Reformed Villain’s Ex: Don’t Love Me, It’s Futile

Chapter 22 — Red Buttons and Very Poor Life Choices

The red panel pulsed like a bad decision with Wi-Fi.

For a heartbeat the vault room was all breathing and blinking screens. The little red dot on the panel put its head down and kept counting like it was auditioning for a countdown role in a disaster film. Nobody clapped. Nobody wanted to.

Oliver’s fingers were a blur across the tablet. He sounded like a man who’d learned profanity as a religion. “It’s not a simple upload,” he said. “It’s a distributed push. If it goes, it moves across multiple nodes—offshore mirrors, P2P caches, a CDN that’s legally divorced from this jurisdiction. Severing the local link won’t stop propagation.”

“Of course not,” I said, and the words tasted like metal. “Of course they made it redundant. Wouldn’t want their legacy to be less efficient than their morals.”

Damien’s voice was a metronome: precise, low, a thing that made commands sound like law. “Options?”

Oliver didn’t look up. “Cut power to the building,” he said. “Physically remove the network gear. Destroy the unit. But if the device has an internal cell uplink, and it does, it’ll try satellites. We need to kill the SIM and sever the external relay.”

Elliot pinched his brow. “We get legal to compel the network provider to kill the SIM. That takes time. We need time.”

“We don’t have time,” Mason said. He sounded like someone who had tried to sweet-talk servers before and lost.

The timer kept ticking down: 00:56… 00:55…

Maya, who had been ghosting the corners of the room like someone made of shadow and hard decisions, moved close to the locker. Her jaw set. “If that goes, they launch the archive. It’s not just footage. It’s donor transfers, names tied to shell accounts, email chains. People with reputations will collapse. But—” she shot me a look like a compass reset, “—there’s a kicker. The release is set to trigger a secondary protocol if interrupted. It will go full auto if we try to stop it wrong.”

Fantastic. A booby-trapped whistleblower bomb. Only in our industry do crooks dress tyranny up as an ergonomic workflow.

I pressed my palms flat on the metal locker like it might steady me. “So we can either stand here and watch the internet get nuked, or we can try to stop it and risk making the worst possible case permanent.”

Elliot’s lawyer face came on: “We need to think like litigators. Evidence control. Chain of custody. Digital forensics. We need to lock down everything so that whichever copy goes public has a timestamp stamped with our custody notes. It reduces the value of illicit copies.”

“You mean we make the files less juicy?” Mason asked. “Like adding a legal watermark? Nothing says excitement like *OWNED BY SUBPOENA*.”

“I mean we do something that forces a legal hand to act,” Elliot said. “The court can issue emergency takedowns if we can prove it's about to be illegally distributed.”

“Which again takes time,” Oliver said. “Which we don’t have.”

The red dot blinked: 00:30… 00:25…

I felt the old ridiculousness rise—the absurd, defiant part of me that uses sarcasm like armor. “They built a doomsday for receipts,” I muttered. “It’s so corporate. If you’re going to terrorize people, at least pick a more artisanal apocalypse.”

Roast line one slid out like a reflex: “They curated chaos with a budget and a spreadsheet—call it performance art for the ethically bankrupt.” It landed with a hollow chuckle in the room; humor is the last thing to leave people with adrenaline.

Damien grabbed the locker key on the chain Elliot had secured around his neck and turned it like a man starting a machine or stopping one. “We go manual,” he said. “We’ll remove the device physically. Oliver—can you cut internal power to that locker?”

Oliver’s fingers flew. “I can isolate the circuit—if the building’s breaker box cooperates. But they’ve got a secondary power bank. We have to physically disconnect the unit plus remove the SIM.”

“Who does that?” Maya asked.

“I do,” came a voice from the corner.

Jonah stepped forward. He had the sort of tired guilt that could put out small fires if only people would let it. He’d been useful and unreliable in equal measure to us for weeks, and now he looked unreadable as an old book.

“Why you?” I snapped. “You hoarded receipts, then showed up with them like a penitent thief. Now you want to get hands dirty?”

He didn’t answer with remorse. He answered with intent. “Because I set some of this up. I know where the back access is. And because I’m tired of being the guy who apologizes and does nothing.”

That should’ve been heartening, and part of me wanted to say a thousand appreciative things. Instead the other part—the protective civic that now runs my domestic life—said, loudly: “You’ve burned us once. Don’t get me to roast you into a cautionary tale.”

Roast line two came quick and mean, the kind that’s both funny and sharp: “Apologizing isn’t a job qualification, Jonah—try brighter actions next time instead of a secondhand sorrow sale.” He winced, because he deserved it.

