CHAPTER 53: CHAPTER 53

Sleep was a lost cause. It felt like a luxury they couldn’t afford anymore.

The fifteen thousand dollars sat in a locked metal box under the workbench, but its presence was a heavy ghost that haunted the entire workshop. Ace lay on his cot, staring at the water-stained ceiling, his mind replaying the night on a torturous loop. The feel of the stiff waiter’s shirt, the clink of poker chips that sounded like falling coins, the cold, calculating look in Vincenzo’s eyes, and the unforgettable, sickening crash of glass. He saw the other waiter’s face, pale and stunned, his night ruined. He saw Marcus’s grim satisfaction in the dark car.

Ace felt he had traded a man’s dignity for a stack of cash, and that thought sat in his stomach like a cold, hard stone.

A sliver of grey dawn light was finally filtering through the high, grimy windows when he gave up on rest. He sat up, his body aching with a tiredness that went deeper than bones. Across the room, Evelyn was asleep at her desk, her head resting on her arms beside her laptop. She had been searching for any news about the incident at the Lounge before exhaustion finally claimed her. In the corner, their friend Silva was snoring softly on a pile of moving blankets, looking peaceful and completely unaware of the dangerous storm clouds gathering over them.

Ace moved quietly and started a pot of cheap coffee on the hotplate. The simple, familiar routine was a small comfort. As the bitter brew began to drip, he looked at his sleeping friends. They were the reason he had done it. This was the fragile, ridiculous family they had built together in this dusty room. He had to believe the money could protect them, even though every instinct screamed that it was actually putting a target on their backs.

The smell of coffee eventually woke Evelyn. She stirred and lifted her head, her eyes blurry with sleep. She saw him, and the memory of the previous night immediately flooded back into her expression, wiping away the last traces of rest.

"You look terrible," she said, her voice raspy.

"I feel worse," he admitted, handing her a chipped mug full of black coffee.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, the only sounds being Silva’s gentle snores and the distant rumble of the city waking up.

"I’m sorry," Ace finally said, the words feeling too small for the weight of his regret. "I’m sorry for last night and for snapping at you. You were right about everything."

Evelyn slowly sipped her hot coffee while watching him from over the rim of her mug. "I know I was right," she said. Her tone wasn’t angry, just resigned to their situation. They were in this together, even the bad parts. "But being right doesn’t magically fix our problems," she continued. "We are in a dangerous situation, so we have to manage it carefully." She set her mug down with a firm, decisive click. "We will deposit all of the money today into the business account. We will use it exactly as we planned, for inventory and proper tools to make this a real, functioning business. We will use Ramos’s dirty money to build something clean."

Ace nodded, feeling a small measure of his crushing guilt begin to lift. Having a plan and a direction to move in was always better than feeling trapped. "We’ll operate under the radar," he agreed. "We will not draw any attention to ourselves. We’ll just focus on our work."

Their quiet conversation finally woke Silva, who sat up and rubbed his eyes. "Are we millionaires yet?" he asked through a massive yawn.

"We are officially in business," Ace said, offering a small, tired smile. "And our first official task is a trip to the bank."

The process of depositing fifteen thousand dollars in cash was more stressful than Ace had imagined. The bank teller, a young woman with perfectly styled hair, gave the stacks of bills a long, suspicious look. She had to call over her manager, a serious-looking man in a suit who counted the money with slow, deliberate movements, his eyes flicking from the cash to Ace’s worn jacket and young face. Ace was ready with a story about selling a collection of vintage electronics, but the manager didn’t ask. He just processed the deposit, handed Ace the receipt, and gave him a look that said he knew a fishy story when he saw one. Ace felt a flush of shame, feeling like a criminal under the bright, clean lights of the bank.

Walking out onto the sidewalk with the deposit slip in his hand felt like a small victory. The money was no longer a physical, threatening object in a locked box. It was now just a number on a piece of paper, and it was legitimate, at least on the surface.

Walking out onto the sidewalk with the deposit slip in his hand felt like a small victory. The money was no longer a physical, threatening object in a locked box. It was now just a number on a piece of paper, and it was legitimate, at least on the surface.

"This is good," Silva said, ketchup dribbling down his chin. "We have a plan, we have money in our bank account, and we’re going to be okay."

