The terminal screen bathed the room in a cold, artificial light, casting long shadows of the wreckage we had made. My father's face, captured in that 'Handshake 0.0' file, remained frozen on the display—a ghost of a man who saw his daughter as an inheritance rather than a person.
Yuri appeared in the doorway of the server room. He had cleaned the blood from his face, but he couldn't wash away the look of a man who had just seen his own history rewritten as a lie. He walked toward me, his movements heavy. He looked at the frozen image of my father on the screen.
"He lied to me, too," Yuri said softly. "My father told me we were protectors. He told me the Volkovs were the only ones who could keep the world's most dangerous secrets safe. He didn't tell me we were the ones who helped create them."
I looked down at the "Delete" key. The weight of it felt like a mountain. "Everyone was in on it, Yuri. The collision, the 'protection,' the mansion... it was all just a long-term storage solution for a weapon they hadn't learned how to fire yet."
I looked at him—the man who had been my jailer, my savior, and finally, my lover. The "smut" of the previous hours, the raw and desperate collision of our bodies, felt different now. It wasn't just survival; it was the only honest thing either of us had ever done. In a world of programmed responses and encrypted lives, that hunger was the only thing they hadn't been able to simulate.
"If you press that key," Yuri said, stepping closer until I could feel the heat radiating from him, "the 'Phoenix Protocol' is gone forever. The world will never know what they did to you. The UNI directors will scurry back into the shadows. Mikhail will be a free man because the evidence will vanish."
"I know," I whispered. "But if I don't press it, the code stays alive. And as long as the code lives, someone will always come for the 'Key.' Another girl will be hit by another truck. Another father will sell his soul for a seat at the table."
I looked at the 'Delete' key, then back at Yuri. "I don't want to be the fire anymore, Yuri. I just want to be Jessy."
Yuri reached out, his large, scarred hand covering mine over the keyboard. For a moment, we stayed like that—two broken parts of a machine that had finally decided to stop working.
"Then let's finish it," he said.
Together, we pressed the key.
The monitors didn't just go black; they flickered and died with a final, pathetic spark. The hum of the cooling fans slowed to a stop. The silence that followed was absolute. The "Ghost Code," the Volkov Ledger, and the blueprints for my own mind were gone.
I turned into Yuri's arms, burying my face in the crook of his neck. He held me with a strength that felt like it could hold back the world.
"What now?" I asked into the dark.
"Now," Yuri said, pulling back to look into my eyes, his gaze finally clear of the ice that had defined him for so long. "We walk out of here. We find your mother. And we see if there's a life for people who have no secrets left to tell."
We walked out of the penthouse together, leaving the ruins of our empires behind. As the elevator doors closed on the 48th floor, the morning sun finally broke over the horizon, clear and bright, turning the glass towers of Manhattan into pillars of gold.
For the first time in three years, I didn't feel the code humming in my blood. I just felt the cold morning air, the weight of Yuri's hand in mine, and the terrifying, beautiful uncertainty of a new beginning.