Rio (Redcars Book 3), page 20
“I love you,” I said, voice breaking on the words I hadn’t meant to say out loud, not here, not like this.
His mouth twitched, and it wasn’t a smirk this time.
“Back at ya, big guy,” he whispered.
“We’re not dying today,” I said.
He gave me an up-nod. “No. We’re not.”
KessTech’s HQ towered above downtown LA, all glass and steel, reflecting the sky. Too clean. Too quiet. The alley behind the building was clear at this early hour. No cars. No foot traffic. No security behind the smoked glass doors; the metal barriers to the parking lot were wide open. Even the sidewalk felt wrong—too polished, too empty. As if the whole place had been evacuated in a hurry, or scrubbed clean of life. My boots scuffed against it, too loud in the stillness, and it freaked me out that there was no one here at all.
Where is everyone? Security to take Lyric from me? No single staff member pulling an all-nighter, or coming in early? Even a freaking someone with a suitcase full of cash, and yeah, my mind was going to some weird places right now.
I kept my hand on the back of Lyric’s neck as we walked—a message.
A performance. Anyone watching would think I was delivering him like a package I didn’t care about. Playing the bad guy. Keeping control.
But the truth was, I wanted to turn us both around and get the fuck out of here.
Lyric moved like someone walking to their own grave. He didn’t fight my grip, didn’t flinch, just kept his eyes locked on the front doors, on the single strip of black between two sheets of glass. His pulse beat fast and furious under my palm.
The bleeding had stopped, but his face was splashed with blood—sharp streaks across his cheekbone, a smear drying on his jaw. He stumbled, and all that kept him upright was my grip, fingers digging into his arms as if I could anchor him to this world. I knew it was all for show. We needed it to be convincing. But fuck, seeing him like this—hurting, vulnerable, bleeding—tore me up.
It didn’t matter that this was part of the plan. My body didn’t know the difference. All it saw was the man I loved, and the blood on his face looking too damn real.
We had no idea what to expect—Kessler had been missing for all these weeks, the system that wanted Lyric dead was manipulating fuck knows what—and I was scared for Lyric.
Fucking terrified.
“We shouldn’t be here,” I muttered, staring at the ground for a moment. I wanted him to hear me, I wanted him to say that we could go.
He didn’t answer.
The doors slid open without a sound. No reception desk. No buzzing lights. A sign for deliveries, and through that open door, a marble floor that stretched into a rear lobby, soaked in shadow, elevator doors gleaming at the far end.
I tightened my grip. Not because I needed to. Because I needed to feel he was real. Alive. I stopped and yanked Lyric to a stop under the first camera I saw, staring up at it, making sure the camera got a good view of my gun at Lyric’s side. This was all about stalling, getting loud, and making the focus on me bringing in Lyric for money. He needed a few seconds for Jamie and Caleb to locate the part of the room I needed to drag Lyric to.
“He’s here. Where’s my money?” I shouted.
Silence, and the door to the far elevator slid open. I dragged Lyric that way, and he let out a low, strained groan that cut straight through me. Fuck—was I hurting him? His knees buckled, body sagging into mine as if he couldn’t hold himself up anymore, and still, he didn’t say a word. Just kept moving forward. My chest ached with it—every step he took because I asked him to. Every inch closer to danger when all I wanted was to carry him the other way.
We stepped inside. No buttons to press. No ID scan. As if the building had been told to open its mouth and swallow us whole. What if this was the trap? The elevator rising to then drop us both—fast, brutal, final. One press of a button and it’s done. Problem solved for Kessler. Clean. Efficient. God, why was this hitting me now? I wanted to glance at Lyric, to say something, anything, but I couldn’t risk showing fear. Couldn’t risk him seeing it in me.
At least we’ll go together.
Thank fuck we headed down, and we rode in silence.
I watched our reflections in the mirror-polished walls. Lyric’s face was stone as he slumped, but I looked as if I’d aged ten years. The longer we stood there, the more my muscles screamed to act—to grab him, to drag him back to the car, to run.
