Page 16 of Rio (Redcars #3)
TWELVE
Rio
“I don’t know where to start,” Lyric murmured. “But?—”
“Wait! I’m looping in Caleb,” Jamie said, pulled out his phone, tapped the screen, and placed it on the table, angled toward Lyric. A second later, Caleb’s face filled the display. He was as serious as Jamie—eyes sharp, mouth set.
“This is Caleb,” Jamie said. “Works with Killian at the Cave, and with Levi.”
“What is the Cave?”
“Need to know basis,” Jamie deadpanned.
Lyric didn’t answer right away. His gaze flicked to me instead, searching.
“You can trust him,” Jamie prompted, but Lyric was still watching me for my say-so. My chest tightened.
I gave a short nod. “He’s okay,” I said gruffly.
Only then did Lyric turn to the phone. “Lyric,” he introduced himself.
Jamie stepped to the foot of the bed where Caleb could see him as well.
His voice was quiet, but there was a weight to it—a low, heavy warning cutting through the tension.
His posture was still, but he tracked every flicker of Lyric’s expression, as if he was trying to read beneath the surface.
No theatrics, no raised voice—just the kind of cold control that told everyone in the room that he was hanging on to his temper by a thread.
The kind of quiet that meant he was past shock, past disbelief, and deep into the territory where damage control met fury.
“Nine times, Lyric. You’ve had a contract on you nine freaking times.”
Lyric blinked, his lips parting as if he wanted to argue, but nothing came out.
“All traced back to the LyricNight AI security system, which apparently wants to kill you,” Jamie continued.
They tossed words around—pings, nodes, sandboxes—and I tried to keep up, but it was just noise.
All I really caught was that whatever they’d found had Lyric’s name written all over it, talking in a language I could never hope to follow.
Instead, I stared at Lyric and was ready to move if Jamie lost his shit over anything.
“I know,” Lyric murmured.
“LyricNight isn’t just mirroring system activity—it’s logging behavioral telemetry, feeding it to a weighted AI decision engine, and using it to auto-generate bounties.”
“Yeah.” Lyric sounded beaten down.
“Kessler doesn’t have to lift a finger. The system self-updated, self-deployed, and flagged you as a high-value target nine freaking times. How did you find a way in to trigger this response?”
Lyric exhaled, a slow, tired breath, his voice flat and distant as he spoke. “Fuck, Jamie. It’s my code.”
“The fuck?” Jamie snapped.
“When I worked with Kessler…”
I felt the words crack through the room. Rage surged up so fast it made me dizzy. He’d worked with Kessler ?
I clenched my fists, jaw tight, muscles tensing as if I was ready to throw someone through a wall.
I thought Jamie was cool with Lyric—that he wasn’t one of the bad guys—but if he was working with Kessler, then had Lyric manipulated us?
It made my skin crawl, and Lyric was staring down at the half cookie in his lap.
Maybe he felt it—the heat of my fury blistering the air between us?
He glanced at me. “Let me explain. We were partnered on this project, and I thought it was just a matter of sharing theory and conducting a peer review, but he was stealing my work, albeit not initially. I didn’t know until the code started appearing outside of our test sandbox—until things I hadn’t published started turning up in his software builds.
When I realized, when I logged it as an issue, hell, that was the first time someone tried to kill me. And maybe I should’ve seen it coming.”
“Kessler stole your code?” Jamie pushed.
Relief pricked me—he hadn’t been working with Kessler? And Jamie seemed calm and wasn’t accusing Lyric of anything. Which made Lyric what? A victim?
“He’d built in backdoors, so subtle that even my sandbox environments didn’t flag them.
The program was sold to support investment and law enforcement, with its hooks in bounty hunting, location checks, influencing the outcomes of jury cases, exonerating the guilty, and supporting dark web movements.
Shit, I had to try and stop it, because he was getting richer and more powerful, removing opponents to legislation, tampering with juries without being noticed, murder by contracts, and it was my code that was the foundation for it all. ”
“Shit,” Caleb muttered.
