CHAPTER 130: BURIED DEEP

–Livana–

I detest how Tyrona waltzes into the café like she owns the floor tiles and the oxygen, her heels striking the marble as though they were coded to execute a virus upon entry. And then—oh, what a surprise—she flirts with Damon. I shouldn’t care. Logically, I shouldn’t. But that bastard—yes, my husband—is flipping some switch in my circuitry that makes me territorial. Yes, he is the one making me territorial, like a firewall suddenly triggered by malicious traffic. Maybe it started the moment his infuriating friends decided to parade women in front of him—women who, I noticed, suspiciously share my features: same shade of hair, similar facial geometry, almost like a poor-quality clone someone rushed out before a launch date.

And then, the audacity. The way he laughed—crazily, almost manically—with Tyrona, letting his voice bounce off the walls as if he had rewritten the script of fidelity and replaced it with beta-testing infidelity. His hand brushed that venomous woman’s arm; I saw it—or at least, I didn’t need sight to see it. The air itself hissed when he touched her. I clicked my tongue, a quiet syntax error in this so-called marriage, and forced myself to push the thought aside.

Tonight, Damon will not get what he craves. His fantasies will timeout. I only hope I don’t debug his clinginess and accidentally let him in again.

I don’t love him. There—I compiled the truth, plain and executable. I don’t love that asshole. He can fantasize about other women all he wants, but he cannot have them. Or rather, he can—but that would be the end of our little loop of intimacy.

"You look annoyed," Deanne commented, her voice casual, almost amused—like she had root access to my mind’s processes.

"I don’t want to see that nonsense," I replied flatly.

"Hmm," she hummed, that sly curve of a laugh escaping her lips, "here I was thinking you were jealous."

I turned my face toward her with my signature deadpan—debug mode activated—and then quietly resumed my work. Liquidation reports sprawled before me, numbers neat as code lines, waiting to be read, audited, or perhaps exploited.

Then, as though the universe wanted to remind me I am not allowed peace, a glowing advertisement popped on the massive LCD monitor across my desk: the new CEO’s face, bold and immaculate. He is undoubtedly competent—his work speaks for itself—but there’s something... off. Something my gut, my silent algorithm, keeps flagging but won’t define.

We’ve run backgrounds on him. Several times. Clean. Perfectly clean. Too clean—like a hard drive wiped right before an investigation.

"What?" Deanne raised a brow. "Why are you staring at the screen as if you’re about to decompile his soul?"

"He looks familiar," I murmured.

"Hmm, maybe because his father used to work here? Besides, he climbed the ladder legitimately. Branch to branch, step by step—he earned the spot. But if you have something against him... or if your gut is pinging, I trust your instinct. You always know where the bugs are hiding."

I leaned back in my chair, eyes tracing the sharp lines of his face displayed across the room. He is handsome—objectively, frustratingly so. But could he be the prodigy my mother once mentioned? Her voice comes back to me, fragments of a conversation half-remembered, like corrupted data waiting for recovery. I can’t recall his name. My mother never wrote it down—at least not in the documents I’ve decoded so far. I’ll need to retrieve her journal.

"You’re making me curious and nervous at the same time," Deanne muttered, her tone a mix of exasperation and intrigue.

"Indeed," I said, arms crossing like a gate closing on an unsecured connection. "I’ll think about it. I’ll remember where I saw him." I brushed it aside for now and returned to the paper trail.

Then Deanne dropped the payload: "Your husband is here."

I sighed, adjusting my expression, toggling the ’blind’ flag once again.

Deanne pressed the button to open the door.

"Hello, my love." His voice entered first, followed by the soft but unmistakable rhythm of his footsteps—familiar even on carpeted floors, the kind that leaves imprints in your bones. Damon’s presence has a way of compiling itself in a room—dense, dark, heavy. He reached my swivel chair, crouched down, and tried to plant a kiss, but I managed to intercept the incoming request and push his face away.

"Find something to work on," I said casually, extending a hand toward the desk without even aiming, and spun the chair back to its original alignment.

"Oh?" Damon’s tone was lighter than usual—no dominant darkness, just curiosity. "Is that the new CEO?"

"Yes," Deanne answered. "Do you know him?"

"He’s familiar. Probably because he’s plastered all over the company’s channels."

I let my fingers graze the documents—still pretending blindness—while the real work lay in my other hand: the braille transcription, the CEO’s handwriting encoded for my silent reading.

