Chapter 2
2030 Words
The bell above the café door chimed once as Mia Torres ducked inside, soaked from the knees down and grinning like she owned the damn world.
"You're late," the barista said without looking up, thumbing through an ancient copy of Velastra Times.
Mia shrugged out of her jacket, water dripping onto the cracked floorboards. "Traffic. Cops. Existential dread. Take your pick."
The café hummed around her: low jazz crackling through battered speakers, chipped mugs clinking, steam hissing from the espresso machine. It smelled like burnt sugar, damp stone, and secrets.
She threaded her way to the back, where a flickering neon sign sputtered OPEN 24 HOURS, and dropped into the corner booth. Her battered laptop thunked onto the table, stickers peeling off the surface.
"You ordering anything, Torres?" the barista called.
"Just truth and treason, Sam," she fired back, booting up her laptop.
Lines of code bled into her screen as she leaned forward, eyes glittering.
"Come on, baby," Mia whispered, flexing her fingers over the keys. "Let's go piss off a billionaire."
Lines of green and white bled across the laptop screen like veins under skin, alive and pulsing.
Mia chewed her lower lip, wiped the sweat gathering at her brow with the back of her sleeve, and tapped another sequence into the command prompt.
"Come on," she muttered, her voice low, urgent. "Show me what you're hiding, you smug corporate bastards."
The screen blinked.
ACCESS REQUESTED.
ENCRYPTION BARRIER DETECTED.
SECURITY PROTOCOL INITIATED.
She chuckled under her breath, a sharp, reckless sound. "Oh, you wanna dance? Fine."
Her fingers flew across the keys, faster than thought, bypassing firewalls she wasn’t supposed to see. Somewhere deep inside Wolfe Enterprises, a silent alarm pinged. Somewhere else, someone leaned closer to a monitor.
But here, in the dim pulse of the forgotten café, Mia Torres grinned like a devil.
"You can build your castles, boys," she whispered, slamming through another layer of defense. "Doesn't mean I can't blow the doors off."
She didn't see the silent red warning light flash at the edge of her screen.
Not yet.
"C'mon, baby," Mia muttered under her breath, fingers hammering the keys in a staccato rhythm. "Show me your dirty secrets."
A small, savage grin tugged at her lips, sharp and defiant, the kind of smile meant to bluff a dealer across a bloody poker table.
The code responded: another wall crumbled, another forbidden door creaked open.
Behind her mask of cocky bravado, Mia's heart slammed against her ribs, each beat a warning. She could almost hear Isa’s voice in her head, clipped and cold:
"Don’t take unnecessary risks, Mia. Don’t bleed for ghosts."
She shoved the thought aside.
"Not today, Queenie," Mia breathed. "Today, we hunt."
The screen glitched. Flickered once. And her grin faltered.
For a second.
Just a second.
Then she leaned in closer, hiding the tremor starting to bleed into her fingertips.
The deeper she went, the louder the wolves howled at the edge of her mind.
And Mia Torres, reckless to the bone, pushed even harder.
The screen flared blood-red, harsh and sudden against the dim haze of the café.
ACCESS FLAGGED.
SECURITY OVERRIDE INITIATED.
Mia jerked upright, the laptop teetering on the edge of the chipped table. Her fingers froze above the keys, breath catching sharp in her throat.
"s**t," she hissed under her breath, biting down on her lower lip until she tasted copper.
Across the room, Sam the barista glanced up. "You good, Torres?"
Mia forced a smirk, waving him off with one hand while her other hovered near the power button. "Yeah, yeah. Just lost a game. Big stakes."
Her voice didn’t even wobble.
But inside, alarms were screaming.
Her body itched to slam the laptop shut, run, disappear. She knew this feeling. Knew it from alleyways and bad deals and nights spent dodging debt collectors.
And still, she stayed seated.
Still, she whispered to herself, “No backing out now. Not when she's counting on me.”
Because reckless loyalty wasn’t just a flaw for Mia Torres.
It was the only reason she was still breathing.
The cursor blinked at her like a gun c****d against her temple.
Every instinct Mia had sharpened on the streets screamed: Get out. Bail. Cut your losses.
Her hand hovered over the laptop lid, ready to slam it shut.
"Don't be stupid, Torres," she muttered under her breath. "Live to hack another day."
She almost did it. Almost.
But then, unbidden, another memory cracked through the rising panic.
A hand grabbing hers years ago (steady, certain) pulling her out of a courtroom where no one else cared if she lived or rotted.
Isabella Valencia, in a black coat too expensive for the rain, saying without drama, without pity:
"Come with me. Or stay here and drown. Your choice."
Not a promise. Not a rescue. Just an open door when no one else had even knocked.
Mia swallowed hard, throat burning.
"No," she whispered to the blinking warning screen. "Not this time. Not her."
The wolves could come.
She wasn’t leaving her queen to face them alone.
Mia exhaled slowly, cracked her knuckles, and bent back over the keyboard like a gambler laying down her last, suicidal bet.
The warning on the screen blinked a final time.
LAST CHANCE TO TERMINATE SESSION.
Her fingers danced anyway, reckless and sure.
"Sorry, princess," she muttered, the words scraping low and bitter from her throat. "If I burn, I burn for you."
She stabbed the Enter key with her thumb, overriding the firewall’s final security measure.
The screen blurred into lines of code again, hissing like a live wire. Somewhere deep inside Wolfe Enterprises, a silent protocol marked her signature, traced her location, catalogued her existence for erasure.
Mia smiled anyway.
A wolf’s grin.
Defiant. Lonely.
"Come and get me, you rich bastards," she whispered to the empty booth.
In her chest, her heart slammed against the bones of her ribs, each beat sounding more like a ticking clock.
She didn’t slow down.