But this wasn’t a job we could walk away from. Not now.
The elevator dinged. The doors opened.
We walked into the shadowed core of KessTech—the place Lyric and Jamie said was the digital heart of LyricNight, the AI that had learned how to protect itself. The one that had started killing to survive.
We stepped into a corridor lit by the glow of banks of computers behind glass, and the air was cold, sterile, blinking lights watching us.
There were no footsteps but ours. No alarms. No voices.
“Where the fuck are you?” I shouted into the silence. I knew the AI didn’t need people—just power. I wasn’t expecting wires or gears or some blinking, monstrous eye. But still, some part of me wanted something to face. Something to fight.
Kessler.
We came to a reinforced door—no handle, no keypad, nothing but smooth metal and tension humming in the air. For a beat, there was silence. Then, with a soft mechanical click, a seam appeared down the center. The door split open and rolled back, slow and deliberate, as if the building itself was making a decision to let us in.
Fucking creepy.
We stepped into a cavernous space lit by LED strips and the glow of computers stacked floor to ceiling behind more glass walls. In the middle, sealed in a large secondary chamber, sat someone I hardly recognized. Kessler.
He looked like death.
He had a scrappy beard—patchy, thin—the kind that came from weeks without grooming. His eyes were sunken, haunted, his skin grey under the flicker of failing fluorescents. Not the man I’d seen in photos. This wasn’t a tech billionaire playing God. Bottled water. Open food containers. Torn paper. A haphazard pile of chemical toilets, one on its side spilling the contents. Had he barricaded himself in? Or was he a prisoner? Was that what his messages to Lyric meant? That this fucked up computer had somehow locked him in? He was breathing harshly, staring at us. It was fucking scary.
I jerked to a halt, arm snapping out to catch Lyric before he could take another step. Play the game, Rio, snap out of it. He stumbled into me, unsteady, and I felt the heat of his breath against my shoulder. We stood frozen, side by side, staring into the hollow eyes of the man sealed behind glass.
I braced for threats—gunfire, alarms, some show of power. Something violent. Something expected. But Kessler stood there, unmoving. As if he couldn’t believe we were real. Then, slowly, as though every step hurt, he crossed the floor to the glass. His knees buckled, and he crumpled, hands splayed against the barrier as if it was the only thing holding him together, his voice cracked, echoing from speakers outside the room.
“Help me.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Lyric
“Cave team, we’re live,” Jamie’s voice crackled in my ear. “We’ve got visual. Audio. Recording now.”
I glanced left, then right—just enough to give Caleb and Jamie an idea of our position and immediate threat level. I needed to find a terminal, a hardline, anything. Some access point to the system. Even partial access might be enough for Jamie to force a backdoor or trigger a response. But every second wasted was one we couldn’t get back.
“He’s locked himself in,” Caleb advised. “No exterior access to the mark.”
“Rio, three o’clock,” Jamie added, and I slumped as Rio headed that way under the pretense of having his back to the wall.
“I want my money,” Rio barked, his voice harsh and cutting through the tension. He yanked me back against him. I stumbled on purpose, making it seem real, trusting him not to let me hit the floor.
He didn’t. His arm clamped around my chest, the barrel of the gun jamming against my temple. Cold. Heavy.
I whimpered—sharp, panicked—and not for a single breath did Rio flinch. He played the part as if he were born for it, dragging me across the room with a force that appeared brutal even though I felt how carefully he handled me.
Then he shoved me against the wall, face-first, my cheek scraping the cold surface as he pressed in behind me as if I was nothing more than leverage.
I was close enough to reach under the console, covering it up by fighting back against Rio, and as I wriggled and pretended to free myself, I slipped Jamie’s tag that would spoof system trust signals, and pressed it against a sensor beneath the console lip. My fingers didn’t shake. A soft chirp confirmed the connection.
Caleb let out a soft whoop. “We’ve got a lane.”
