Page 87 of Fractured Loyalties

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Two scrubbed clean.

One I recognize.

Not from a case.

From a room with steel walls and no clocks.

I sit back.

There’s something moving under all of this. And it’s not Caleb.

This isn’t about Mara at all.

Not yet.

But it could be.

If I don’t get ahead of it.

I pull up a second window and start typing instructions. Layered proxies. Clean buffer nodes. If someone’s probing my old ghosts, they’re not going to find a house of cards.

They’re going to hit a wall made of teeth.

And I’ll be on the other side, smiling.

Let them try.

Because unlike before, I have something to lose now.

And if they think that makes me softer—they’ve read the wrong file.

I lock the query in a sandboxed thread and minimize the window. Whatever that trace is—whoever stirred it up—it can wait until morning. But it won’t.

Not the way these things work.

Not when old blood starts surfacing like oil in cold water.

I reach for my comms panel again and tap a silent ping to Lydia. Not urgent. Just a breadcrumb. My way of saying: Keep a weather eye. Something’s shifting. It’s not pressing yet. But it’s circling.

I pause and glance back at the live hallway feed outside Mara’s door. Still dark. No motion.

Still safe.

For now.

My phone vibrates once, silently. A secure line message from the Discentra ledger team—an automated update. The message is benign, but the time stamp on the back-end script running it isn’t. It’s eight hours old. Which means someone inside their vault has been flagging dormant projects. That shouldn’t happen without notice.

I flag the ledger packet and trace it to the last internal terminal to access it.

My spine straightens.

It’s a name I haven’t heard in over a year.

Cassian Drake.

Not a threat. Not then.

But he had reach.

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