Page 108 of Fractured Loyalties
It’s not just a ghost anymore.
It’s a warning.
And the next man who tries to touch her?
I won’t leave behind anything to identify.
Chapter 20 – Mara - Soft Targets
The morning light in this house is different.
It doesn’t just fill the rooms. It spreads like a rumor, bleeding across the floorboards, stretching shadows out until they don’t quite look like they belong to the things that cast them. The silence here isn’t quiet. It’s alert. A listening kind of stillness. Like the walls are waiting for something to break.
Elias is gone a while now.
The sheets still carry the heat of him, but barely. His pillow smells like sleep and salt and sweat. The good kind. The kind I only learned to crave when I realized how rare it was to feel safe in someone’s arms and not wonder when it would turn on you.
I sit up slowly, dragging his hoodie tighter around my frame. The room looks the same, but feels different now that he’s not in it. It feels like he took something with him that I didn’t realize I needed until it was missing.
I swing my legs off the edge of the bed and let them hang. My toes brush the cold floor.
I don't want to be paranoid.
But something itches in the back of my head. A prickle that doesn’t feel like nerves or instinct. It feels like knowing. Like when you step into a room and realize the air’s changed, even if everything looks the same.
I move through the house without turning on lights. It doesn’t need them. Elias designed it that way—full of half-lit corners and quiet tech that hums like it's thinking. The kind of place that feels like it has a heartbeat.
In the kitchen, I find my mug on the counter.
It’s clean. Dry. Placed deliberately, rim facing east. That’s not how I left it. Which means he touched it. Probably stared at it too long, probably told himself it meant something. Because that’s the kind of man he is.
And now he’s gone.
I pour tea anyway. I need something to do with my hands.
The wall panel blinks at me.
It’s not a full alert. Not a breach. Just a nudge. A thread of static.
I step closer. The interface reads local sync disruption. Minor. A flicker on the clinic’s server, time-stamped just after nine.
I frown. I haven’t touched the system today.
I tap into the clinic feed. It loads slow—like it’s hesitant. The data buffer crawls through the standard sweeps. Nothing red-flagged. No spike in patient files. But I can feel it, crawling under my skin.
Something brushed the edge of my world.
Something not quite clean.
I pull up the inbound attempts. There it is.
Two failed access pings.
Remote.
IP scrambled through three dead nodes and a proxy that bounces back to an old biomedical research hub in Lyon.
That’s not random.