"What’s his name again?" Damon asked—his voice aimed, I suspect, at Deanne.

"That’s Louie Lancaster."

"Ohhh," Damon nodded. "Indeed familiar. Lancaster, huh?"

"Speak what’s on your mind, Damon," I said, my tone colder than encrypted steel.

"Well," he mused, "we had a programmer five years ago—surname Lancaster. He was close to me and Damien back when we were messing with programming, hacking, penetration testing—whatever you want to call that phase. He was about ten years older than us."

"Isn’t that him?" Deanne asked, intrigued now.

"Hmm, nope. But they look alike," Damon shrugged. "The guy I knew is at least twenty years older than this one."

Now that—that triggers a cascade. My interest piqued, a process forked into another process. Could it be? My mother once spoke of a man. A prodigy. A ghost in her machine. A name she left fragmented in the dark: a partner in a program so dangerous it could reboot the world or corrupt it beyond repair. She never gave me his surname. Most involved in that project either disappeared, assumed dead, or hid behind rewritten identities.

But I know my mother. She never deletes her assets. She hides them. Protects them. Encrypts them from the world’s prying eyes.

Lancaster, huh? There are plenty of Lancasters in the database. But my mother mentioned her friend had a son—a prodigious one. A boy who helped architect something the world wasn’t ready to run.

*****

When we arrived home—my home, my mansion—it already smelled like an algorithm preloaded for comfort: dinner, warm and waiting, each dish arranged as though anticipating my inevitable decryption. We dined, or rather, we played the ritual of it. Damon, of course, clung to me with the persistence of an unclosed process running in the background. I had half a mind to terminate it right there with a command line, but that would cause a system error in our so-called marriage, and I was not in the mood for yet another reboot.

After the plates were cleared and his clinginess reached a predictable runtime, I instructed him to prepare the bath—his obedient eagerness never fails to amuse me—while I excused myself to the study. Logan was already there, a sentinel waiting to execute orders, and Commander White followed, a relic of a promise older than half the men who dared to walk my halls.

I sat down, my movements deliberate, like a function elegantly written: no wasted motion, no unnecessary loops. The profile of Louie Lancaster was before me, its pages an encrypted archive begging for decryption. Commander White read through the lines with the solemnity of a man brushing the dust off a sealed protocol.

"Your Majesty," he finally said, voice steady, eyes cautious.

"Your command."

"Find out everything about him," I replied, my tone smooth but laced with command-line precision. "His past. Everything beneath the surface. Deeper."

"I will try with what I can do," he murmured, a subtle hesitation in his tone—like a corrupted file hesitating before loading.

"Try?" My brow arched, a question more dangerous than any raised blade.

"The Lancaster line is blocked in our database," he admitted.

"What do you mean?" I asked, though my voice remained steady, my expression still composed, blindfolded as ever.

"It’s a protocol your mother set up. The commander before me instructed that their records be buried."

His choice of words lingered like malware in the system.

"Buried?" I tilted my head toward him, lips curling in an amused sneer. "You mean bury their secrets and identities with your grave?"

He nodded slowly, the weight of his silence confirming more than any confession.

"Hmm." I leaned back, fingers resting against the armrest, as though the chair itself was my throne and this room my sandbox to play in.

"Sparrow?" I called, and Logan stepped forward with that hawk-eyed precision of his.

"It seems our Commander has made a pledge. Dig into their graves."

"As you wish," Logan replied, already calculating the pathways like a spider crawling through a firewall’s cracks.

"Please forgive me, my Queen," the Commander said softly, his voice almost pleading.

"No." I shook my head with an elegant finality. "It’s not your fault. A pledge is a pledge, Commander."

I allowed a smirk to pull at my lips, the kind that doesn’t seek approval but announces victory in advance. My instincts had once again pinged the right server; the lead was here, hidden in the archives, covered by decades of dirt and encryption keys that were never meant to be found.

"I won’t intervene in your investigation," Commander White continued, his voice lined with warning. "But I must warn you... they don’t want to be found."

"Hmm." I tilted my head, almost feline in my amusement. "That makes them far more interesting."

There it was: the challenge. A ghosted record, a forbidden sector. My mother’s hand was all over this—her protocols were never without purpose. If she set up firewalls this strong, then the data behind it must either rewrite history or end it.

And Louie Lancaster? He is not just a name on a corporate chair. He is a variable. One that was deliberately hidden from my equation.