“I wasn’t planning your funeral, Blaine,” Miralin said, her voice dropping so only he could hear. “I was planning my survival. You just happened to be the obstacle in the way.”

As the doors closed behind him, Miralin sat down at the head of the table. She looked at the terrified board members.

“Now,” she said, opening her laptop, “let’s talk about the lithium refineries. We’re going to triple efficiency by Q3.”

The adrenaline wore off around midnight. Miralin was on the Obsidian, Alden’s jet, parked on the private tarmac. The day had been a whirlwind of lawyers, press releases, and damage control. She had officially taken the helm of a multi-billion-dollar empire. She had won.

But sitting in the plush leather seat of the jet’s lounge, holding a glass of scotch she had not sipped, she felt a sudden, crushing exhaustion.

Alden came out of the cockpit. He had flown the plane himself for a quick loop over the coast, his way of decompressing. He was still in his white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, revealing forearms that looked like they could strangle a bear or play a concerto. He sat opposite her, not saying anything. He just watched her.

“I destroyed him,” Miralin said into the glass. “I took everything. His name, his house, his pride.”

“You gave it away, Miralin,” Alden said gently. “You just caught it before it hit the ground.”

“Does that make me a villain?” She looked up at him. “In the movies, the person who plots for years and takes over the company is usually the bad guy.”

Alden leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “The difference between a villain and a survivor is what they do with the power once they have it. Blaine used power to feed his ego. You’re going to use it to build something real.”

He reached out and took the glass from her hand, setting it on the table. Then he took her hand. His skin was warm, rough, grounding.

“Besides,” Alden added, a rare, boyish smirk touching his lips, “villains are usually more interesting.”

Miralin managed to smile. “True.”

“There’s something else,” Alden said, his tone shifting. The playfulness vanished, replaced by the intensity she had seen in the garden. “Now that you’re public, now that Chimera is out of the shadows, we have a problem.”

Miralin straightened up, the exhaustion replaced by alertness. “What kind of problem?”

Alden stood and walked to a wall panel. He pressed a button, and a holographic map of the Pacific Ocean materialized in the air between them. A red light was blinking off the coast of a small island chain.

“While you were dissecting Blaine in the boardroom, I was tracking a signal,” Alden said. “Someone is trying to override the security protocols on the Deep Horizon rig.”

Miralin frowned. Deep Horizon was Chimera’s most secretive project, an underwater data center and mining facility powered by geothermal vents. It was the backbone of their entire tech infrastructure.

“Blaine wouldn’t know how to hack a toaster, let alone Deep Horizon,” Miralin said.

“Not Blaine,” Alden said darkly. “Blaine is a hammer. This is a scalpel.”

He swiped the map, zooming in on the signal source.

“The signal is originating from a relay station in the Swiss Alps. But the encryption signature—I’ve seen it before.”

Alden looked at Miralin, and for the first time since she had known him, she saw genuine concern in his eyes.

“It’s Corwin’s signature,” Alden said.

Miralin felt the blood drain from her face. “Corwin? My journalist? The one who helped me leak the info to Blaine?”

“The one who knows where all the bodies are buried,” Alden corrected. “He’s not answering his comms. He’s gone dark.”

Miralin stood up, her mind racing. Corwin was the only other person who knew the intricacies of her plan. He knew the back-door codes she had used to infiltrate Thornwall Industries. “Why would he betray us?” Miralin asked. “I paid him enough to retire on an island.”

“Maybe someone offered him a bigger island,” Alden said. “Or maybe—maybe he wasn’t working for you alone.”

The plane’s comm system beeped. A text message displayed on the main screen. It was from an unknown number.

Checkmate, Queen. You took the king, but you left the castle unguarded. You have 24 hours to transfer the algorithms or Deep Horizon becomes a deep sea tomb.

Miralin stared at the message. The victory of the morning felt a million miles away. She was not fighting a man-child ex-husband anymore. She had stepped into the deep end of the pool where the sharks had lasers and the water was freezing.