Didn’t look back.
Because some queens wore crowns.
And some, like Mia Torres, lit matches—and dared the world to burn.
The deeper Mia tunneled into the encrypted labyrinth, the darker the screen became: lines of code dripping like ink, swallowed by black.
For a moment, the laptop reflected her face. Split, fragmented, broken by the cracks in the glass protector she never bothered to fix.
Mia flinched.
"Ugh. Great," she muttered, dragging her fingers through her tangled hair. "Look like hell, feel like hell. Top form, Torres."
The joke didn’t land, not even for herself.
The broken version of her on the screen stared back: hollow-eyed, rain-slicked, looking every inch the survivor she pretended was a badge of honor.
"Focus," she barked under her breath. "You’re not that girl anymore."
She dropped her head, typing faster, the reflection warping into meaningless fragments.
She wouldn’t look again.
Wouldn’t let the cracks show.
Not tonight.
Not when Isa needed her to be more than the scared girl the world had thrown away.
Just like Isa, Mia buried her fractures deep, and kept digging.
The deeper Mia burrowed into Wolfe Enterprises’ servers, the more warning signals flared around her screen like red constellations.
Unauthorized access detected.
Trace protocol initiated.
Breach teams alerted.
Mia whistled low under her breath, a sharp, mocking sound. "Well, well," she grinned, tapping a few more reckless commands. "Look who finally noticed me."
The adrenaline flooding her veins felt almost clean: sweeter than fear, sharper than good sense.
A new layer of firewalls slammed into place.
She laughed, too loud, earning another suspicious glance from the barista.
"What?!" Mia called out, raising both hands like a guilty kid. "Haven’t you ever seen a girl flirt with cyberdeath before?"
No one answered.
Her smile stretched tighter. Her breathing got faster.
Warning. Trace at 62% complete.
"You gotta do better than that," she muttered, shoulders shaking with a grin that tasted more like blood. "I grew up running from bigger monsters than you."
If the wolves were coming, she’d grin wider.
If her world was burning, she’d dance harder.
That’s how survivors stayed upright.
By lying louder than the fear.
The rain hammered harder against the café windows, the city outside blurred into a storm of neon and shadow.
Inside, Mia Torres leaned closer to her screen, eyes burning with unshed exhaustion. Her fingers hovered for a heartbeat above the keyboard. Just long enough for the truth to slip past her lips.
"Queen's got her crown," she muttered, almost tenderly, thinking of Isa standing tall in that marble palace of glass. "Me? I got teeth."
She said it like a joke.
Said it like it didn’t ache.
Sam the barista called from across the room without looking up, "You talking to yourself again, Torres?"
Mia barked a laugh that sounded far too much like a choke. "Always, Sam. Best company in the world."
Her reflection on the black screen caught her again, fractured, half-lost.
Teeth, not crowns.
Bite, not beauty.
Different weapons. Same war.
She flexed her fingers once, cracked her knuckles, and dove deeper into the digital abyss.
Because survival wasn't about wearing crowns in Mia’s world.
It was about tearing down thrones before they crushed you.
The laptop screen flickered again (once, twice) and then froze.
A new file surfaced from the tangled wreckage of data.
Red.
Encrypted.
Bleeding urgency across the black background.
SUBJECT: VALENCIA.
Mia straightened so fast her chair scraped a screech against the floorboards.
"What the hell…" she breathed, blinking once, twice, as if it might vanish.
It didn’t.
The name glared at her, pulsing like a live wound.
Sam glanced up again from the counter. "You alright over there?"
Mia swallowed, throat dry as ash.
She forced a grin. "Found... something I wasn't supposed to."
Her voice cracked right down the middle.
No more jokes. No more swagger.
Because this wasn't about some stolen financial records, some hidden offshore accounts, some stupid political game.
This was about Isa.
They weren’t just trying to use Isabella.
They were hunting her.
And Mia Torres, fool that she was, had just stumbled right into the heart of it.
Mia leaned back slowly, the cracked vinyl seat groaning under her weight.
For the first time tonight, her fingers slipped from the keyboard, trembling faintly against the tabletop.
She stared at the flashing red file like it might bite her.
Or worse, like it already had.
"No way," she whispered. "No way they’re targeting her. Not like this."
The café’s noises dulled around her: the hiss of milk frothing, the clatter of a dropped fork, the low hum of half-heard conversations. It all blurred into static against the thunder roaring in her ears.
Sam called out casually from the counter, not bothering to look, "You good, Torres?"
Mia didn’t answer this time.
She just sat there, heart pounding, mouth dry, staring at that single word:
VALENCIA.
Not a transaction.
Not a pawn.
A target.
And if they were coming for Isa (really coming) then no amount of pretty dresses or public smiles would save her.
And no amount of Mia’s hacking might be enough to stop it.
But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t damn well try.
Mia’s hands moved before her brain did.
She yanked her burner phone from the inner pocket of her jacket, the cheap plastic case slipping in her sweaty grip.
Fingers flying, she punched in the encrypted code.
One ring.
Two.
The line clicked.
"Isa," Mia hissed, voice low, panicked, barely holding together. "Boss lady... it’s me."
On the other end, a beat of silence. Then Isabella’s voice, calm as a blade: "Talk."
Mia pressed the phone tighter to her ear, glancing around the café like ghosts might pour through the walls any second.
"You’ve got bigger problems than a bad marriage, Queenie," she whispered. "Way bigger."
"Mia, spit it out," Isa snapped, icy and impatient.
Mia squeezed her eyes shut for a breath, then said it:
"You're not just married to the monster, Isa. You are the monster they're hunting."
The words hung between them: raw, heavy, impossible.
Static crackled on the line.
Mia’s gut twisted.
There was no going back now.
- Writer