Jonah’s jaw worked, then he moved toward the locker with the kind of focused regret that gets work done. “I’ll do it,” he said. “But if I’m wrong—if they’ve mirrored it—pull everything public. Flood the net. Don’t give them a second.”

“Agreed,” I said. It felt like handing someone a detonator that might also save us. “We flood. If this goes, we make sure the world gets the full context in a legal packet within minutes.”

Oliver tapped the panel like he was playing a stubborn piano. “We have to cut the comms first. The unit has a cellular backbone and a satellite fallback. Jonah knows the in-room wiring. He can reach the module. He’ll need cover.”

“Cover by who?” Mason asked. “We can’t exactly send a SWAT team into a vault with a ticking broadcast—well, we can, but it would be dramatic and then someone would sue us.”

“Coverage by me,” Damien said. “Security—open the vault, I’ll go in with Jonah. Oliver monitors. Maya, keep the kid safe and keep Oliver connected to the outside. Elliot, file for emergency court order NOW. Mason, prepare the flood.”

Everyone moved. We’d learned, in a tight week, how to turn panic into work. That was our talent: making crisis vertical and productive.

The vault door was heavy, the kind of industrial certainty that makes you feel important just for being present. Damien and Jonah went in like two men who had repented differently—one by building walls and one by trying to dismantle them.

Inside, the locker was smaller than I imagined. Jonah’s hands worked fast, tracing cables, muttering to himself like a man in a math problem with consequences. Oliver’s headset chirped: “I’ve isolated the AC feed. No mains power into the box. It's running off batteries and a NanoSim with roaming.”

“We cut the power inside,” Jonah panted. “But there’s still a wireless module. It’s set to fall back if it senses a cut. There’s an anti-tamper that sends the payload if the unit is physically interrupted.”

“Of course,” Oliver said, and the exhaustion in his voice was a thing that tightened the air. “Of course they made it so hurting it hurts everyone.”

Jonah worked with a surgical calm. He unscrewed panels, found the SIM slot, and pinched the life out of connectors like a man squeezing leaks. At the same time, Damien shielded the locker like a human umbrella, shoulders wide, jaw set.

“Got it,” Jonah breathed. “But there’s an encryption module—if I cut power, it triggers a loss finalizer. You have to jam the uplink before I pull the power.”

“Jamming,” Oliver said. “We can try—but now the legal issue becomes, the radio blackouts are regulated. But frankly, I don’t care about regs if they threaten to blow up reputations and put kids in the middle of PR terrorism.”

He tuned the jammer; the hum in the room shifted. The little red light hovered at 00:08… 00:07…

Jonah’s fingers hovered. He looked up, at me, like a man asking permission from someone who’d already deserved better. “On three?”

“Do it,” I said.

He pulled.

Silence. Not the good silence; the waiting kind that smells like the seconds before a verdict.

The panel’s red dot stalled at 00:02… 00:01…

Then—nothing.

No explosion of content. No shower of hacked archives. No fireworks to sate monsters.

Instead, a beat of exquisite, fragile relief. Oliver hugged the tablet like it was a rescued kitten. Maya let out a breath that sounded dangerous and human.

Then the locker door clanged. Open. Empty.

Not empty of attackers or devices—empty of the beacon. Whoever had planted the Spine had also prepared for retreat.

Damien slammed a hand against the open space and found… nothing but emptiness and an envelope tucked where the module had been.

Jonah slid it toward us with a hand that lacked swagger and contained guilt. “It was a decoy,” he said. “A relay. They took the main node.”

My hands went numb. “They left a taunt.”

He opened the envelope for me. Inside were two things: a photograph, one I’d never thought to see again, and a note written in a hand that knew how to be cruelly precise.

The photograph was of a child—my child—in a second van, eyes wide, smiling in a way that belongs to people who don’t know they’re headlines yet. But beside him, visible in the reflection of the window, was a face I had once trusted so deeply it had become a part of my vocabulary. The name on the note read… not a name, but three words:

**We have leverage. We have time.**

A new ping lit the tablet.

Another tracker, minutes away, activated.

Oliver’s face went pale. “They moved him. They mirrored the unit. They planned for this. They always planned for this.”

And then, low and terrible, the voice from earlier—calm, intimate, practiced—came through the room speakers, as if the building itself had learned its villain’s cadence.

“Tick tock, Ava,” it said. “We promised you theater. Welcome back to act two.”

The tablet pinged coordinates—and the location wasn’t a warehouse, a van, or a chapel. It was a children’s hospital wing with a private room reserved under a donor’s anonymous name. The red dot blinked once, then settled, like a heart taking a breath before it runs.