Page 145 of Fractured Loyalties

He found the hole he left.

And crawled inside it to become something else.

I flick the blade upward. Fast. Disarm movement. The remote clatters to the ground. I step in, slam him against the wall.

“You threaten her again,” I hiss, “I’ll erase you from every system that ever logged your name.”

His breath is ragged. “You think this is over?”

“No,” I say.

Then I hit him.

Once.

He drops like the lights cut.

And I leave him there.

Not because I’m done.

Because I’m not finished making him useful.

The wires behind me still whisper. But now they whisper my name.

Time to follow the thread back to her.

Because whatever Vale started, it ends with the next breath I take.

And it won’t be alone.

The corridor outside the nest’s kill-box is lit with red spill—old alarm lights pulsing dim against the concrete. The walls sweat like the place is breathing, like the system has lungs.

I dragged Vale’s slate from his pocket when I moved. He wasn’t bluffing. The room was rigged—just not to explode. It was staged to alert. To transmit. Someone else was supposed to hear that detonation.

I kill the beacon.

Three floors up, I pass rusted walkways and what look like fake sensors—cheap decoys meant to deter the lazy. At the end of the last corridor, I find it.

A door with no markings. No label. Just the faint static tick of a live feed behind it.

The room hums—not from power, but from pressure. A surveillance core. Cold air. White walls. One desk. Six monitors glowing like a pulse.

Every feed is on Mara.

Different angles. Clinic. Street. A grocery store I never took her to. All archived, time-stamped.

And one live.

The lighting is similar. But the tilt of the walls is off, the frame too narrow.

I glance at the overlay log. Lydia’s voice crackles over the secondary feed: “It’s the corridor two levels beneath the safehouse. You locked that door three days ago.”

My stomach hardens.

The stream is less than thirty seconds old.

Someone has been watching.