For a little while, sitting in the weak morning sun, Ace almost let himself believe it.

They spent their afternoon exactly as they had planned, focusing on their work. They used a small amount of their money to carefully buy more broken electronics from online auctions. They avoided making a single large purchase that might draw attention, choosing instead to build their inventory with a steady and reasonable number of items. Evelyn researched and then ordered professional-grade tools and diagnostic equipment. She did not choose the cheapest options but instead picked reliable, solid gear that showed they were running a serious business. Meanwhile, Silva buzzed with positive energy as he organized their chaotic workspace. He labeled shelves for incoming and completed devices and started a logbook to keep track of all their work.

The work felt productive and satisfyingly normal. For a few wonderful hours, the threatening memory of the Sapphire Lounge seemed to shrink in their minds, becoming just a bad memory.

This peaceful rhythm was suddenly broken by Evelyn. She had been quiet for nearly an hour, bent over her laptop and pausing only to sip her cold coffee. Across the room, Ace was completely focused on repairing a laptop with a fried motherboard. using his steadily improving control over the nanites a sensation only he could feel, which he used to guide the repair of a microscopic fracture in the circuitry. His work was perfect.

"Ace," Evelyn said, her voice low and tight. "We have a problem."

He looked up immediately and saw that her face was pale and her eyes were locked on the screen.

"What’s wrong?" he asked.

"I was running a standard security scan on our new business network, the one we use for invoices and client records," she explained. She swallowed hard as her finger traced a line of code on the screen. "There’s something in here that doesn’t belong."

Ace was at her side in an instant. On her screen was a complex data log with lines of code scrolling past. Most of it looked like normal system information, but every few seconds, a string of garbled characters would flash for a millisecond, like a digital ghost and then vanish before the eye could even focus on it.

"It’s like a whisper," she said, her voice hushed with alarm. Her fingers began flying across the keyboard as she typed commands to isolate the anomaly. "It isn’t attacking us or deleting anything. It’s just listening. It’s exploring our system and mapping it out."

"Could it be Ramos?" Ace asked, a cold dread forming in his stomach. "Is this another one of his tests?"

"I don’t think so," Evelyn whispered, shaking her head. "This feels different. Ramos is blunt and forceful. This is elegant and slippery. This is the work of a true professional."

As if it had been waiting for that moment, the screen of her laptop suddenly went jet black. The machine’s gentle hum softened. Then, a single line of stark, white text appeared in the exact center of the void.

A shield is only as strong as the hand that holds it.

The words hung there, impersonal and menacing, for three long heartbeats. Then, the screen flickered back to life as if nothing had happened. Evelyn’s desktop background, a generic photo of a forest, was back. It was as if the message had been a collective hallucination.

But the feeling of violation was utterly real.

Silva, who had been watching from a few feet away, gasped. "What was that? A virus?"

"That was worse than some random virus," Evelyn said, her voice now sharp with a focused fury. She was already pulling up raw data logs, her movements frantic. "It left a tag behind. It’s a tiny, arrogant signature in the code it used to slip past my basic defenses." She highlighted a string of characters at the very end of a complex log file.

[User: Silica]

"Silica," Ace repeated. The name meant nothing to him, but it landed in the room with the heavy weight of a tombstone.

Evelyn’s face turned from pale to ashen. "I’ve seen that name before. On the dark web forums where I sometimes look for information about... unusual tech. She’s a legend. A ghost. They say she can hack into anything. Corporate servers, government databases... anything." She finally looked up from the screen, her eyes wide with a fear Ace had never seen in her before. "She’s not one of Ramos’s enforcers. She’s a freelancer. A hacker for hire. And she just found us. She knows we’re here."

The silence in the workshop was suddenly immense and suffocating. The threat from Vincenzo was a physical one—a danger of men with guns in dark alleys that they could, in theory, lock out. This was something entirely new and terrifying. This was a deep violation. Someone had slipped through their new steel door, past their cameras and alarm, without making a sound. She had been inside their digital home, reading their files, and had left a calling card simply because she could.

The money was safe in the bank, and the doors were fortified. But a new, invisible enemy had just drawn a target on their wall, and she could be anywhere. The danger was no longer just outside their door. It was in the very air they breathed and in the devices they relied on. They were exposed in a way they had never before imagined.