His fingers hovered for half a second over the screen, then tapped again with more force than necessary, sending another burst of code into the void. The familiar rush of data flowing through his consciousness steadied him—the digital world still made sense even when the physical one was tilting sideways.
“I slipped a tracker onto his device. Custom app. My system will flag me the second he gets within a mile of the resort perimeter or Lena’s signal. We’ll have a ten-minute head start, minimum.”
He hesitated long enough for Zach’s brow to lift in silent curiosity. Those gray-blue eyes missed nothing; his brother’s analytical gaze dissected what he said and hadn’t said.
Heat crept up David’s neck—not from the tropical climate seeping in through the windows, but from shame. “I… may have put a tracker on Lena.” His voice dropped, and he forced himself to meet Zach’s eyes, then Nick’s. “And she… may not know that yet.”
He ran a hand through his hair, fingers brushing the damp still clinging to him from the walk over. The strands fell backacross his forehead, sweat beading at his temples despite the air conditioning.
Disgust coiled in his gut like a pulled muscle—not at the necessity of the action, but at the violation of trust it represented. She’d already been betrayed by too many people. Now he was adding himself to that list, even if his motivations were pure.
“I know how that sounds,” he continued, the words tasting bitter, “but something is off, and we can’t take chances. Not with her. Not after Kate—” He stopped, jaw clenching. They all remembered Kate’s kidnapping—Nick’s panic when he couldn’t reach her telepathically while she lay unconscious.
Zach grimaced. “I agree, but make sure you tell her as soon as possible. You don’t want protecting her to backfire on you.”
Nick nodded his agreement. “Agreed. She’ll understand, as long as you volunteer the information. But if she finds out in some other way…”
David winced. Yeah, he didn’t want that.
David took a breath, trying to center himself the way he did before diving into a complex problem, and continued, his voice sharpening with renewed focus, confident that his brothers understood his actions.
“He’s not even bothering to cover his tracks. Sloppy as hell. Or he thinks he’s protected.” David’s fingers twitched, itching to pull up more data, to dive deeper into the digital footprint Chester was leaving like breadcrumbs. “No way he’s doing this solo. That video scrambler—he couldn’t have built that. I’ve seen his work history. The man can’t operate a smartphone without butt-dialing people.”
David’s mind raced through the code he’d reverse-engineered from the scrambler’s signature, seeing the elegant brutality of it even now—too sophisticated, too purposeful.“Someone funded him. Trained him maybe, but more likely bought him and provided him with the tech and moves.”
He let the implications hang heavy, like the tropical air pressing through the slats of the tall windows. Beyond the glass, palm fronds swayed in a breeze he couldn’t feel, and the sea glittered with deceptive calm.
“You think Chester is a distraction.” Zach’s tone was assessing.
David’s mind ticked forward, a restless storm of analysis and gut instinct, puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit but were forming a picture he didn’t like.
“They probably looked at new hires who would more likely be open to bribes or manipulation,” he tapped the pen on the table, the words coming faster now as his theory solidified. “Lena’s background is out there, and not hard to exploit if you know what buttons to push. Public records, social media, hell—her entire employment history is available if you know where to look.”
His hands clenched into fists, knuckles whitening. He fixed his gaze on a point past the window, cold fury behind his eyes, burning with an intensity that surprised him.
“When this is over and we’ve stopped the mastermind behind all this, I’ll scrub her history.”
When had she become this important? When had protecting her transformed from professional duty to a necessity carved into his very bones? How had he fallen so far, so fast? “So they sicced him on her. Paid or prodded or manipulated—either way, Chester’s being used as a weapon. And Lena is the target.”
The thought woke something primal and fierce—something that had nothing to do with corporate security and everything to do with the woman with impossible turquoise eyes who saw more than a man who talked to machines.
Zach sat back, his chair creaking under the shift of his muscular frame. “Makes sense. Send me the tracker info. I want eyes, too.”
David’s fingers danced again, the slick glass an anchor in turbulent water. Code flowed through his consciousness, a river of data that responded to his mental commands with the kind of precision he never quite achieved in the messy realm of human interaction. “You’ve got access now. Synced to your feed. Real-time updates.”
His pulse thudded heavily, adrenaline making everything feel a fraction too loud, too bright. The fluorescent lights seemed to hum at a higher pitch, and the salt from the ocean mixed with the ozone from the electronics surrounding him.
Nick tilted his head to the side. “I think you should put that tracker on each of us. Just to be safe—a failsafe mechanism, if you will. I’ll talk to Kate about it tonight, but I bet she’d love the protection it offers, as long as it’s only us that can track her.”
“Yeah, it’s my own tech. I can do that. I have spares. I can put them into a pen, like mine, so they’d be undetectable.” David pulled a pen from his pocket to show them before tucking it back in. “Or anything else you carry regularly.”
“One more thing,” he looked from Zach to Nick, watching his brothers’ faces shift into the hardened expressions he recognized from every crisis weathered together. The three of them against the world—it had always been that way since they’d found each other.
“Our saboteur’s obsessed with utilities—routes, disruptions, weak links. I’ve set a trap using the backup water controller. Swapped the circuits, fed a false access log, and made sure the marking tape’s scuffed enough to look like a rushed repair.”
He grinned slowly, a hard, unforgiving expression that spoke of a perfectly executed ambush in the realms of code and mechanics. His pulse quickened with anticipation, that rush ofthe hunt that came from having actionable intelligence rather than reacting, always one step behind.
“So,” he pocketed his tablet with a click that rang loud in the stillness, the device warm against his hip like a weapon ready to be drawn. “Who wants to go hunting tonight?”
