Carson's POV
3:00 a.m.
The world outside the penthouse window wasn't sleeping. It was waiting. Waiting for something to bleed. Something to burn.
The city lay beneath a fevered fog, twitching with hidden life. Towers blinked like surveillance drones. Rain still shimmered on the glass as if the sky had cried and then forgotten why. Only one light was on in the penthouse—the blue glow of screens. My altar. My confession booth.
I didn't sleep. I watched. One hand around a mug of coffee gone cold. The other crushed a stress ball engraved with my initials. That leather skin was stitched with the same hands that tried to cage me. Funny. Now I used it to focus.
Behind me, silence buzzed with the hum of code and consequence.
Ryder flickered on screen, IV in arm like a badge of dishonor. His lips curled like he was about to tell a joke and commit arson in the same breath. "We doing this or dying slow?"
"Same thing," I said.
He grinned. "Thought so."
Only we knew. Only Leona, Ryder, and me. Everyone else thought we were just tired kids chasing ghosts. No. We were the ghosts. And we were here to haunt back.
Then came Leona.
3:05 a.m. Sharp heels. Black jumpsuit. Hair coiled into a defiant crown. No makeup. Just red eyeliner like she painted her warpath.
"You idiots started without me?" she barked.
Ryder gestured at the chaos on the screen. "You're late. The apocalypse couldn't wait."
She rolled her eyes and tossed a flash drive on the table. "Blueprints. Access logs. Internal shifts from Glory's Seoul wing. You're welcome."
I grabbed it without a word. Slid it into my system. My fingers moved faster than I thought. I wasn't coding. I was dissecting a god.
"I added a ghost bypass," Leona said. "Firewall won't even know we're inside until it's too late."
"Where'd you get this?"
"Ryder's blood results." She grinned. "He's got iron in more ways than one."
We weren't breaching Glory. We were breaking it. Quietly. Bloodlessly. But with enough precision to cause a collapse from within.
Suddenly, a creak.
We all froze.
Elise.
She stood in the hall—barefoot, hair tangled, oversized hoodie, grey sweats. She looked like she hadn't slept in years. Her eyes darted from screen to screen, to Leona's smirk, to Ryder's grin, to my stillness.
"What the hell is this?" she rasped.
None of us answered.
"I went to sleep after watching reruns of some shitty baking show," she whispered. "Now you're staging a cyber war in the living room?"
Leona sipped her drink. "Welcome to the family."
Elise didn't laugh. She looked at me.
I sighed. "It wasn't time to tell you."
"When is it ever time with you?" she snapped.
Silence.
"I hacked your father's backup server three hours ago," she said coldly. "Found your firewall. Danced through it. You think I can't keep up?"
My jaw tightened.
She stepped forward. "I'm not a porcelain doll, Carson. I can burn too."
The screens flickered. Ryder whistled.
"She's in," he muttered.
Leona smirked. "Told you she wasn't just another pretty face."
Before I could answer, Ryder swore. "We've got a signal."
"What kind?" I asked.
He angled his screen.
A coded SOS. Embedded in a candy store server. Location pinged: two blocks from where I saw Damian.
"Shit," I breathed.
Leona leaned in. "That's your brother, isn't it?"
I nodded slowly.
Damian's message was short, sharp, and masked behind three proxies.
HELP.
Glory was watching him too. And he'd just risked everything to speak.
Ryder started rerouting. Leona updated the plan. Elise stared at the screen, still bleeding from a shallow cut on her hand she hadn't even noticed.
I crossed the room. Took her wrist gently. Wrapped it. Quiet. Focused.
"We're in deep now," I said softly.
She met my gaze. "Then let's drown together."
The breach lasted thirteen minutes before the firewall closed.
We left through a backdoor. Enough to listen. Enough to haunt.
And across the world, in a steel tower with no name, Kim Yoon-suk blinked at a red alert. For the first time, he felt it.
The monster wasn't knocking anymore.
He was already inside.
Now. Seoul.Yoon-suk's POV
He stood before a wall of surveillance, arms folded behind his back, the ice in his glass long since melted.
"A breach," the agent whispered. "Minimal data extraction. But they touched the vault."
Kim Yoon-suk did not blink. His reflection stared back at him from the glass wall, calm and surgical.
"They're playing monsters," he murmured, voice like silk dipped in arsenic. "But they forgot—" He turned slowly, smiling like a razor. "—monsters are born in my basement."
He walked toward the room where a boy—barely breathing, eyes stitched with tracking nodes—lay shivering.
"Send them a gift," he said.
Back at the Penthouse – Leona's POV
The air tasted like caffeine and nerve endings. We hadn't slept. Elise was still in her oversized hoodie, hair a mess, hands flying over a keyboard like it was an exorcism. And damn—she was good.
She bypassed firewalls that Ryder said were unbreakable. Not just broke them—she danced through them. Like this wasn't her father's empire she was destroying. Like she wasn't trembling inside.
I watched in awe.
"You learned that where?" I asked, sipping coffee like it was whiskey.