“He has access to the pressure valves,” Miralin realized, horror dawning on her. “If he overloads the rig—”

“The thermal buildup—”

“It will detonate,” Alden finished. “With 40 crew members inside.”

Miralin looked at Alden. The romantic tension, the victory lap, it was all gone. They were back in the trenches.

“How fast can this jet get us to the coordinates?” Miralin asked, kicking off her heels.

Alden was already moving toward the cockpit. “Fast enough to break the sound barrier.”

“Buckle up,” he said. “The war isn’t over.”

Part 3

The Obsidian cut through the stratosphere at Mach 1.8, a silent needle stitching the night sky. Inside, the atmosphere was pressurized in more ways than 1. Miralin sat surrounded by screens in the jet’s command center. The luxury of the lounge was gone, replaced by the stark blue glow of data streams. Alden was in the pilot seat, pushing the engines to their thermal limit, but his voice over the intercom was steady.

“20 minutes to the drop zone. Status on the rig?”

“Critical,” Miralin replied, her fingers flying across a haptic keyboard. “The core temperature of the Deep Horizon servers is rising. Corwin has disabled the cooling pumps. If it hits 200 degrees, the geothermal vents will destabilize. It won’t just destroy the servers, it’ll cause a seabed collapse. A tsunami.”

She stared at the image of Corwin Ashvale on her secondary monitor. It was a file photo she had taken herself, him laughing over a cheap diner coffee. The man she thought was her friend, her confidant. The man who had helped her burn Blaine to the ground was now holding the match to her own legacy.

“Why?” she whispered to herself.

“Money is a powerful motivator. But not for Corwin,” Alden’s voice came through as if reading her mind. “He’s a nihilist, Miralin. He doesn’t want to be rich. He wants to be right. He always hated the elite. He helped you take down Blaine because he hated Blaine. Now he’s taking us down because, well, we’re the elite now.”

The main screen flickered. The static cleared to reveal a live video feed.

It was Corwin.

He looked exactly the same: rumpled suit, messy hair. But the background was not a storage unit. It was the sleek, sterile control room of the Deep Horizon rig itself.

“You made good time,” Corwin said, leaning back in the command chair, spinning a pen in his fingers. “I assume you’re in the jet. Nice toy. A bit excessive for a climate activist, isn’t it, Alden?”

“Corwin,” Miralin said, her voice freezing the air in the cabin, “turn the pumps back on.”

“I can’t do that, boss.” Corwin smirked. “Not until I get what I came for. The Chimera source code. The prediction algorithm.”

“The algorithm predicts market trends,” Miralin said. “It’s useless to you without the infrastructure.”

“Oh, I’m not going to use it to buy stocks.” Corwin laughed, a jagged sound. “I’m going to release it, open source, to everyone. Imagine the chaos, Miralin. If everyone knows what the market will do, the market collapses. No more billionaires, no more Thornwalls, no more Ravenshires. A true reset.”

Miralin went cold. It was not greed. It was ideology. He was a fanatic.

“If you destroy the market, you destroy the pensions of millions of ordinary people,” Miralin argued, trying to buy time. “You’re not saving the world, Corwin. You’re burning it.”

“Fire cleanses.” Corwin shrugged. “You have 10 minutes. Upload the code to the secure server I just linked or I let the core melt. The crew has been locked in the mess hall. They’ll go down with the ship.”

The feed cut.

“He’s insane,” Miralin breathed.

“He’s committed,” Alden corrected.

He engaged the autopilot and walked back into the command center. He looked at the countdown clock. 9 minutes.

“We can’t upload the code,” Alden said. “If that algorithm goes public, the global economy crashes by morning. It’s not an option.”

“And we can’t let the rig explode,” Miralin countered. “40 lives plus the environmental impact.”

She closed her eyes, forcing herself to think. She was not the victim anymore. She was not the wife. She was the architect. She knew Corwin. She knew how he thought. He expected her to try and hack him. He expected a brute-force attack.

“He’s watching the external firewalls,” Miralin said, her eyes snapping open. “He’s waiting for us to try and break in. But he’s inside. He’s physically on the rig.”