Page 35 of Ranger's Honor
The words are carved there like a scar—unforgiving, inescapable. My pulse pounds in my ears as dread knots low and cold in my chest. Not just a bug. Not just a line of suspicious code. It’s a fucking embedded uplink.
My skin flushes hot, then icy. I feel the blood drain from my face. A ringing starts in my ears. My throat tightens around a breath that won’t come. My fingers jerk away from the keyboardlike it’s burned me. Nausea swirls up from my gut as I force myself to reread it. Again. Again.
The screen swims.
My pulse stutters and gallops. I’m suddenly hyperaware of every beat, every breath, every tick of the cursor blinking in silent confirmation. The room doesn’t feel safe anymore. It feels watched. Infiltrated.
A cold sweat breaks across my shoulders.
I push the chair back hard enough to scrape against the tile, the sound sharp and jarring as I stagger to my feet.
My blood runs ice-cold.
Whoever planted it didn’t just sneak past the firewalls—this was designed to piggyback on the encryption itself. I check the logs. It’s been active for weeks. Feeding location data, system access, and—god—file previews.
He’s seen everything. The Reaper has seen everything.
The thought slices through me like a razor. He’s seen my notes, our plans—and if he’s hacked into the camera, he’s also seen the quiet moments. The soft, stolen touches. The unguarded side of me I’ve only ever given Dalton. It’s not just intrusion—it’s an attack. A deliberate strike meant to strip us bare. My skin crawls at the thought of those private fragments being watched, dissected, maybe even cataloged. I feel exposed, targeted, like every boundary I thought I had has been razed to the ground. The warehouse plans. Sookie’s notes. Our movements. Me. All of it, laid out like prey.
“Oh my god…”
I slam the laptop shut, pushing back my chair and moving away from the table like it might bite me. My hands are shaking. Every hair on my arms is standing up. The room is too quiet. Too still.
He’s been in the system this whole time.
And if he’s been watching…
“Dalton,” I whisper, heart hammering. “Dalton!”
I bolt for the stairs. He’s already halfway down them, jeans half-buttoned, shirtless, eyes sharp.
“What is it?”
I stop short. “There’s a tracker in my system.” The words scrape out on a ragged breath, and for a second, I can’t move.
My hands clench around the edge of the table, fingers white-knuckled as the implications rip through me. A cold sheen of sweat breaks across my skin, and I swear I can hear my pulse hammering in my ears. My stomach drops, breath catching in my throat as nausea claws its way up. I grip the table harder. “It’s been feeding data out—everything. Notes, locations, our route to the South Pier—everything.”
He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t blink.
Then he’s moving.
Straight to my laptop. He yanks the power cord free, flips it over, and ejects the external drive like it personally offended him. Without a word, he grabs a fireproof pouch from the cabinet—one I didn’t even know was there—and slides the drive inside. Then, without hesitation, he crosses to the microwave, opens the door, and places the pouch inside before shutting it again.
I blink. “Wait—what are you doing?”
He doesn’t look at me. His jaw is tight, a muscle ticking along the edge like he’s biting back the urge to snap the door clean off its hinges.
“Microwaves can act as a Faraday cage—a metal enclosure that blocks wireless signals by redirecting electromagnetic waves, cutting off all digital communication inside. It won’t stop the uplink, but it isolates the drive while I decide how to wipe it properly. Right now, I’m cutting the cord between you and whoever’s watching.”
"There's only one person who would be watching my computer, and I don't mean one of the trolls from one of the review sites."
He nods; the tension in his body gives him away. Shoulders bunched, jaw tight, like he’s holding in a snarl. Like he’d rather shatter the microwave with his bare hands just to be sure it’s really done.
“Dalton...”
“Sit. Over there. Don’t touch anything.”
His tone is low and controlled—but there’s nothing calm about it. It’s the kind of voice a man uses right before violence: cold, measured, final. I’ve read it in books—hell, I’ve written it—and seen it in films, but hearing it from Dalton is something else entirely. It’s not fiction. It’s real. And the weight of it is unmistakable. Lethal.
