I took a bad hit back there, although I hid it well.
Morgan Auberon. Of course I remembered her. I wasn’t lying when I said she was the reason I came back.
But I didn’t remember her like that. She’s transformed herself—she’s harder, stronger, savvier, and so much sexier than the girl I knew. It’s like she rewrote herself all in caps—no way to ignore her now, not that I would have.
Seeing her next to Raven emphasized just how much she’s changed, since Raven’s almost exactly as I remember. Sweet, kind, self-effacing.
Morgan wasn’t sweet, but she was more… innocent. More willing to accept things, like her father keeping her out of the company that should have been hers. I’m guessing that if Ira were to somehow come back, this version of Morgan wouldn’t let him do that.
Except… she still hasn’t pushed out Oscar. Guilty or not, he needs to go. The company hasn’t collapsed with him running it, but it hasn’t thrived either. Morgan would take her father’s legacy and put it back where it belongs—at the forefront of the tech industry.
Instead, she’s been hiding at Inspiron. Doing great, amazing work, but for someone else.
Her ex-lover in fact.
When I first saw she was dating Axel Beck, I felt an odd pulse. Not exactly jealousy, more like a transmission from a far distant star I know I’ll never see. Never be able to communicate with. So why pay attention?
I ignored it, and the pulse went away. And when they broke up—not publicly, I figured it out from Beck’s IG feed—I felt another pulse, stronger, closer. Impossible to ignore.
I was glad they broke up. And yes, a bit triumphant that I revealed I was still alive. And I wondered if their breakup had anything to do with it.
Not a great line of inquiry for me to follow, not if I’m going to help Morgan gain control of the company before I take off again. Best to let sleeping dogs lie. Seeing Bishop again tonight reminded of how far away that old life is. Not even far away—it’s dead. There is no old Tynan to return to. There’s only me now. And I don’t fit here. Not with her, not with them.
I left my childhood behind and became someone new. And when I swam free of that sinking car, clutching a computer box to my chest, I became someone else again.
I walk across the living room to the windows looking out over the wooded hills of Sonoma. It’s too dark to see anything but the barest outlines of the branches, the moon only half-full and high in the sky.
This place was one of the works of my exile. A house that is also a SCIF—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. It looks mostly like any other house, set back far, far from the main road among a stand of trees, with hedges and shrubs planted strategically to screen any view of the house. But no electronic signal can penetrate it and no electronic signal can leave.
It’s owned by a shell company fronting for yet another shell company, layers and layers of digital paperwork hiding the fact that I built and own it. Even a deep dive into the house’s title would only reveal it to be an investment property for some overseas company. One of many.
Morgan wanted to know what I was doing while I was gone, and it was this: selling my talents, amassing money and property, hiding any trace of my existence. Preparing to return to claim my inheritance from Ira and get my revenge on the men I thought betrayed me.
Everything I’ve learned since I sent my sister to steal back my notebook has me questioning what I thought I knew. When the car went off the road, when it was clear Ira wasn’t going to make it, when he told me to grab the computer and save myself, there wasn’t time to think. Only to act. But as I climbed up the cliffs, hearing the ocean below as it claimed the car, pulling it out and then down into the depths, my mind started working. On who might have reprogrammed the car to suddenly veer off the road without warning. Who had the skills and the access to do it. And who would benefit from our deaths.
The only answer that made sense was Gideon, Bishop, Cassian, Archer, and Gage. The men who helped build the system. The men Ira was mentoring.
By the time I climbed up to the road, all my childhood instincts had kicked in. Trust no one. Disappear into anonymity. It was easy for me to do since I’d done it before as a kid. Dad was a super prepper—we lived completely off the grid with no contact with anyone outside our family. I don’t even have a birth certificate.
When I left, I was probably eighteen. I think—we didn’t do birthdays either. But I reinvented myself as a kid with a completely normal upbringing that I never talked about, complete with forged birth certificate, social security card, and driver’s license. And I convinced myself Dad was wrong. That you could trust other people. That you had to if you wanted to experience every amazing thing in the wonderful outside world he’d denied me.
All that got flipped the moment the car did its barrel roll off the road and down the cliff.
I won’t lie—even though I left everything behind, I still thought about Morgan. Thanks to the internet and social media, I could see how she was. When she took the job at Inspiron, it made sense. Morgan was always about fixing things. But not in a handyman kind of way—more like she wanted people’s lives to be better. More equal. She’d see Ira’s death as something she’d have to try to fix.
This last project of Ira’s, the one I helped him with, it should be hers. Morgan’s got the brains and the guts to take it where it should go. She could be the mother of cyborgs with this thing.
I walk over to the bar set into a wall of the living room, pour myself a vodka tonic. The alcohol slides down my throat with a cold burn. It reminds me of Morgan’s twenty-first birthday, celebrated in a dive bar carved out between two apartment buildings around the corner from Chinatown. She tried every drink she could think of, determined to discover that night which was her favorite. We tried to slow her down—and if she didn’t like it, she wouldn’t drink it—but she plowed forward. In the end, she was decently drunk and had settled on a French 75 as her favorite, the cocktail she’d make her signature drink. Tart with a decent kick, but bubbly too. Kind of like her.
I was the one who got her home that night. I remember Ira meeting me at the door, stern, concerned. And when he saw it was me, he said, “I knew I could count on you to see her safe.”
I didn’t take it as encouragement from him. Honestly, if any of us had made a move toward his daughters, I seriously doubt Ira would have been cool with it. He never said anything explicit, but there was an… air, a tacit expectation that we could be friends with them but not that friendly. Our spheres could interact but never overlap.
Still, it meant a lot to me. I wasn’t going to act on my attraction to her or even let it get beyond a simple crush, but of course I was going to take care of her. And Raven too, although doing it for Morgan meant more.
I wonder if she still drinks French 75s. Her tastes might have changed. But judging by the way her gaze ran over me, almost possessive…
She’s single now too. Axel’s stepped back from her and his company. Which gives me an idea.
I’m here to settle a lot of scores. To get the project firmly under Morgan’s control, to push Oscar out—and maybe put him in prison—to get what Ira left to me, settle things with my sister, and possibly punish my former friends if it turns out they’re lying about being responsible for the crash.
But there’s some other shit I can deal with too while I’m bringing myself back to life.
I pull my phone out of my pocket, find the contact I need, then hit Call.
“Hello?” Axel answers tentatively. He knows who it is—this line is only for me to call—but he always answers like that. As if he’s hoping this time it might be someone else.
So weird since I made him a shit ton of money. You’d think he’d be glad to hear from me.
“Hey,” I say carelessly. “I’m in the Bay Area by chance. I figure it’s time for us to finally meet.”