terminal down. His hands were steady. His mind wasn't.
He had to know what Dominic meant. Why did this message exist? And how deep this rabbit hole really went.
Because Liam wasn't just a ghost in the code anymore.
He was part of the story.
And someone had just invited him in.