Jamie didn’t take his eyes off Lyric. He just gestured silently for him to go on.
Lyric stared at Caleb, then back at Jamie, jaw clenched before he continued, quieter.
“Every system-level event. Every script revision. Each time I tried to hack in and modify the prediction engine or optimize the neural net feedback loop, I tracked how the software was evolving, and—fuck—it was evolving. Reinforcement layers in the model were beginning to rewrite themselves.”
I didn’t understand any of this, but Jamie looked murderous. Was that at Lyric? Or the system. Or Kessler?
Lyric swallowed hard and dropped his gaze for a beat before he talked in a flat tone as if it hurt to remember.
“When Kessler dropped out of MIT to start KessTech, I used my own backdoors into the criminal justice side of the software he created. Started spotting payout patterns. Anonymous transactions. Contracts showing up on dark web forums—carefully phrased, encrypted hits, running off my code in his platform. They were random at first, as if Kessler was stress-testing the system…”
He went quiet for a second. Then: “But when I tried to take the contracts offline, the AI turned on me. It mirrored the triggers and launched a contract against me.”
Caleb’s voice was soft but clear. “Kessler wanted you dead?”
Lyric gave a short, bitter laugh. “The system wants me dead. LyricNight wants me dead. Kessler, whatever was left of him in control, wants me captured. I was a proof of concept for the AI’s darker operational mode.
It learned from me—and then, it came for me.
This?” He gestured vaguely at the bandages. “Attempt number ten.”
“Fuck,” Jamie said, gripping his lighter and flicking it on, then off, a familiar habit when he was tense or thinking hard. “The system could’ve tracked you right to our doorstep.”
A beat of silence followed. The room shifted, subtle weight in every glance exchanged.
“You were the most random connection I could think of, and I covered my tracks. There’s nothing online, and I haven’t accessed the system. As far as the AI and Kessler are concerned, I died in the accident that killed the assassin who’d taken the contract.”
“Then why the whole media storm about you attempting to kill Kessler? Why are the contracts ramping up?” Jamie asked.
Lyric winced. “I don’t know.” Then, he hung his head. “Maybe it’s the messages I get from Kessler.”
“You’re talking to Kessler?” Jamie snarled.
“No, fuck, he’s sending me these messages on an encrypted app he created in college.”
Jamie held up the note he’d shown me. “Like this.”
“Yeah.”
Jamie and Caleb launched into a heated debate about how safe everyone was, and it was just noise, although Jamie had calmed down and gone into geek mode.
Which meant the conversation was going over my head again.
When my phone buzzed and I saw a 911 text from Lianne, before it rang, I was relieved to use it as an excuse to move to the landing outside.
A 911 meant shit was happening, and I never ignored those calls.
I didn’t close the door, so I could keep an eye on Lyric in case Jamie did something to try to hurt him.
Inside, the tech speak was still going on, and Lyric was pale and exhausted, but nodding along .
“What?” I snapped, pressing the phone to my ear.
“Well, fuck you too, sunshine,” Lianne replied. “Just confirming the fight for Saturday.”
I grunted. “Why is this a 911? I said I’ll be there.”
“Just checking. You need some pills?”
“No, I fucking don’t need pills.”
“I have some if you?—”
“I’ll be at the fucking fight!”
I ended the call, fingers twitching, then turned to stare at Lyric lying in that bed. I wouldn’t cancel, I needed to fight for so many reasons, not least, the need to get rid of the aggression that was a permanent part of me.
I didn’t want to care, but I did. The feeling coiled in my chest, tight and furious, and no amount of fists or fights could burn it out of me.
I leaned back against the wall for a beat, jaw clenched so hard it ached, trying to pull myself back from the edge.
But when I glanced through the open door and saw Lyric still too pale, too quiet, my resolve cracked wide open.
I decided to stay outside the door, ready to keep pretending I wasn’t some growling, fucked-up guard dog whose temper was on a knife-edge and who didn’t want to pick Lyric up and keep him safe, but also have him fuck me into next week.
Same as I should have with Danny.