Read Chapter 34: The Break-In

The door came off its hinges with a sound like a gunshot.

Jazz stood in the hallway, keys still in her hand, shopping bags slipping from her fingers. The flat's door—their stupid, flimsy, rented flat door—hung crooked, the frame splintered, the lock snapped clean through.

"Tom." Her voice came out thin. Wrong. She said his name again, harder. "Tom."

He was already moving past her, into the living room. She heard his footsteps stop short. Followed him in.

The place was wrecked. Not angry-wrecked, not a tantrum. Surgical. Every drawer pulled, every cushion slit, every shelf emptied onto the floor. Books splayed open, spines cracked. The fridge stood open, its contents dumped in a pile. The bathroom cabinet had been pulled off the wall.

But Jazz wasn't looking at any of that. She was staring at the corner of the living room where their server used to sit—the custom rig Tom had built, humming in its black tower case, the one they'd insured for more than their rent, the one holding every line of code, every build, every backup of the new integration features.

It was gone. Just an empty desk, cables cut clean, dangling like dead vines.

Tom stood in the middle of the chaos, completely still. "They knew exactly what to take."

"What?" Jazz turned to him, heat rising in her chest. "You think this was—"

"Look around, Jazz." His voice was flat, controlled, the kind of calm that came from a very hard fall. "They didn't touch the TV. The laptop on the kitchen counter is still there. My watch is on the nightstand. The only thing missing is the one piece of hardware that could destroy us."

Jazz walked to the desk anyway, as if the server might materialize if she just got close enough. Her hand touched the bare surface. The cables were cut flush—clean, deliberate cuts. No tearing. No yanking.

Someone had brought wire cutters.

"Vikram." The name came out bitter. "He said he'd take us down. This is how he does it. Cobra-strike legal threats in public, garbage in private."

Tom didn't argue. He was already on his phone, thumb tapping. "I'm calling the police. And then I'm calling Priya. She may know something. She always does."

"And then what?" Jazz's voice cracked. She hated that it cracked. "Tom, we don't have backups. The off-site sync died last week because we spent the money on the awards trip. We have three days until the integration deadline. Three days, and every file we've written in the past six weeks is gone."

"We have local copies—"

"Where? On our laptops?" She laughed, brittle and hollow. "Our laptops that are still here because they're not worth stealing on their own. The code is gone, Tom. All of it. The new features, the API changes, the security patches we built over the sprint. Everything."

Tom's phone was still in his hand, but he wasn't calling anyone. He was just standing there, staring at the empty desk like it had taken something from him personally. Because it had. It had taken his work. His fight. His redemption arc, the one he'd been building since he confessed to the patent lie.

Jazz felt the edges of her vision blur. She blinked hard. Not now. She couldn't fall apart now. That was the deal she'd made with herself years ago, after the startup that broke her, after the failure that taught her to keep her feet planted and her eyes forward. Don't look down. Don't waver. Don't—

"Jazz." Tom's voice was softer now. She felt his hand on her arm, a grounding weight. "Hey. Look at me."

She looked at him. His face was pale beneath the stubble, his jaw tight. But his eyes weren't blank anymore. They were searching. Thinking.

"We'll figure this out," he said. "We always do."

"You don't know that." Her voice came out small. She hated that too.

"No." His grip tightened. "I don't. But I do know that standing here feeling sorry for ourselves won't bring the server back. So we call the police. We log the theft. We talk to Priya. And we ask ourselves one question: who knew the server was even here?"

Jazz froze.

The cables. The clean cuts. The absence of visible theft beyond the one target. Whoever did this hadn't wandered in and taken the most expensive thing they could find. They'd known exactly where to go, exactly what to grab, exactly how long they had before anyone came home.

"I told Priya we were running backups off-site," Jazz said slowly. "At the integration session. Remember? I said it to her on the phone—our backup strategy, when she called about the meeting. And the awards night, she was there—she saw the server, she asked about the case, the ventilation."

Tom shook his head. "Priya's on our side now."

"We thought she was before, too."

Silence. The accusation hung between them, ugly and unfair and impossible to take back. Jazz wanted to retract it, but the damage was done. Tom's face had closed off.

"She gave us the evidence," he said quietly. "She put herself on the line."

"Or she did exactly what Miles warned us about." Jazz pressed her palms to her eyes. "I don't know. I don't know what to believe anymore. All I know is we had three days to deliver and now we have nothing."

Tom was quiet for a long moment. Then he crouched down, running his hand along the floorboards where the desk had been. Jazz watched him, brow furrowed. His fingers found a slight irregularity—a seam in the wood that didn't match the others.

"What are you—"

"Priya and I had coffee last week. Just the two of us. She asked how I was holding up, after the blog post." He pried at the board. It lifted with a low groan. "She said something strange. She said, 'If you're ever worried about losing something, Tom, remember there are always places people don't think to look.' I thought she meant emotionally."

His hand disappeared into the gap beneath the floor. When it came back, it was holding a small black drive.

Jazz's breath caught. "That's—"

"Not ours." Tom turned the drive over in his palm. A label was affixed to its side, marked with a single word in Priya's tight handwriting: *BACKUP*. "But it might change everything."