Chapter 240 - 0240: What Do You Even Want?

Chapter 240: Chapter 0240: What Do You Even Want?

Graham’s Point Of View

"Everything has been leading to a dead end."

The words didn’t land softly. They dropped into the room like something heavy and metallic, the kind that didn’t bounce, just hit and stayed there, cold and final.

For a second I genuinely thought I’d misheard him. Surely a man like Scott didn’t say words like that, not without a smirk hiding somewhere behind them, waiting to announce the punchline.

"What?" The word tore out of me before I could stop it.

Scott didn’t answer immediately. He was still staring at the screen like maybe it might suddenly feel guilty and confess. Lines of code kept crawling upward, bright and alive, but useless, completely useless, all that motion and all that complexity and nothing behind it. Just blank. I watched his eyes track the lines anyway, searching out of habit, the way a man keeps patting his pockets for keys he already knows he’s lost.

My chair scraped loudly against the floor as I stood up, and I didn’t even remember deciding to move. One second I was sitting with my lungs tight and my stomach hollow, the next I was on my feet, blood rushing hard enough that I could hear it in my ears.

"That’s..." I dragged a hand over my face, pacing once before turning back to him. "That’s unbelievable."

Scott finally looked at me, and he wasn’t smug or amused or even frustrated in the way he usually was when something didn’t bend to his will. This was different, quieter, like a mechanic opening a machine and realizing the engine was never there to begin with. There was something almost apologetic in the set of his shoulders, though Scott didn’t apologize, not for work, not ever. That alone should have warned me.

"It’s what it is," he said simply.

I hated how calm he sounded, and I hated how final it felt.

"No," I snapped, shaking my head, a humorless laugh slipping out. "No, you don’t get to just say that and be done. You’re Scott. You don’t hit walls. Three years ago you traced a wire fraud ring through four banks and a fishing company in Alaska in a weekend. You sat in this office and ate my sandwich while you did it."

A ghost of something crossed his face at that, maybe the memory of it, maybe just tiredness. "And this isn’t a fraud ring," he said, already closing windows on the screen. "Fraud rings are made of people, and people are lazy. They reuse numbers, they skim, they get tired at two in the morning and leave a door open. This person didn’t leave a door open, Graham. There’s no door. There’s not even a wall where the door should be. Whoever built this treats anonymity like an art form."

"Everyone misses something."

"Everyone does," he agreed. "And I’ll keep looking. But I’m telling you what I’m seeing, and what I’m seeing is a person who spent real money to make sure today went exactly the way today went. The relays were built in advance. The number lived for eighty seconds. Even the timing of the investor emails, staggered by minutes, just long enough that it reads as panic instead of coordination. That’s not a leak. That’s choreography."

The casualness of it scraped something raw inside me.

"You’re telling me," I said slowly, each word tight, "that someone sent a message that made investors vanish overnight, and you can’t find a single thread?"

He didn’t look up. "Not a usable one."

"That’s insane."

"Mm." A noncommittal sound, too noncommittal, and I watched him start packing up, and something about that, the zipper of his bag sliding closed, the quiet efficiency of it, made the air feel thinner, like he was sealing something shut. Not just the laptop. The whole situation. I found myself wishing, absurdly, that he’d slow down, drag it out, give me more time to argue him out of whatever conclusion he’d already reached.

"You’re leaving?" I asked, disbelief edging into something sharper.

He paused, glancing at me like I’d asked something obvious. "Yeah."

"That’s it? You drop a line like that and you just walk out? Sit down. Take the other phone, the burner in the drawer, run the message through your own environment, your servers, whatever you need..."

"Graham." He said my name the way you say it to someone standing too close to a ledge. "I ran it through everything. My kit here, and I’ll run it again on my own hardware tonight, and I’ll enjoy the challenge, because this is the best work I’ve seen in years. But I want you to hear me, because I’m only going to say this once. The best work I’ve seen in years is pointed at you. Not at a bank. Not at a government. At you. And the only reason someone aims work like this at a single man instead of an institution is because the single man has something they want more than money."

The room went cold.

"What could they possibly want from me?"

Scott slung the strap of his bag over his shoulder, movements unhurried and deliberate, like he wasn’t running from the problem, just stepping away from something already decided. "That’s not my department," he said. "But you know what your message said. Do what’s right. Whatever ’right’ is, you’re apparently the only one in this city who doesn’t need it explained."

Before heading for the door, he stopped, and that alone made something cold slide down my spine, because Scott didn’t do dramatic pauses. He just moved. Watching him hesitate felt like watching a man who never flinched suddenly check twice before crossing the street.

"I’d advise you to do whatever the message says," he said.

The words were casual, but they hit wrong. Very wrong.

I frowned. "Excuse me?"