She didn't look up. "Does it matter?"
No. It didn't.
I turned to Carson. He looked like a storm pretending to be a man. And he was smiling. That damn crooked smile.
Then: signal.
Damian. Trapped. Message encrypted. One word: HELP.
Carson's eyes changed. Leveled. Laughed like a guillotine.
"We're going," he said.
"Double date's canceled," I replied, grabbing my coat. "Let's go save a ghost."
Elise and Ryder stayed behind—Ryder calling shots, Elise setting trap after trap, building a minefield in code.
I tossed her my phone. "If we die, make it poetic."
She didn't flinch. "If you die, I'll make it ugly."
Meanwhile, Hospital.
Alex's phone buzzed. He glanced. Half a message. Then there was a blackout.
The patient in Room 9 stared at him. Pupils blown wide. Knife tucked under a blanket.
Alex smiled like a man who'd been in hell before.
"Let's get started, shall we?"
Back on the road, Carson and I were a pair of devils with nothing left to lose.
We were going to save Damian.
Or take the world down trying.
We were halfway between sleep and war when the signal came. One word. Red screen. Digital scream: HELP.
Carson froze mid-sentence. Ryder stopped chewing on wires. Elise looked up from the floor, eyes dazed but locked in. No one said it aloud. No one had to. Damian was in trouble.
"We're going," Carson said, that lunatic calm in his voice—the kind of chill that made hell shiver.
I grabbed my coat, tied my hair in a bun. "Double date cancelled."
Elise tossed a coded drive toward me like it was a grenade.
"If we die, make it poetic," I told her.
She didn't even flinch. "If you die, I'll make it ugly."
That's why I liked her.
Ryder was at the desk, six screens surrounding him like a war throne. Coffee in one hand, scalpel in the other. The look on his face? Pure chaos.
Carson was already by the door, coat swirling like he was born to haunt. I followed. The penthouse door closed behind us like a coffin lid.
The Rescue Begins
Midnight highways blurred under screaming tires. Carson drove like a man playing chess at 200 miles an hour. Not reckless—precise. Calculated psychosis. Each turn is a threat. Each red light is a challenge.
Damian's last ping came from an abandoned prep school in the Upper North sector. Half-owned by a ghost company under Yoon-suk. The kind of place where kids vanished and files were always marked "accident."
"Trap," I said.
"Obviously," Carson replied.
We didn't slow down.
When we got there, the wind screamed. Shadows bled across the concrete. The gates were broken. Lights flickered like someone breathing too fast. I saw blood before I saw the bodies.
Carson smiled. "Let's make some noise."
He moved like a bullet wrapped in silk. Silent until he wasn't. I followed, blades in both hands, breath steady, pulse wired.
Inside, corridors stretched like intestines. The stink of rot and bleach. Blood on the walls. A single flashlight flickered in the distance. Damian's coat.
But nothing else was still.
Ambush.
They came from every door—mercs, drugs still in their eyes, loyalty stitched into their bones.
Carson laughed.
That goddamn laugh.
I joined in. Screaming through blood, slicing and spinning, watching him break ribs like he was conducting an orchestra.
We weren't rescuing. We were reaping.
I found Damian in a locked room, bruised, barely conscious. Eyes wide. Hope buried deep.
"Hey, kid," I whispered, hauling him up. "Told you monsters are real."
Carson covered us as we ran. Bullets behind. Fire spreading. He moved like this was a ballet. A psychotic, manic, glorious ballet of pain.
Outside, we threw Damian in the car.
"Go!" I screamed to no one in particular.
Carson didn't drive.
He launched.
Back at the penthouse, we didn't speak. Didn't blink. Blood dried on our clothes. Damian clung to Carson's arm like he didn't know who else to trust.
The Morning After
The city began to stir. Somewhere, a street vendor called out over steam, selling bagels to ghosts in suits. A train moaned through the grey fog, distant and low, like the city exhaling.
Alex pushed open the door to the penthouse like he was crossing into a tomb. His shirt was half-untucked, streaked with ash and blood. Cuts mapped his arms like a story he didn't want to tell. His eyes were hollow—some battle had been barely won, and only just.
He stepped in.
And froze.
Everyone was asleep.
Ryder lay on the couch, curled around Leona, her cheek painted in dried blood like war paint. A soft, strange peace in the way her fingers gripped his shirt.
Carson was on the floor, cradling Damian like a wolf guarding a wounded cub. Arms locked around him, jaw clenched in sleep.
And Elise…
She sat upright, unmoving, with Carson's head resting in her lap. Her fingers threaded through his hair in slow, absent strokes. Her eyes were half-lidded, lost in some far-off storm only she could see. But she was still there. Still touching him. Still awake.
No alarms. No panic. Just the hum of machines and breath.
Alex didn't speak. Didn't dare.
He let his bag fall. Sank onto the nearest couch. One arm over his eyes.
And, for the first time in days, he slept.
Because in this house of broken saints and beautiful madness, survival was sacred.
And silence—
Silence meant we were still alive.