Page 376 of Hell Hath No Fury
“What the fuck!?” I shouted, jerking at my restraints.
No one answered me.
Before me, the black and white console’s dark screen flared to life. The image of a pixelized black swan appeared.
“Why the fuck are you doing this?” I growled.
The image wavered then dissolved into pixel blocks, falling to the bottom of the screen.
“Why would you help me?” I shouted back, frustrated and impotent.
It reminded me all too much of how it had felt to walk into the living room on Christmas morning last year and see my mother like an unwanted, unwrapped package dead on the ground.
I blinked at the flashing words.
Why would one of the most powerful hackers in the world needmyhelp?
As if she was able to hack into my mind too, she replied:
“You don’t know me,” I countered. “Even if you’ve been watching me, which clearly you have, you don’t know who I am. Why would you think I’d help you?”
I glowered at the screen, my skin so hot with anger I felt like I’d burn to ash.
The last sentence detonated something in my brain, tumbling down walls I hadn’t even known were erected around a truth I’d refused to see.
S1gn3t.
She hadn’t said those words when I’d voiced them to her and now here was the 0bs1d14n Sw4n saying them verbatim back to me.
It wasn’t a coincidence.
They were one and the same.
My mind whirred as I worked the scenario.
Signet to Cygnet, the Latin word for swan.
Obsidian Swan.
Fuck.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered through the tangle of emotions clogging my throat. “We were friends. I would have helped you without all of this shit.”
