Page 105 of Fractured Loyalties

And if it thinks I’ll wait for it to ask permission, it doesn’t know who it’s trying to fuck with.

I slam the terminal shut and head for the back room—a vault carved into the wall, lead-lined and shielded. Inside is everything I swore I wouldn’t need again. Identities. Burner drives. Tracer tools I built from scratch with parts that don’t legally exist.

I pull three.

One for Toma.

One for Vale.

And one for whoever just tried to touch her.

You don’t prod a monster when it’s sleeping.

But you especially don’t touch what it dreams about.

I strap the tools into place, reset the lock, and step back into the garage.

The air is sharper now. Brighter.

I start the car.

Time to go hunting.

As I pull onto the coastal route, the sea stretches to my right—flat, gunmetal blue, unbothered. I watch it in the mirror until the road curves inland, and the shadows climb higher on the cliffs.

I wish this wasn't happening now. Not while Caleb's still out there. Not while his name still curls like smoke through every shadow I pass. I haven’t forgotten him. I can’t afford to. Every time I close my eyes, I still see the mark he left. The warning carved into Mara’s world.

And now this?

Now Vale.

I’m not sure what woke him. Maybe it was the Berlin node lighting up. Maybe someone whispered my name in the wrong room. Or maybe he’s just been waiting for me to soften.

Waiting for me to bleed.

I can’t be sure why he’s coming now. But the signs are too aligned. The Marseille packet. The ghost signal on the nest.The message that is tagged with EIDOLON. That wasn’t just a breadcrumb.

That was him announcing he remembers.

Jori Vale, his brother.

Unlisted. Soft-side tech. Recruited for his encryption mind. Smart, clean, and naive. He didn’t belong in the dirt Vale dragged him into. But that didn’t stop them from running him on our Belgium firewall op.

He was the one who failed to purge the shell company routing before our cell got exposed. Two of my team died that night. I wiped the line and shut down the trace—but Jori vanished.

Vale thinks I executed him.

Maybe I did, in a way. I made the call that closed that door. And Vale’s been trying to pry it open ever since.

That could be the revenge piece.

But Mara?

And now someone’s reaching for her clinic access? That’s not just timing—that’s calculated. That’s someone testing how close they can get to her digital skin before I react.

That’s a different line.

She doesn’t just matter to me. She matters on paper now. Her clinic ran a string of treatments that processed patients under one of my older burner identities—a patient file Vale might have dredged up through that Marseille node.