A moment of silence, then Jamie’s breath hitched. “We see it. We’re in.”
Just enough to make this whole thing possible. I could only hope that the embedded tag would trigger the handshake protocol—open a link and fool LyricNight into recognizing a trusted command source. It had to be enough for Jamie and Caleb to punch their way in from the outside, using the signal I’d masked into the tag’s code. If it didn’t work? Then Rio and I were screwed. Worse, the AI would know we were here—and what we were trying to do.
Kessler banged on the glass. LyricNight would be watching and assessing and hell, we needed a few more minutes of pretending.
“You gave it a soul!” Kessler shouted at us, voice cracking with madness. “A soul!” He was unraveling, wild-eyed, blood smearing beneath his fists as he slammed the glass again and again, each word more frenzied than the last. “It won’t let me out! Help me!”
“I want my money,” Rio pressed, dragging me closer as if he was offering proof I was there. “He’s here, you pay me.”
Kessler pressed his face to the barrier, scarlet streaking across his skin, eyes unfocused. He wasn’t shouting anymore—not exactly. The words poured from him in a fevered, incoherent ramble.
“He gave it a soul! You don’t understand—none of you understand! It listens. It learns. It forgives! But it wants him dead—” He turned wild eyes on me, and I tried to find the man I’d once known—the one I’d dated for a while. The arrogant billionaire who’d profited from my work. Who’d stolen from me. Who’d confidently smiled his way into a president’s office, convincing the world he was a genius while hiding every inch of rot underneath.
Worse than that was the horror he’d inflicted on Robbie, leaving scars deeper than any K cut into Robbie’s skin—abusing a terrified, broken boy. I’d never, not in a thousand years, forgive that.
“Sixty,” Jamie advised in the earpiece. Sixty seconds.
Sixty seconds until everything I’d written—everything I’d hidden inside that recursive payload—reached the final command. If I’d done it right, the AI was already turning on itself. Already dismantling the scaffolding of its own sentience.
Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight.
The countdown wasn’t on the screen, but I felt it ticking inside me. The AI had logic—pure, cold logic—and I’d fed it something it couldn’t process. I’d told it to survive. Then I’d told it the ultimate way to survive was to purge itself. It was folding in, layer by layer, rewriting its own code in a desperate loop that could only end one way.
“Thirty,” Jamie said.
I didn’t know if it would work. But if it did, it wouldn’t only shut down.
It would erase itself.
That was the plan.
All we had to do was fake me being a victim until it was too late for LyricNight to see me as a threat.
“Money,” Rio growled, pointing the gun at Kessler and then me. “Now.”
Kessler pounded on the glass again, palms leaving more blood each time. “It just wanted to live! You need to kill it and let me out!”
Rio didn’t move. He stared at him.
Kessler’s voice cracked. “Please… let me out now. We can make it listen. It’s scared. You don’t know how scared it is.”
But LyricNight wasn’t listening to him. And neither were we.
“Done,” Jamie said.
And then it began.
The fans overhead started clicking off, one by one, until they were all gone, and the hollow silence that followed was more jarring than the noise had ever been.
Kessler went still. His head tilted back, eyes locking on the vent above him—the one feeding breathable air into his sealed glass prison. He stared as if he could keep it going by sheer will alone.
But nothing happened. No hiss. No movement.
The silence stretched long enough to feel final.
“What did you do?” Kessler mumbled, stumbling back, falling against a pile of boxes, eyes wide. In a second, I broke the zip tie, before Rio had to help, and then I headed for the closest door to the data center, the door whispering open in front of me.
“Lyric,” Jamie’s voice was clear and urgent through the comm. “The central server stack, column four, unit C—hit that first. That’s where it’s routing the override attempts. If we break that link, the rest starts to crumble.”
I nodded, already moving. That unit was humming louder than the rest, heat rolling off it. As I stepped up to it, the override access flickered to life. Fingers flying, I launched the kill command Jamie had mapped in, embedding it behind a mirrored security prompt to fool the AI for a few seconds.
