Page 12 of Damsel in Disguise

Which isn’t entirely a lie.

I’d take any course. Any department. Any excuse that lets me sit in a lecture hall and belong to him in the most technical way possible—his student. Even if it’s only on a register.

It’s been a year since I came to England.

Life is boring, if you ask me. Not that Sydney ever offered anything better. I don’t miss the city. Compared to there, I love it more in here. I needed the cold stone. The order. A place royally old enough to swallow mistakes without echoing them back.

The only thing I miss is my elder brother, Asher, and our cousin Adrian.

I think they miss me too. It shows in the way they visit me whenever CynoTech loosens its grip long enough to let them breathe. Well, being the CEO, Adrian hardly gets days off to relax.

Asher has changed a lot ever since taking on the COO role, working alongside Adrian. I blame the damn family legacy, the CynoTech Group, for carving him into something perpetually grumpy and impossible to relax.

I miss the old sarcastic Asher.

Sometimes he brings Adrian with him. He’s our only close cousin, and obviously, the best days are when he tags along with Asher.

Adrian is the only one who can get away by poking him relentlessly, needling his composure until something familiar cracks through. It’s only when the three of us are together—crowded in shared space and old rhythms—that Asher slips back into his element.

alistair

An anomaly left unexamined is a security failure in waiting.

For exactly ninety-two days, a localized variance has drifted along the perimeter of my routines. A shadow on a black sports bike. A recurring blip on the private surveillance loops I’ve spliced into the Oxford campus grid.

The body lingers in the blind spots of the stone archways, tracking the exact timing of my departures from the engineering faculty.

At first, my calculations suspected Council surveillance. The Triarch Dominion’s hidden biometric research lines require constant vigilance against internal oversight. So I monitored the shadow with cold, algorithmic precision, waiting for a misstep that would necessitate a clean, permanent extraction.

But the data didn’t align with a professional operative.

An intelligence asset doesn’t wear an oversized fleece hoodie that swallows their frame.

A state spy doesn’t hold their breath so sharply when I pass that the acoustic sensors hidden in the courtyard pillars catch the sudden spike in their respiratory frequency.

A trained tracker doesn’t leave a digital footprint under the brazenly arrogant alias @phasevariance on public engineering forums, systematically analyzing my uploaded CoreCircuits schematic files.

I sit at the mahogany desk in my darkened office in the mansion, the amber glow of three monitors reflects off the lenses of my glasses.

On the central screen, a real-time data string from the local cellular node is attempting to unmask the device tracking me.

SIGNAL ENCRYPTION LEVEL: HIGH.

PARENT CARRIER: SECURE GLOBAL GATEWAY (DATA ROUTED THROUGH SYDNEY/ENGLAND CACHE).

USER IDENTITY: DECRYPT IN PROGRESS... STATUS: CLASSIFIED/RESTRICTED.

I lean back, tapping a single fingernail against the polished wood of my desk. Whoever this tracker is, they’re backed by an incredibly advanced, corporate-grade security matrix—the kind of multi-layered sovereign shield that typically belonged to high-tier tech dynasties or defense contractors.

The individual’s agency is an illusion. I haven’t left this stalker uncontained because I’m careless. I’ve left them uncontained because a threat hiding behind such high-level encryption is an exceptional data point. I’m allowing the loop to continue to harvest behavioral profiling, tracking their exact steps until their identity finally decodes itself in my system.

A sudden flash of crimson on my auxiliary monitor breaks my thoughts.

ALERT: ZONE 4 COMPROMISE. UNIVERSITY SECURITY DISPATCHED.

On the live surveillance feed of the Radcliff Quadrangle, the lone figure in black leather is pressed tightly against the shadow of a stone pillar. The tracker has miscalculated the patrol sweep.

An Oxford security guard is cutting across the lawn, his flashlight beam slicing through the mist, heading directly toward the alcove where the figure hid.