My husband walked into my hospital room after my near-fatal car accident—not to comfort me, but to demand that I get out of bed and stop costing him money. He tried to drag my broken body home until the door opened and he came face-to-face with the one man he never should have challenged: my father, a hidden special operations officer. / Chapter 53 / 60

Chapter 53 - The Server Core

The air inside the central tower was freezing, artificially chilled to keep the massive supercomputers from overheating. We moved silently down the pristine white hallway, bypassing the security cameras by hugging the blind spots Jax had highlighted on the stolen schematics.

We reached the main server core—a massive, circular room dominated by a towering, glowing pillar of fiber-optic cables and quantum processors. It pulsed with a cold, blue light, humming with the terrifying power of a caged god.

"This is it," Elena whispered, stepping into the room. "The Aegis Mainframe."

I walked over to the central console. A glass port waited empty, clearly designed to receive the crystal drive I carried in my pack.

"Set the C4," I ordered, unzipping my bag. "Place the charges on the main coolant lines and the central support beams. We blow this room, the servers melt down, and the entire rig collapses into the ocean."

Elena moved quickly, slapping blocks of plastic explosives onto the massive pipes running along the ceiling. I approached the central terminal, intending to plug in Jax’s scrambler drive to disable the rig’s localized defense grid before the explosion.

But as I reached for the console, a massive shadow fell over me.

"I was wondering if you would actually make it this far, Ms. Hayes," a deep, gravelly voice echoed through the server room.

I spun around, drawing my pistol.

Standing in the doorway was a man the size of a freight train. He wore heavy tactical armor and carried a massive, drum-fed auto-shotgun. His face was heavily scarred, and his left eye was replaced by a glowing, red cybernetic optic.