Page 9 of Double Down

No one is supposed to be better than me, but someone just erased hours of footage from my home base like it was as simple as finding a fucking Netflix password.

“Motherfucking hell.”

I breathe out slowly; let the meds settle. Let them claw through the fog and force clarity.

Focus.

Prioritize.

I scan the logs again, hunting for the breach point—whatever weakness they exploited.

Nothing.

There’s no evidence they were ever inside. Just that half-second blip I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t looking for it.

The truth settles over me like a bad taste in my mouth. I wasn’t just breached. I was outplayed.

“Did you find anything?” Conrad asks, opening the door and leaning on the frame.

I don’t turn. “Yeah, but you’re not going to like it.”

He waits, saying nothing. I rotate one monitor past the privacy screen and hit play.

“What am I looking at?”

“The exact moment Phoenix slipped out of the suite last night,” I say. “Followed by the six hours where everything should be visible. Phoenix leaving, Sarah coming in with the killer. Everything.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s all gone.”

“Define gone,” he growls.

“I mean someone stripped every camera, every hallway, every angle. Not just deleted—scrubbed. I can’t even prove they were in my system. If I hadn’t gone looking, I never would’ve noticed.”

It feels like admitting a personal failure. Heat crawls up my neck; I flex my hands under the desk until the tendons bite.

“Can it be found?”

“Maybe,” I say, facing him. “If I had a week, a miracle, and that guy’s IP address tattooed on my dick.”

That earns me a sharp look. I meet it with a level one of my own.

“They were good,” I add. “Better than I’ve ever seen. This wasn’t brute force. It was surgical. Whoever did this studied my systems beforehand. For weeks.”

Maverick appears, arms crossed. “So, what do we do?”

I have no idea. For the first time in years, I’m at a loss and I don’t have a plan simmering at the edge of my mind ready to go.

“I don’t know. We can’t prove she wasn’t killed here. We can’t even prove we weren’t here, which means if the wrong person asks the right question, we’re fucked. If we’re fucked, then Phoenix is left unprotected.”

“One problem at a time,” Maverick says. “The corpse is our biggest, most immediate problem. How do we?—”

“No.” I get to my feet. Heat pools in my gut, the migraine pulsing spikes behind my eyes. “The actual problem is that no one should’ve been able to do this. The system I built is a closed loop. The cameras outside our door are air-gapped. Meaning the only way to get to them is from this room, with my passwords and biometric signatures.”

“You think one of us did this?” Conrad asks.

“Not unless you learned to code in three languages overnight.”