Page 120 of Fractured Loyalties

I’m back. Safe.

I hit send. Then add:

We need to talk when you return.

The message is delivered, but no read receipt appears. I shouldn’t expect one. He’s in the field. Or in a room without signals. Or neck-deep in ghosts with knives instead of names.

I toss the phone beside the burner. They look wrong sitting next to each other—one too polished, the other too wrong to belong in this world. Like twin hearts beating in different languages.

I lie back.

There’s too much converging now. Elias’s past. Mine. Caleb’s presence. The fact that someone’s watching the watchers. And this message—this new player—whoever thinks Elias is just an obstacle to something bigger.

I don’t know who they are.

But I know they’re wrong.

Because Elias isn’t just in the way.

Heisthe wall.

And if they want what’s behind it—what he protects—they’re going to have to tear him apart to get it.

I don’t know if I’m more afraid of that happening...

Or what I’ll become if it does.

Chapter 22 – Elias - Ash in the Mouth

The garage door slides closed behind me with a hydraulic sigh. Darkness folds in slow, layer by layer, until the last sliver of daylight is smothered by concrete and steel. I leave the engine running for a moment longer than necessary, just to hear something alive in the room. Then I kill it. The silence that follows is dense and low, like fog in the chest.

I don’t go upstairs.

Instead, I move through the inner access door, bypassing the motion-activated lights with a flick of my wrist. Manual mode only. No announcements. No welcome-home chirps. I don’t want the house to know I’m here before I do.

The control panel near the back stairwell glows low amber—standby mode. I override it. Password, biometric scan, heatprint sequence. It takes less than ten seconds to bypass the layers, but the act makes my pulse rise anyway.

No cameras inside. Not by rule. Not by accident. But there are still traces—digital fingerprints in the house systems. And Mara left plenty.

I pull up the internal sensor logs. Motion sweeps. Surface contacts. Panel requests. Pressure trails on the floor mesh. All timestamped. All painting a portrait of someone who wasn’t panicked, but was bracing for something.

She left the house.

The logs tell me exactly when: 11:51. The door opened from the front, authorization accepted, and no alert triggered. She had her badge. She must have taken one of the older field bags. The weight differential in the wall rack is enough to confirm that.

There’s a twelve-minute void in the outbound mesh. No signal pings until Lydia’s ID syncs with the house again at13:07. The logs confirm Mara came back with her. Alone. No tail. But the metadata around her burner activity before that—something’s wrong.

Two encrypted messages were received on the burner line between 11:00 and 12:30.

One of them disappeared before backup sync.

That’s not Mara.

That’s someone else.

I cross-reference outbound traffic. Her path was consistent with the beach route. But the traffic cam near her old apartment caught a shadow—a man stepping back from the edge of the frame as she passed.

Not mine.