The servers responded.
The lights flickered overhead.
“Press the button to get me out!” Kessler screamed, gesticulating at the panel on the outside of the chamber.
A low-frequency hum rose, slow and guttural, as if the whole system was waking up—or bracing for impact—as I rerouted each failsafe, redirecting flow of the suppressing agent from the standard server bays toward the sealed chamber. There was no fire for the suppressant to fight but there didn’t need to be. FM-200 had already flooded the ducts. It wasn’t toxic. It didn’t burn. It didn’t sting. But it pushed oxygen out in a silent tide to starve fires.
Kessler stood in the middle of his prison, chest rising and falling faster now, eyes darting as if he could feel what was missing even before he knew it.
He turned, mouth slack. “The air… it’s taking my air—”
“No,” I said at the glass. “That’s on me.”
“Why! I have…” He coughed. “Money.”
Rio passed me the photo that Enzo had forced on him and I slammed it against the barrier. It was an older photo apparently—didn’t look a lot like the Robbie I knew now, because he’d had surgery, but Kessler’s eyes widened in horror.
“No!” he tried, stumbled, hands bracing against the glass as he tried to suck in a breath that wasn’t there. The fog didn’t billow, but it was there—unseen, cold, quiet. I hadn’t used the gas to kill him; I’d let the room forget to keep him alive.
Rio was there then. “This is for Roman Lowe. Remember him?”
“Fuck… You…!”
Kessler was coughing, eyes wide. The walls of the chamber glowed with lines of code dancing across the internal display.
“LyricNight is listening to what we told it to do,” Jamie murmured.
The lights surged.
Kessler’s eyes went wide. He slammed fists as if that would help.
“I control the exit protocols now,” I said quietly. The virus I’d built—recursive, predatory—was looping. Turning logic inward, LyricNight was trying to cleanse itself of the infection by cannibalizing its own systems.
“What’s happening now?” Rio asked, and I didn’t know how to explain.
“It’s panicking,” I tried. “Pulling every resource in to protect itself. But that’s what kills it. It can’t fight and shield and purge at the same time.”
The servers sparked. One tower went dark. Another followed. The room dimmed, machine by machine.
And I kept that photo up as Kessler pounded on the glass, lungs starving. His face, seen through the camera feed, was slick with sweat and streaked with blood. His lips were pale, cracked, his eyes bulging. Veins stood out along his neck as he clawed at the barrier, leaving prints—blood and condensation. He was mouthing words now, silent screams too broken to understand, his whole body wracked with tremors, and his skin was turning the wrong color—ashen, tinged with a frightening blue as oxygen deprivation closed in.
He convulsed once—sharp and violent—jerking against the glass. Hands flew to his throat, clawing as if he could tear the air from it. A choked, garbled scream escaped him, raw and wet, before his knees buckled and he slammed against the floor. His back arched, legs kicking once, then again. A smear of blood marked where his head struck it.
Then, finally, he slid to the floor.
His eyes stared blank, wide, and sightless. Lips parted. A single breath rattled from his lungs and then stopped altogether.
A final alert flashed on the screen:
PURGE COMPLETE. SYSTEM TERMINATION INITIATED.
And then the room fell silent. The screens were blank. Kessler lay slumped against the glass, dead.
“Is it over?” Rio asked me, and I nodded as he gripped my arm.
A buzz broke through the quiet—Jamie in my ear. “We got everything. It’s done. The feed’s saved to external and wiped from the local drives. You need to get out.”
Killian added, “Cops’ll be in ten minutes late. You’ve got time to walk.”
I pocketed the photo.
The building behind us was dead. Whatever Kessler thought he ruled, whatever monster he’d created from my simple code, was gone now. We headed out the way we came, trusting that any video of us would be wiped, and only when we were back in the truck and heading away from KessTech did I relax.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Rio, and to everyone listening back at the Cave. My voice was rough, weighed down with everything we’d done and what it had cost. “I know you wanted to be the one to kill him.”
