Page 77 of Veil of Obsession

I pace my room, my heart pounding, my mind spinning.

Lucio isn’t answering me. He isn’t responding to my texts. He isn’t anywhere.

I grab my laptop from my desk, flipping it open with shaky fingers. My breathing is uneven, shallow, as I navigate to theapp that allows me to access the cameras I’ve installed in his apartment. If he won’t give me answers, I’ll find them myself.

I log into the security cameras, my fingers moving over the keyboard with practiced ease, my eyes glued to the screen as the footage flickers to life.

But he’s not there.

The place is dark. Empty. Not even a shadow of movement.

I check the footage from the past couple of days with timestamps. He hasn’t been there for days.

The sick feeling in my stomach tightens—a slow, twisting thing. Where the fuck is he?

I close the feed and switch tactics, pulling up the tracking system that’s embedded into his phone. Only to be met with…nothing.

Blank. The tracker is gone.

A bolt of pure panic rips through me. Lucio isn’t super focused on his phone. He wouldn’t have been able to remove it, let alone notice the tracking chip. Someone else must have.

I inhale sharply, my fingers clenching into fists. This isn’t right. Something is wrong. And I need to know what.

My hands move on instinct, clicking through encrypted pathways, bypassing firewalls, searching for another way in.

And then I remember. The Camorra’s internal system. It’s set up to appear as part of Folonari Jeweler so when the feds come sniffing, they won’t be able to pin anything on them. It holds everything. Locations, business movements, security protocols, personal details which will lead me to…him.

I hesitate for half a second. Not because of fear, but because this crosses a line. But I don’t care. I plug into the secure network, my fingers moving fast, slipping through the cracks of their defenses one breach at a time.

One wall down. But even as one wall falls, another pops up in its place, fortifying the system.

I don’t stop. I don’t tire. I keep at it till each one falls after the other.

Then another.

I keep going. Until…I’m in.

It takes me hours to crack it, but I slip in. Determination is one hell of a drug. The Camorra’s system opens to me like a forbidden door, information spilling out in lines of code and restricted files.

I don’t stop to think about what I’ve just done. I don’t consider the consequences. I just search. For Lucio. For anything that will tell me where he is, what’s happening, why he’s disappeared.

But then the screen freezes. A split-second delay. An unnatural lag.

My stomach drops.

And then…

SECURITY BREACH DETECTED.

My blood turns to ice.Fuck.

I froze the system. I just triggered an internal security breach in the Camorra’s network.

They’ll know.

They’ll trace it back.

And if they find out it was me?—