He met my eyes then, and whatever I saw there made my chest tighten. Not fear exactly, but recognition, like a hunter seeing another predator’s tracks in the snow.

"Because from what I can see," he went on, voice lower now, stripped of its usual bite, "the person behind this isn’t someone you want to play games with."

I felt something ugly stir in my stomach. "You don’t even know who it is," I said, forcing a scoff that didn’t quite land.

Scott held my gaze. "Exactly."

The room went very still.

"If someone of my expertise can’t even trace the message," he continued, not breaking eye contact, "then whoever did this is operating on a level most people don’t even realize exists. And Graham, people on that level don’t send warnings for fun. That message was a courtesy. The fact that they bothered to be polite should tell you how bad the second message gets."

"What second message?"

"There’s always a second message," he said. "The first one’s for your pride. The second one’s for your understanding."

He adjusted the strap on his shoulder, then added, almost as an afterthought, "Good luck."

And just like that, he turned and walked out, no grand exit and no lingering glance and no last-minute solution tossed over his shoulder. The door clicked shut behind him with a soft, ordinary sound that felt completely out of place in the middle of something this heavy. For a man who’d spent a decade unraveling other people’s secrets, he left mine wide open and walked away from it without a backward glance, and somehow that scared me more than anything he’d said.

I stood there staring at the door, at the exact spot where he’d disappeared, waiting for it to open again, waiting for him to come back in and say he’d forgotten something, a cable, a charger, a final piece of reassurance, something that would make this feel less real. But nothing happened, just silence, the kind that expands and presses against your ribs. I didn’t realize how hard I was breathing until I dragged a hand down my face and felt the heat there, my skin feeling too tight, like it didn’t quite fit anymore.

What the hell was that? What the hell was any of this?

I let out a short laugh that sounded completely unhinged in the empty office. "Unbelievable," I muttered, but the word tasted hollow now and weak, because this wasn’t just unbelievable. It was real, and that made it worse.

I walked toward the desk slowly, each step heavy, like gravity had decided to double just for me, and my gaze dropped to the phone lying there, small and harmless-looking, a stupid little rectangle that had just torn through weeks of stability in under twenty-four hours. I picked it up, and it felt colder than it should have, as though it had been waiting there the whole time, patient, indifferent to the chaos it had caused.

"What do you even want?" I murmured under my breath, staring at the blank screen like it might answer if I stared long enough, but there was no response, just my reflection staring back, distorted and warped by the glass.

A flicker of anger sparked low in my chest, small at first and then hotter and sharper and familiar, because fear and I had never gotten along. I didn’t do well with things I couldn’t see and couldn’t touch and couldn’t fight, and this was smoke with no face and no name and no direction, just consequences. I started pacing again, slower this time, my fingers tightening around the phone while my mind replayed Scott’s words, each repetition digging deeper under my skin. Do whatever the message says. The person behind this isn’t someone you want to play games with. If I can’t trace it...

I swore under my breath, dragging a hand through my hair. "No. No, screw that."

The anger burned hotter now, pushing back against the unease trying to creep in. Whoever this was, they didn’t get to do this from the shadows. They didn’t get to pull strings and watch me dance like a puppet, and if they had a problem, they could show their damn face.

"Whoever the fuck you are," I muttered, my voice low but shaking with restrained fury, "come out and say it."

The words echoed faintly off the glass walls, and there was no answer, of course not. I laughed again, harsher this time, the sound scraping my throat on the way out, my grip on the phone tightening until my knuckles went pale.

"Instead of hiding behind encrypted bullshit and untraceable IP addresses," I went on, the frustration finally spilling over, raw and ugly, "and random goddamn texts."

My chest rose and fell sharply, and the room felt smaller now, or maybe I was just running out of space inside my own head. Nothing about this made sense, not the silence and not the precision and not the fact that Scott had walked out with nothing, and that more than anything gnawed at me, because if he couldn’t touch it, then what the hell was I dealing with?

I stared at the door again, like answers might be written into the grain of the wood if I looked long enough, like maybe this was some elaborate joke and someone would burst in laughing any second. But deep down, I already knew. This wasn’t a joke. It was something worse, something patient, something deliberate, and I was standing right in the middle of it without a single clue where the edges were.

The thought settled into my bones with a weight I didn’t know how to carry, and for the first time in years, I felt genuinely, completely alone in a room I’d built with my own two hands.

A slow, disbelieving breath left me as I dragged a hand down my face again, my eyes burning now from staring too long and thinking too hard and knowing too little.

"This is insane," I muttered hoarsely, the words falling into the empty room like a confession. My jaw tightened, my chest tight with something that wasn’t quite fear and wasn’t quite rage, something tangled between the two, something that felt disturbingly close to grief for a version of my life that had existed only hours ago. I shook my head once, sharply, like that might snap reality back into place. "Everything about it."