I woke up to the sound of a heart monitor.
Beep. Beep. Beep. It was the same sound from the beginning. The same smell of antiseptic. The same white ceiling. For a terrifying second, I thought I was back at the start. I thought the last six months had been a dream—a hallucination brought on by the car accident.
"Jessy?"
I turned my head. Yuri was sitting in the chair by my bed. He looked like he hadn't slept in a week. His clothes were wrinkled, his jaw covered in dark stubble. But he was there.
"Am I... am I in the void?" I asked.
"No," he said, taking my hand and kissing my knuckles. "You're in New York. You're safe. Mikhail is at the bottom of the river. The police think he slipped."
I closed my eyes, a tear escaping. "It's over? Truly?"
"It's over," he whispered.
But as I drifted back to sleep, a thought flickered in my mind. A memory of the "Ghost Code" I had shown Mikhail. I hadn't lied to Mikhail about one thing. I did have a backup. And as I lay there in the white light of the hospital, I realized that I wasn't the "Grace" in the story. I was the one who held the power to destroy us both if I ever needed to.
Yuri thought he was my protector. But I was the one holding the keys to the world.
I woke up again to the gray light of a Manhattan dawn. Yuri was gone from the bed, but the indentation of his head remained on the pillow next to mine. The room felt colder now, the heat of the night replaced by the chilling reality of what came next.
I sat up, pulling the sheets to my chest. My body felt heavy, marked by the ghost of his touch. For months, I had fought against the idea of him. I had called him my captor, my monster. But as I watched the sun bleed over the skyscrapers, I realized the truth: I hadn't just given him my body. I had given him the one thing the Ghost Code couldn't protect. My soul.
I looked at my hands, pale against the charcoal hospital blanket. Somewhere, in a decentralized cloud server that only my neural signature could unlock, the Volkov archives sat waiting. Every bribe, every shadow-contract, every name that could topple a government.
Yuri entered the room quietly, carrying a tray of coffee. He stopped when he saw me sitting up, his face softening into that rare, unguarded expression he reserved only for me.
"The discharge papers are signed," he said, setting the coffee down. "There's a car waiting in the basement. We have a flight to the Azores in three hours. From there, we disappear."
"Disappear," I repeated. It sounded like a dream. But as he leaned down to kiss my forehead, I felt the phantom hum of the data in my mind.
"No more monsters, Jessy," he murmured against my skin. "I promise."
I leaned into him, closing my eyes. I wanted to believe him. I wanted to be the girl he saved. But as we walked out of that hospital room, leaving the beep-beep-beep of my old life behind, I knew the balance had shifted. He was my shield against the world, but I was the weapon that ensured the world would never come looking for us.