Page 89 of Fractured Allegiance
I kill the current access line and start tracing the entry point.
Lydia doesn’t speak.
She just stands there, watching me work, like she’s trying to decide whether to trust me or throw me out.
She walks into the kitchen, opens a drawer, pulls out a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. She doesn’t ask. She just pours.
By the time I finish tracing the access logs, I find what I was looking for—and what I wasn't expecting. The surveillance system has multiple access points. Drazen's, obviously.
But there's another one buried in the code, routing through an external network I don't recognize. Someone else has been watching her feeds. Someone with technical skill and resources.
Not Drazen. He wouldn't need to hack into a system he installed himself.
Which means someone else is in the loop. Someone who either paid for access or took it.
I make a note to dig deeper later.
She's already set one glass beside me and taken the other to the far end of the couch.
"Did Drazen tell you he gave someone else access to the feeds?" I ask.
"Drazen?" She takes a sip, eyes sharp over the rim of the glass. "He doesn't tell me things. He just makes sure I know he's watching."
"That's not what I'm asking." I lean forward slightly. "Someone else has been accessing your surveillance. A third party. The access signatures don't match Drazen's primary network."
Her expression doesn't change, but something shifts in her posture—tension bleeding into her shoulders that wasn't there before.
"Who?"
"I don't know yet." I glance back at the screen. "The routing's sophisticated. Whoever it is doesn't want to be traced."
She's quiet for a moment, processing. Then her expression shifts—not panic, but calculation.
"If someone's in Drazen's system without him noticing, they're better than I thought possible."
I look at her. "Why?"
"Because I did bypass his surveillance once. Had someone set up a loop system." She takes another sip. "Drazen caught it in forty-eight hours."
That stops me cold.
Forty-eight hours. That's not just good security—that's obsessive monitoring.
“Which means whoever this third party is, they're either exceptionally skilled, or they have access Drazen doesn't know about. Or both.”
"Dom?" she asks again, but this time there's less certainty in her voice.
"Maybe. Or someone with resources that rival Drazen's." I pause. "Or someone inside his organization covering the tracks."
That last possibility hangs in the air between us, heavy with implications neither of us wants to voice.
"I'm installing something," I say. "A monitoring system. If anyone accesses your cameras—third party, Drazen, anyone—I'll know."
She sets her glass down. "No."
I look at her.
"If you touch Drazen's system, he'll know. I bypassed it once, and he caught it in forty-eight hours. You add anything, even something small, and we're both dead."
