The glow from Liam's monitor bathed the darkened server room in soft blue light. Everyone had gone home hours ago, but he sat alone still, silent surrounded by the quiet hum of machines and the unrelenting scroll of old code on the screen before him.
Lines of data flickered, decades-old fragments unearthed from an encrypted partition he'd forgotten existed. But the signature embedded in the code was unmistakable.
His.
His teenage alias: 0N1_Hex.
He stared at it, gut-twisting.
He remembered the night clearly sixteen years old, angry, brilliant, and reckless. Fueled by the thrill of cracking into something no one else could. Roth Industries had been the Everest of corporate networks. A fortress. An obsession. And he'd broken in not to destroy, but to prove he could.
He hadn't stolen anything. Not then.
But he'd looked. And what he saw corporate firewalls hiding offshore transfers, black budgets, and names he didn't understand had unsettled him enough to flee back into the shadows.
Back then, Dominic Roth was just a name. A symbol of power. Not Elena's father. Not the man whose death had started this spiral. And certainly not the person who might've known Liam had ever been there.
But now…
Now he wasn't just some ghost in the code. He was here. Inside Roth Industries, under his real name, building trust with the daughter of the man he once digitally trespassed.
Liam ran a hand over his jaw, trying to slow his breathing.
Was this fate? Irony? Or a setup?
He double-checked the metadata. This archive had been tucked deep inside a legacy server, likely missed in the last decade of audits. But someone had reactivated the file. Last accessed: 3 days ago.
He hadn't been the first to open it.
"Shit," he muttered, fingers dancing over keys.
He initiated a trace but the IP that accessed the archive was masked. Sophisticated. Someone didn't want to be found.
He leaned back in his chair, heart pounding.
If Victor or anyone else on the board discovered this connection between Liam Carter and 0N1_Hex, it wouldn't matter that he'd done no damage. They'd bury him. And Elena would never trust him again.
He stood abruptly, pacing the length of the room, then stopped at the glass panel that overlooked the city. Lights glitter across the skyline. Somewhere out there, Elena was probably still in her penthouse reading Dominic's journal, or fighting to stay ahead of the sharks at her throat.
And here he was, carrying a secret that could shatter her.
A secret she deserved to know.
But how could he tell her?
Would she see it as a betrayal? As a manipulation? Would she look at him the way she did Victor cold, guarded, and bitter?
Liam clenched his fists.
He'd come into Roth to disappear to be invisible, a technician in the background. But he couldn't stay invisible anymore.
Not with her.
Not with the code screaming that the past wasn't finished with him.
Suddenly, the server room door creaked open.
He turned fast.too fast and exhaled when he saw Sophie.
She tilted her head, eyeing him carefully. "You're still here?"
"I could say the same to you."
She crossed her arms. "I left my badge upstairs. Came back for it. You okay?"
He hesitated. "Yeah. Just… working through old files."
Sophie didn't press. But as she turned to leave, she paused at the door.
"Elena trusts you," she said softly. "Don't give her a reason not to."
Then she was gone.
Liam stood there, alone again, the monitor still glowing with his past.
And all he could think was:
What if I already have?