Chasing Zeroes

Chapter 7: The Router

Chasing Zeroes

by Teejayoflife

Chapter 7: The Router

"Where is he really," Asher said again, and Aria let the question sit for one deliberate second before she let her face crumple, just slightly, just enough.

"Honestly?" She dropped her voice, glanced down like she was embarrassed to say it out loud. "I don't know. He does this sometimes. Disappears mid-party, comes back like nothing happened." She forced a small, humiliated laugh, the kind she'd heard rich girls perform in the cafeteria a hundred times, and aimed it at herself. "I didn't want to make it a whole thing in front of your friends. It's bad enough everyone already thinks I don't belong here without adding insecure girlfriend to the list."

It was a calculated bet—that Asher's worldview had no room in it for a scholarship girl who might be lying strategically instead of just anxiously. People like Asher didn't imagine people like her capable of chess. Only checkers, played badly.

His expression shifted, suspicion softening into something closer to pity, which was almost worse but far more useful.

"He does that to everyone," Asher said, not unkindly, testing the theory rather than buying it whole. "Vanishing act. Very on-brand." He studied her a beat longer. "You really don't know where he is."

"I really don't." True enough, technically, in the way that mattered.

But Asher didn't fully release her, not yet. He stepped closer instead, close enough that the party noise blurred into background static, his voice dropping into something low and precise.

"Let me be clear about something, since you're new to this particular tier of the ecosystem." He smiled, and it had no warmth left in it at all. "Julian can vanish at his own party and it costs him nothing. His name protects him. Yours doesn't protect anything." A pause, deliberate, surgical. "I have friends on the financial aid committee, Aria. Friends who owe me favors. It would take one conversation—one—for your file to stop being flagged and start being gone. Not delayed. Gone. By Monday morning, if I wanted it."

Her stomach dropped through the floor, but she kept her face still, because panic was information and she wasn't giving him any more of it than she already had.

"That a threat?"

"It's context." Asher straightened his cuff, unbothered, a boy discussing weather. "Julian can afford to burn his life down for fun. You genuinely cannot. I'd remember that, if I were choosing who to run interference for." He glanced toward the hallway one more time, jaw tight, clearly weighing whether to go check it himself.

He'd taken half a step toward the corridor when the glass doors at the far end of the room slid open, and Julian walked in from the direction of the lake, not the hallway, jacket damp at the shoulders, hair pushed back like he'd just been standing in weather.

"You would not believe how hard it's raining on that dock," he said, easy, unbothered, already crossing the room toward them like he had no idea he'd just detonated a five-minute crisis. "Wanted to see if the boats were tied down. Your dad's yacht guy is going to have a rough morning, by the way."

Asher's whole posture recalibrated in an instant—suspicion folding back beneath the polished host mask, though not without a last, careful glance at Julian's wet jacket, a note filed away for later.

"You could've mentioned you were leaving," Asher said, mild, testing.

"Could've." Julian slid an arm around Aria's waist, casual and possessive at once, a physical full stop on the conversation. "Didn't think it needed a permission slip. We should get going, actually—storm's picking up."

Asher's smile came back online, thin and precise. "Of course. Drive safe."

He watched them all the way to the door. Aria felt it on her back the entire walk out, like a hand pressed flat between her shoulder blades.

The car door shut on the storm, rain hammering the roof in a hard, steady rhythm, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Julian gripped the wheel without starting the engine, breathing like he'd been holding it for longer than five minutes.

"You okay?" he asked finally, and it wasn't performance—the question came out rough, stripped of the party's polish.

"He threatened my file. Said he could make it disappear by Monday." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "I improvised the insecure-girlfriend routine to buy you time. I don't know if it held."

"It held." Julian reached into his damp jacket and pulled out a small notebook, spiral-bound, cheap, the kind nobody would look at twice—except the inside cover was lined with a strip of numbers copied by hand in careful block print, timestamps and IP fragments and file paths abbreviated into a code only he seemed to fully understand. "I got five minutes on his home router. Long enough to pull the local access log."

Aria took it, rain drumming overhead, the dashboard's dim light barely enough to read by. Her eyes moved down the column of timestamps, cross-referencing dates she recognized with a cold, sinking certainty—the same week her family's aid flag had frozen two years ago, a login recorded from this exact address, this exact house, hours before the file changed.

"This isn't a school problem," she said slowly, the numbers refusing to rearrange into anything less true no matter how long she stared at them. "This is coming from here. From his house."

"Yeah." Julian finally started the engine, wipers beating hard against the glass, his jaw set in the dark. "We're not chasing a rumor anymore, Aria. We're chasing an address."

Rain streaked sideways across the windshield as they pulled out onto the black, empty road, and Aria sat with the notebook in her lap, the numbers glowing faintly in her mind long after the dashboard light dimmed, understanding with total, bone-deep certainty that whatever came next would not be contained by a four-week deadline or a courtyard rumor mill.

It had a home address now. And homes had people in them.