Bitcoin Billionaire: I Regressed to Invest in the First Bitcoin!

The operations deck was buried beneath six floors of reinforced fiber-steel, encased in anti-surveillance shielding, and lit only by the cool hum of system monitors stretching from floor to ceiling.

Darren stood with arms loosely folded, his gaze fixed on the main holographic console, where Kara's hands danced with brisk precision, layering virtual firewalls like Kevlar on a skeleton — preparing the walled server for what could either be a breakthrough or a breach.

"We're good," Kara announced without looking back. "Sandbox is up. Triple-redundant isolation. Mirrored nodes, synthetic bounces, and a dead-man's switch that vaporizes the entire cage if anything even twitches outside the parameters. If she screws this up, the only thing left will be academic regret."

Ileana said nothing. She stood at the access terminal, fingers hovering over the soft-glow keys, posture straight but not rigid.

There was no defiance in her stance, no anxiety either, only focus. Quiet, cold focus.

Brooklyn, seated just behind her, leaned forward slightly, eyes flicking between the decryption interface and the lines of code scrolling like silent prayers across Kara's main display.

She had no idea what they were doing, so all she could do was watch. Maybe if a good story came out of it that she could tell without getting into trouble... again, then that'll be something she could do.

Darren remained still as his System whispered to life in his peripheral vision.

┏Mission Subroutine Enabled: Validate Loyalty – Subject: Ileana Popescu┛

┏Tracking Neural Input Streams…┛

┏Success Condition: Full Retrieval & Blacklist Injection Confirmed┛

┏Ileana's Loyalty Level: 85%┛

That Loyalty Level had been around that number ever since he got her into the hotel and that was the only reason why Darren didn't straight up believe that she had betrayed him.

The terminal beside her blinked, awaiting the first key.

"She knows what she's doing," Kara murmured, though her tone was layered with suspicion. "But so did every other snake I've seen get into bed with Triad code. Let's just hope this one bites the right direction."

Darren gave no reply. He simply watched.

The vault was older than she remembered.

Ileana's interface shifted into personal override mode, and the world became code —layered, fragmented, recursive. Echoes of security scripts flared faintly across her field of vision like half-buried landmines, most inert, some flickering at the edge of activation.

The monitor to her became a world of holographic numbers and she was in the middle of it.

She traced their outlines with her eyes and navigated around them with ease born not of arrogance, but of familiarity.

This had once been her home.

The architecture of the vault was unmistakably hers. From the decaying symmetry of the firewall loops to the mirrored misdirection trees on every fourth node —these were the fingerprints of a coder who had once believed that untraceability wasn't just a challenge but a form of rebellion.

But this system was no longer pure. Something else lived here now — something watching.

She entered the second tier.

A flicker across the root stack. Static noise.

Then, at the back of her mind, she heard his voice again.

"My little ShadowBloom."

The voice wasn't real, and yet it arrived with the unmistakable timbre of memory. Corroded, digitized, slowed.

"Back to finish what you started? Or back to fail again?"

Her breath caught. Not because she was afraid of it. But because she remembered how often she had heard that voice behind her at two in the morning, when her hands trembled after ten hours of coding death-traps into the bones of unknown systems.

Skinner had never shouted. He had whispered. The kind of whisper that could reprogram your survival instinct.

But this wasn't Skinner. This was just a ghost— a verification protocol coded in his likeness. A final gate, built to verify identity through psychological residue.

She had to remind herself. Skinner was dead.

He was fucking dead.

She... She was the one who killed him.

Ileana exhaled slowly. "I'm not here for you," she said in her thoughts. "I'm here to bury what you made me do."

The ghost said nothing. And the gate finally opened.

Success.

Inside the vault, flare traps hung like dormant teeth. Decoys blinked in intervals, programmed to activate if any sequence passed without full authentication. Kara's dead-man's switch blinked in her peripheral vision; silent, patient, eager to pull the plug.

Then came the last defense.

A flare script snapped into partial ignition, its code signature screamed at her through error pings.

She recognized it instantly. It was a deadlock that required the override phrase.

Her fingers hesitated. Then she quickly typed the words that she remembered, the same line she had that dreadful sing every time in the background while he made her run codes.

'Rivers run silent beneath the stone.'

Ding.

Ding.

Ding....

Success!

The script flickered.

Then folded.

Immediately, the vault collapsed like there was nothing at all even holding it. It fell quietly, cleanly, without so much as a byte left behind.

"She did it," Kara whispered, checking the monitor. "She wiped the vault clean, blacklisted their last five ghost accounts, and ran a recursive anti-rebuild through the old ShadowBloom shell. If they try to rebuild the vault, it'll eat itself."

Darren didn't reply immediately. He stared at the log stream, watching for irregularities —stray calls, duplicated pings, background whispers in the lines.

There were none.

Just clean execution.

His system confirmed it.

┏Protocol Completed: Loyalty Assessed

Status: Probationary Trust Level – 92%┛

Ileana gazed at him, fingers crossed, begging him to say something.

Only a moment passed before Darren finally turned to her, nodding once. "Well done. You passed."

He turned around and left the room.

Kara smiled at Ileana while Brooklyn followed after Darren.

-------

It was late when Brooklyn found him, standing on the upper floor of the Steele Complex's west area, peering through one of the windows.

He didn't look at her when she stepped up beside him. She said nothing at first, letting the silence fill in the space between them, like static before a signal.

"You really like this girl, don't you?" she finally said. "Didn't even get mad at the prospect of her betraying you."

Darren's eyes remained on the skyline. "I just knew that she didn't."

He waited before continuing. "Also, I don't like her, I just think she's talented. That Skinner guy knew it and the Triad didn't."

Brooklyn nodded, thinking.

"I didn't realize how close it was," she said. Her voice wasn't weak, but it was quieter than usual— like the bravado had finally stepped aside to let something more honest speak. "That relay wasn't meant for me. It was meant to bleed you. I just… happened to be the entry point."

"You were always part of this, Brooklyn. Whether you signed anything or not." His voice didn't waver, didn't soften. It wasn't compassion that drove his words. It was something heavier— conviction without performance. "I protect my friends. Full stop."

She nodded, then looked down at her hands, thumbs brushing together in thought. "You always make it sound so simple."

He said nothing. Let the wind speak.

After a moment, she asked, "How do I repay that?"

The question hung there, vulnerable.

Darren turned to her slowly, not with sentiment but with certainty.

"Come work for me."

Brooklyn laughed. "I already have a job, Steele"

"I'll pay you double whatever you earn," he replied. "I want you to take full control of my PR. I've seen how important that is recently. You'll coordinate press strategy, media management, and external pressure. The world's going to come clawing when we go louder with our tech. I don't want a buffer. I want someone who already knows how to cut through noise."

He held her gaze.

"Be my press manager."

Brooklyn let out a sound somewhere between a breath and a dry laugh. Her lips curved into the kind of smile that only happens when exhaustion meets unexpected trust.

"I can't believe you're asking me to do this."

Darren's smirk was brief, but it reached his eyes.

"Are you saying you will?"

Brooklyn pretended to think about it. "Well, if you're paying me double..."

"Yeah right," Darren joked flirtatiously. "Pretend as if the money's why you're doing this, Brooklyn."

She smiled back.