Use the chaos. Use whatever help comes. Get her out.
I’m reaching for the cold coffee when the alert sounds. Soft chime. The kind most people would dismiss. But I built this system from the ground up, and this particular tone means my perimeter has been tripped. Someone is probing my network.
My fingers go numb on the keys. I’m already in the security logs, tracing the intrusion before the adrenaline has fully hit. Muscle memory.
The probe is sophisticated. Careful. Not amateurs. Not even close. Professional. Targeted.
A second wave hits my firewall. Not probing anymore. Pushing. They want in. I’m the only thing between them and everything I’ve built.
My defenses peel back one by one. Three gone. Four.
“No, you don’t.”
I reroute. Throw up decoys. Patch the breach. They punch through the first decoy in two seconds. Faster than they should be able to. Faster than anything I’ve seen short of a state actor.
Five walls down. Two left.
I kill the connection. Full blackout. Screens dark. Count to thirty. Fists white on the desk. The walls press in.
I reconnect through a clean route. They got close. Too close. Too close.
“Trace it.” My voice sounds strange in the silence. “Trace it, trace it.”
I run the trace before they can regroup. Bouncing the signal, fighting back. Forty-seven seconds. The origin point materializes on my screen. Just an IP address. Meaningless until I run it against everything I’ve collected.
I stop typing.
I’ve seen this signature before. Brushed against these servers while mapping New Orleans. Pulled fragments from infrastructure I had no business touching and filed it away as background noise. Powerful. Private. Careful.
Someone noticed.
I check my physical security without thinking about it. Cameras. Motion sensors. Stair alerts. Nothing triggered. They have my digital signature but not my location. Not yet.
I dig into the logs. Scroll back through weeks. Months. There. And there. And there. Subtle touches I dismissed as noise. Patterns I was too focused on the Benedettis to read.
Fuck. Sloppy. I was so goddamn sloppy.
I’ve been monitored. By someone with reach. Resources. Whoever has been squeezing the Benedettis has also been watching the person watching them.
I could run. Pack the drives, burn the apartment, become someone else in another city. Ghost can be rebuilt anywhere.
But she can’t run. Not locked in a warehouse with twelve days on the clock.
I didn’t go back for her the first time. I told myself I needed one more year, one more semester, one more thing to carry when I came back for her. I was wrong. I was eighteen and scared and wrong, and she paid for it.
I’m not leaving her again.
Which means I can’t run.
The trace blinks on my screen. Patient. Circling. A predator with more resources than me. And now they know exactly where to look.
On the wall, she’s still smiling. Braces. That ugly shirt. Attitude I couldn’t argue with even when I tried.
Okay. I crack my knuckles. Pull the keyboard closer.
“Let’s see who you are.”
I start hunting back.
