Page 88 of Fractured Allegiance
Her mouth opens to speak, but I get there first. “Your monitor’s flickering.”
She blinks. “What?”
I nod toward the loft behind her. “One of your camera feeds. I saw it from the rooftop. Someone’s in the system.”
Her mouth closes. Then opens again. But no sound comes.
“May I come in?” I ask.
She steps back without speaking. Just enough to let me pass.
The door shuts behind me.
The room feels smaller than usual.
Not because of its size.
Because of what’s hanging between us now — the things we haven’t said and the way she hasn’t looked away since I arrived.
I reach into my jacket pocket and pull out a small device—black, matte, about the size of a lighter. Without a word, I set it on the table near the door and press the side. A tiny LED blinks green once, then goes dark.
She watches, eyebrow raised.
"Audio scrambler, it blocks microphones in a fifteen-foot radius." I say quietly. "We can talk now, no one will be able to hear us."
Her eyes shift from the device to my face. "I don't think Drazen's system has audio. I've said things in here that would've gotten me killed if he'd heard them."
I pause. She's probably right—most surveillance setups prioritize visual over audio for storage and bandwidth reasons. But "probably" isn't the same as certain.
"Better safe," I say.
She nods slowly. "Careful."
"Always."
I move toward the console on instinct.
The monitor is still lit. The glitch is subtler now. Almost gone.
I crouch, tap the edge of the screen.
“It’s not a bug,” I say. “It’s a forced stream loop. Someone’s piggybacking.”
She crosses her arms behind me.
“How do you know?”
Because I’ve done it.
Because it’s what I’d do if I wanted to keep a target watched without alerting anyone on the local feed.
“I just do,” I say instead. “Do you mind?”
She shakes her head. “No.”
I start tracing the stream. The software Drazen installed is overkill for a loft this size. Too many layers of redundancy, too much encryption. That alone was a red flag the first time I saw it. Nobody installs this much surveillance on someone they trust.
Only on someone they want to own.
