Page 144 of Fractured Loyalties
That’s not a bluff.
“You have a leak,” he says. “It’s not me. It’s not even the girl. It’s the echo you left in the system.”
“What echo?”
“You.” He smiles, teeth faintly yellowed at the edges. “You’ve built yourself into too many networks. Too many feeds. Too many shells. Your name isn’t just flagged—it’s fucking replicated. Ghosts of you keep triggering alerts even when you sleep.”
He takes a step closer.
“So I followed them. Let the system tell me who you’d become. Then I found her.”
My fist clenches. My body wants to move before my mind does.
“I don’t care about your revenge,” I say. “You want to die in this room, keep talking.”
“But I don’t,” he says. “And you won’t kill me yet. Because you still think there’s a clean way out of this.”
“Isn’t there?”
He grins. “No. You got too attached. You gave her your name. Your prints. She’s carrying the weight of your ghosts, and she doesn’t even know half their names.”
I shake my head slowly. “You think she’s fragile?”
“I think she’s lethal,” he says. “That’s why I waited. Because if I went for her first, you’d never have followed the thread. But now?”
He steps back.
Now I see it. The glint of a trigger remote half-concealed in his jacket’s inner lining.
“I rigged this whole nest,” he says. “You walk out clean, she doesn’t. You take me down, the whole grid blows.”
My eyes narrow.
“You didn’t wire this,” I say.
“Didn’t I?”
“No. You don’t have the tech markers. The grid was designed by someone else. You just hijacked it.”
His mouth twitches.
I’ve struck a nerve.
“You found him,” I say. “Your brother.”
Silence.
I watch his face. The flicker. The hesitation.
“Jori’s alive,” I say—not as belief, but as bait.
He swallows.
And in that breath, I see it: not confirmation. Not denial.
Just guilt. Just grief.
He didn’t find him.
