Page 21 of Fractured Allegiance
Inside, the firewall bites before it lets me in. Facial scan. Fingerprint. One phrase I change every day, never something personal.
I boot the decryption shell and load the terminal they said I shouldn’t touch unless it was “mission-critical.”
I never ask what qualifies.
This does.
I start with what I can see.
Drazen’s shipments are scattered. Most of them are intentionally misrouted, half under shell companies, a quarter under names of corpses that haven’t been found yet. It’s nothing surprising.
What’s surprising is the name ‘Lydia Carr’ shows up once: a thin trail in the back end of a logistics file marked for “transactional compensation — red ledger.”
I follow the reference. It breaks three times before I backdoor the last entry. It's clean. Clean enough to be deliberate. Which means it's been curated.
And curation takes intent.
Lydia’s not just in the books.
She’s managing them.
I pause, crack my knuckles, and keep digging.
There’s another hit. Not under her name this time, but tied to a relocation record out of the Seaside trauma clinic. No details. No initials. Just a date, six months ago, and a security clearance that doesn't belong in medical records.
I don’t know if it’s her yet.
But something tells me it is.
Because this isn't the pattern of someone being kept.
It’s the footprint of someone keeping herself useful.
I lean back in the chair and scrub a hand down my face.
She’s more than what she showed me in the club. Or the office.
And the cleaner her record is?
The dirtier the reality underneath.
I minimize the window and call up traffic logs from Drazen’s known properties.
Takes three minutes to bypass the live feed filters.
Dom’s club has cameras everywhere, visible ones, and two that the Bureau planted last year through a compromisedcontractor. They don’t show much. Just crowd footage. But it’s enough.
I rewind to last night.
Pause.
There she is.
Lydia Carr, in black. The dress is tight enough to prove she knows what distraction looks like, but functional — not worn for vanity. Every movement is deliberate, but none of them theatrical. She doesn't perform. She calculates.
I watch her approach Dom. Watch her brush off a second-tier enforcer like he’s air. Watch her sit with one leg crossed, arms balanced on either side like she’s carving out space just by being.
I’ve seen trained interrogators with less command.
