Page 97 of Fractured Devotion
My fingers hover over the keyboard.
For a moment, I debate telling Celeste just enough to tip her further from Alec’s carefully crafted trust.
But not yet.
This has to be timed.
For now, Harper will keep dancing at the edge of exposure.
And Rourke won’t see the fire creeping toward his doorstep until it’s too damn late.
By the time the hallway clock flicks to 2 a.m., I’m exactly where I need to be.
On the seventh floor in the northeast wing. Rourke’s private entrance.
Most people wouldn’t even know it exists. He had it carved into the design under special architectural clearance. It’s soundproof and off the clinic grid, its power rerouted through a decoy terminal. But I know the bones of this place. I’ve mapped it in my head a hundred times.
And now, I’m inside.
The air is stale. Only artificial pine lingers, a scent Rourke once said reminded him of controlled environments. Of order.
The monitors are still warm.
I plug in a passive sniffer and leave it running. The deeper records I want won’t be accessible now, not without triggering alerts. But logs from the past few hours can still be pulled silently. Session duration, input types, sleep mode time, and who came and went.
I watch the numbers load.
The last login occurred forty minutes ago.
Rourke was in this room, accessing archival surveillance logs tagged under Tier Red. That’s Celeste’s classification. No one outside of board-approved clearances should even know that tag exists.
So he’s digging too. Into her. Maybe into me.
Or maybe trying to erase something before anyone finds it.
I copy the timestamp, encrypt the file, and exfiltrate the logs through a dead channel just in time.
Footsteps echo from down the hall.
I freeze, kill the lights, and pull the door shut behind me.
Then, I vanish into the service duct before the night shift even realizes a ghost walked past.
Rourke has made his move.
Now it’s mine.
To further confirm what I already know, I don’t go home. And I don’t sleep.
Instead, I loop through the server footage on a dummy terminal set up behind an unregistered janitor’s panel. No one knows it exists except me, and that’s exactly how I like it.
I run the footage from the lobby, the elevator, and the hallways that connect Rourke’s office to the rest of the clinic.
There’s a window between 1:48 a.m. and 2:06 a.m. where all power to the hallway cameras is cut for exactly eighteen seconds.
It’s intentional.
I flag it and mark the frames before and after. Whoever spliced the footage knew what they were doing.
