Page 69 of Fractured Devotion
I rewind again, slowing the intruder’s movements frame by frame. Every motion is surgical—clean gloves, no wasted steps. But it’s not just how they move. It’s what they avoid.
They knew exactly where not to look. The angle they took toward the closet avoids the lens I installed weeks ago. That’s not luck. That’s intelligence.
Someone has access to more than just her space. They also have access to mine.
I take a breath, then I start scrubbing.
All traces of the footage get backed up to a separate offline drive and encrypted three layers deep. Then I pull a series ofinternal logs from the secondary tap points. Remote sensors, traffic pulses, and entry signal discrepancies.
There.
At 11:02 p.m., there’s a ping, one just faint enough to look like network drift. Except it lines up to the moment that bastard bypassed the door.
They used a key fob clone. One that mimics the same code as hers.
Which means they got close to her. Real close. Enough to lift the encryption handshake from her own access device.
My fingers flex. This isn’t just shadowplay anymore. It’s full contact.
And the worst part? She has no idea.
She thinks she’s being hunted by ghosts. By paranoia. But it’s worse than that.
She’s being surrounded.
I grab my burner and fire a message to a buried relay account—one of the ones that lets me pull anonymous access queries through clinic data. Then I tag it to the lab’s secure server.
Within minutes, I’m reading flagged keycard logs.
And there it is. Her ID string… duplicated twice in the last five days.
Someone’s using her name to move through the system.
Someone who isn’t me.
I push back from the desk, cold rage settling deep in my stomach.
I need to act. Now.
But carefully.
If I confront the wrong person, I spook the whole nest. And if I get too close to Celeste too fast, she’ll retreat.
Unless…
Unless I use this.
The intrusion, the impersonation, the van. I shape them all into one sharp narrative. One she’s already halfway convinced of.
I make myself an ally. The one man willing to name it. The one man who understands what it means to be invaded, erased, and observed.
I just have to push it a little further.
And keep Alec out of the picture.
I head for the shower, adrenaline lacing through my every muscle. I scrub quickly and dress sharper than usual in a dark gray sweater and tailored coat. With enough edge to appear professional, and enough looseness to be just a little unguarded.
Then I walk to the clinic. Not to start a war.
