Page 95 of Fractured Devotion
Chapter 31 – Kade - Ashes in the Signal
She hasn’t looked at me in what seems like forever.
Not like before. And not like the night on the cliff, when the air between us burned so hot that it should’ve left a scar on the clouds.
Not since Alec crawled his way back into her psyche like a parasite with a white coat and moral spine.
I gave her space, though it was not out of mercy but calculation.
I’m not foolish enough to chase a woman mid-suspicion. Not when Alec has been whispering theories and planting ideas like rot in the foundation. He has Reyes in on it now too. They meet in corners and exchange glances when they think no one sees.
But I see everything.
Still, I wait. Because while they speculate and posture, I move.
Celeste has been pulling back. No more questions. Just silence. And that tells me more than any confrontation would.
So I distract them and feed them what they think they want.
Things like little inconsistencies, terminal anomalies, and enough breadcrumbs to draw them off my scent and onto something juicier.
Harper.
She’s the weak link, the perfect scapegoat. But I don’t think she’s alone. Nobody that nervous moves without a leash.
And I intend to follow the chain to the hand that holds it.
I begin with her access logs. The surface-level entries say nothing, just timestamps that make her look diligent, if erratic. But deeper in the server cache, I find the fingerprintsof obfuscation, ghosted login tags rerouted through deprecated paths. Someone taught her how to hide her trail.
That’s the first red flag.
The second is the chat log.
It’s encrypted and scrambled, but not invincible.
I spend the next five hours running old decryption patches, the kind the board never approved because they were “ethically suspect.”
They work like a charm.
What I get is a transcript between Harper and someone using the handle “PHRNTK.”
It’s fragmented, like most black market relays. But the context is damning.
PHRNTK:Status on Subject-V?Harper:She’s fragmenting. The emotional triggers are working.PHRNTK:Good. Stay close. Don’t let her re-stabilize.Harper:She’s starting to doubt him. I think she’ll break soon.
There are no names, but it doesn’t take a genius to know who “him” is.
I isolate the middle exchange, clean it, encode it into a fresh packet, and then send it.
To Celeste.
With no signature and no commentary. Just the truth, delivered raw.
Let her draw her own lines.
Let her wonder why Harper talks like a handler.
Let her start to see who’s really been in control all along.
