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“Oh.”

Her eyebrow shot up. “Oh? The man sat outside your door until I got back there this morning. He was worried about you. Didn’t want you to wake up alone. Only left because we needed the team debriefed. Even then, I had to pull rank to get him to leave.”

She didn’t know what to do with that. “Well, I’m fine. And now I’m about to get to work. That’s all that matters.”

Fallon tilted her head sideways. “Do you remember how much of an idiot I was when I first got together with Isaac?”

Now it was Cassandra who raised an eyebrow. “Are you talking about when you ran from his bed, when you stole his watch, or when you were trapped on the outside of a building as your entire body seized up and he caught you moments before you plummeted to your death? You’ll have to be more specific.”

Fallon chuckled. “And yet we’re getting married anyway. My point is these things are never a straight line. Relationships with men like Isaac and Ryder are…complicated.”

Truer words never spoken. “Ryder isn’t Isaac, Fallon. And not every story gets a happily ever after. You know that better than anyone.”

“No, I guess they don’t.”

Cassandra pulled her in for a hug. “Let’s focus on saving some children. My personal life can wait.”

“Text as soon as you get the info.” Fallon headed in a different direction, and Cassandra made her way to the lab.

She not only needed to be brilliant, she needed to be brilliant fast if they were going to save this group of kids.

Three hours later, she would’ve settled for mediocre, forget brilliant. This encryption was a problem. A genuine, well-engineered problem that no amount of coffee and stubbornness was going to brute-force.

At the lodge, she’d mapped the file structure and found the primary data cluster distributed across three directory branches. She’d been impressed but confident. That confidence had been built on seeing the system through a narrow window in the middle of the night with Ryder watching the door and her adrenaline doing half the cognitive work.

Now, with the full dataset in front of her and proper equipment to analyze it, she was realizing the lodge setup had been a mask. Basic security on the surface, professional-grade encryption underneath. Someone had built this system to look less sophisticated than it was.

Okay. So you’re smart. Let’s see how smart.

The encryption was layered and modified. Someone had taken an established protocol and rebuilt the internals with custom modifications that changed the behavior in ways she had to reverse-engineer piece by piece. Standard decryption tools bounced off it. Frequency analysis gave her partial patterns that dissolved when she tried to scale them.

She pulled up a second terminal and started mapping the modification logic. The pattern would be in there. It was always in there. She just had to see it.

More hours passed. Coffee appeared at her elbow. She drank it without registering who’d brought it or what it tasted like.

This was where she was good. Where her brain stopped being the thing that destroyed her and became the thing that made her valuable. The same mechanism that sent her to her knees in a crowded room could tear apart an encryption protocol that most analysts would spend weeks on.

Same engine. Different fuel. One cost her everything. The other one saved people.

She cracked the first layer. The second fought harder. She ran three approaches, discarded two, got halfway through the third before her mind drifted somewhere it had no business going.

He sat outside your door.

She pulled her focus back to the screen.

The modified protocol used a key rotation that shifted every forty-eight data blocks. Not random. The shifts followed a sequence she could almost see the shape of but couldn’t pin down. Every time she thought she had it, the pattern slid away.

Come on. Show me something.

She leaned closer and let her brain work. Just data. Relationships between numbers that nobody had put there on purpose and nobody could hide forever.

The sequence was seeded from the data itself. Self-referential encryption. The key to unlock it lived inside the thing it was protecting.

That’s actually beautiful. I hate you, because you’re using it to hurt kids, but it’s beautiful.

She built a decryption framework, ran it on a sample block, and got garbage. She adjusted the seed derivation, ran it again, and got different garbage.

Back to the beginning.