All Chapters of Crossed Lines: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

POV: Hailey Hailey prided herself on reading people. It was half the reason Byte & Beam had survived this long. She could sense when a client was bluffing, when an investor was pulling strings, and when Elara was hiding something. And tonight, as she sat across from Ava in the dimly lit café near their office, she had the sinking feeling both of them were keeping secrets. Ava stirred her tea more than she drank it, her gaze flicking to the window every few seconds as though expecting someone to appear. “You didn’t have to invite me,” she said finally, voice careful. “Clarisse will wonder.” “Let her wonder,” Hailey replied with a shrug. “Besides, you don’t look like someone who wants to spend another evening trapped in that mansion.” Ava’s lips twitched, almost a smile, but not quite. “You’re not wrong.” Hailey leaned back, studying her. Ava was younger, but sharper than people gave her credit for. Too sharp for her own good. “You and Elara don’t… talk much, do you?” Hailey aske

POV: AvaThe house was too quiet. Ava had always hated silence, not because she feared it, but because in silence, Clarisse’s presence was somehow louder.Her mother wasn’t home tonight. Some charity gala, another room full of painted smiles and knives hidden behind pearls. The staff moved like ghosts, careful not to disturb the perfect veneer of Clarisse Duval’s kingdom. And Ava, Clarisse’s carefully groomed daughter, sat curled on the velvet chaise with a book open on her lap, pretending to read words that refused to stick.She dropped the book with a sigh. Even rebellion felt hollow when there was no one to witness it.Ava rose and crossed to the massive window that overlooked the glittering city. From up here, everything looked orderly, perfect, a grid of light and glass. But Ava knew better. She knew about the power games behind closed doors, the way Clarisse brokered loyalty and silence with the precision of a surgeon. And she knew what it meant to be raised not as a daughter,

POV: Damon CrossThe glass walls of his office reflected the midnight skyline. Jagged, glittering, untouchable. To anyone outside, he looked the part of a man who had everything: the empire, the influence, the control.Inside, he was staring at code.Not just any code. Her code.ShadowByte.The name had been whispered across cybersecurity forums for years, always with the same sharp edge of awe and frustration. Untouchable. Precise. Ruthless when paid to be. But what made Damon linger over her work wasn’t just the mastery. It was the pattern underneath.CrossTech had been breached months ago. A rival conglomerate had siphoned proprietary algorithms and scattered them across the black market, fragments of CrossTech’s competitive edge floating in hostile hands. His in-house teams had contained the fire, but they couldn’t erase the trail, not cleanly enough.That’s why he’d gone hunting. That’s why he’d needed ShadowByte.The only hacker alive who could burn out every trace.Except she’d

POV: Damon Cross Damon had learned to live with control. Every meeting, every deal, every rival taken off the board, they all bent to his will eventually. That was the CrossTech way. Yet as he stared at the streams of code filling the darkened office screen, control felt like sand slipping through his fingers. ShadowByte. The phantom hacker who had stolen his attention more than any merger or acquisition. The copycat incident was resolved, his influence had forced the imposter to confess, and the smear campaign had been contained. But the original ShadowByte still moved freely. Somewhere in this city, she breathed, worked, and plotted. And Damon was closer to her than ever. “Sir,” his chief of security said, stepping in. “The deeper traces we ran matched more activity during the breach. Same digital footprint. Whoever this is, they weren’t just cleaning up CrossTech’s stolen data, they left… a signature.” Damon’s gaze narrowed on the highlighted string of characters. It was bol

POV: Damon The CrossTech command center was quiet after midnight. Most of the staff had gone home, leaving only the faint hum of servers and the glow of monitors. Damon leaned back in his chair, jaw tight, as the last lines of code scrolled across the screen. He’d ordered his top cybersecurity unit to comb through the breach, but it wasn’t their work that caught his eye. It was something else. A ghost. Subtle, clean, nearly invisible, like fingerprints wiped with silk. The kind of thing only someone who knew exactly what they were doing would leave behind. ShadowByte. Damon’s lips curved, not in amusement but in recognition. He’d chased the elusive hacker long enough to know the style, the precision. The digital “signature” was undeniable. But what gnawed at him wasn’t the fact that ShadowByte had been here. It was the ‘why’. The breach wasn’t deepened, if anything, traces of the rival company’s intrusion had been scrubbed clean. Smoothed over, as though ShadowByte wasn’t sabot