Chapter 10 No Safe Systems
Sloane’s POV
Lines of code blurred in front of my eyes and snapped back into focus like an optical illusion I could not quite solve. I had half a dozen terminals open in the nook off my living room, all of them hooked into different parts of my own systems. Building APIs. Internal Mercer tunnels. Personal firewalls I had hardened myself.
If I could find the crack, I could seal it. That was the story I kept telling myself.
Anger still hummed under my skin from the night before, a low static. Eli’s insistence on reading my logs. My refusal to hand over the last piece of my privacy. Underneath that, annoyingly, was the echo of his voice when he talked about Amira, about walking someone into an ambush he still carried like shrapnel. It had made something tight in my chest loosen and then I hated that too.
I was still in leggings and an old Mercer T shirt, hair twisted into a knot with a pencil, barefoot so I could feel the chill of the floor. Control through sensation, stupid as that sounded.
“Eli,” Mila’s voice crackled faintly from the next room. Then footsteps. Fast.
He came into the nook with that particular stride that meant he was pretending not to run. His jaw was set, eyes darker than usual, one of the hardened laptops in his hand.
“What now?” I asked, not looking away from my screen yet. “Did one of my toasters start talking to you?”
He set the laptop on the table so hard my coffee mug rattled. On the display was a black screen with white text in the center.
Stay in your lane, soldier.
My fingers went still on the keys.
“This is from our air gapped investigation terminal,” he said. “Berlin contact sent a still from inside your hotel room. As soon as I hit play on the video, the box crashed and rebooted to that. No network connection. No external ports.”
I stared at the message. At the word soldier. At the way it used his past as a taunt. At the way it mocked every precaution we thought was unbreakable.
It hit two parts of me at once. The professional part recognized the scope. These were not script kiddies in a basement. This was a technical peer, maybe better. Someone who could walk through defenses Ward marketed as near bulletproof and leave a neat little calling card. My part of the world. My rules.
The personal part wanted to vomit. Whoever this was knew him well enough to reach back to sand and blood. Knew me well enough to string Berlin to my garage to my bed. We were both maps on their wall.
I closed my laptop slowly. “So they are playing inside your sandbox too,” I said. “Not just mine.”
“Yes,” he said.
For a second I just breathed. In. Out. It did not help.
Then the anger surged up and swallowed fear like a wave. “This apartment is a joke,” I said. “I want the entire network ripped out and rebuilt. I am done tinkering around the edges. I am calling my team in. My team, Eli. People who have been in my code for a decade.”
He shook his head immediately. “The leak might be inside Mercer. Whoever exploited Berlin had deep knowledge of your prototypes. Bringing more of your staff into this space could give them fresher routes.”
“This is my domain,” I snapped. “You do not get to cut me out of my own systems like I am some clueless executive. I am the reason half the critical infrastructure in this country has not already collapsed. I am not going to sit here and let you pat me on the head while you play hero in my house.”
His eyes flashed. “And my domain is making sure you are alive to log in tomorrow,” he shot back. “You want to spin up a black box Mercer task force, we do it on neutral ground, with controls we design together. But I am not letting you import a whole new set of unknowns into a compromised environment because your pride is stung.”
“Pride?” I laughed, sharp and ugly. “Someone crawled into my bed and left evidence of the only time I have ever taken my armor off. Someone turned my one lapse into a weapon. Forgive me if I want my own artillery back.”
We glared at each other, heat clashing with heat.
That was when the building fire alarm screamed.
The sound cut through the argument like a knife. Red strobes began to pulse in the corners, washing the white walls with color. My central panel flashed a warning. Fire detected on penthouse level.
There was no smoke. No smell. The temperature in the room had not shifted a degree.
Eli was already moving, checking the nearest vent, the kitchen, the hallway, as my fingers flew over a console, pulling up the building control page. Sensors read nominal. No heat spike.
“This is not real,” I said. “It is triggered.”
“False or not, we follow protocol,” he said. “You, Ava, housekeeper, everyone out. Stairs. Now.”
The word stairs sent a spike of cold down my spine. Forty nine floors of people and panic. Cameras. Phones. Eyes.
“I am not running barefoot through my own building because some troll hit the alarm,” I snapped, even as the rational part of me knew he was right.
He grabbed a pair of sneakers from by the door and shoved them at me. “You can either walk or I can carry you. Your call.”
The look on his face told me it was not an empty threat. I shoved my feet into the shoes.
The stairwell was chaos. Residents in pajama pants and silk robes, kids crying, someone’s dog losing its mind. The alarms echoed off concrete, the strobes making faces stutter in red and white.
Eli stayed just ahead of me, one hand braced on the rail, the other ready to block anyone who stumbled too close. Diaz materialized somewhere around floor forty five to take rear guard, eyes scanning up and down between breaths.
At one landing, the flow bottlenecked. I stumbled and felt a strong arm curve around my shoulders, steadying me, his body a barrier against the press of people. Someone a few steps below lifted their phone, lens tilting up. I saw the flash in the corner of my eye. Barefoot billionaire in an old T shirt, hair a mess, arm around her mystery bodyguard in the middle of a fire drill. Perfect clickbait.
By the time we spilled out onto the street, my ears were ringing. The night air was cold on my damp skin. Fire trucks idled, lights painting the facade. Firefighters went in, came back out shaking their heads. No smoke. No heat.
False alarm. System triggered.
The building manager was already shouting about malfunctions and demanding answers from men in uniforms. Residents glared at me as if the whole mess were my personal inconvenience.
Back upstairs, I dropped into a chair with my laptop like I might fall through the floor. My hands were steady enough to type. Anger made excellent fuel. I tunneled into the building’s automation logs, tracing origin tables, timestamps, override commands.
It did not take long. The alert had not been born in a faulty sensor. It had been injected at the central controller level, riding in on a privileged account that should never have been used that way. Clean, deliberate, elegant in a way that made me want to throw something through my own window.
Within minutes, my phone buzzed again. This time it was not unknown. Board distribution list.
Firm, concerned language about my safety. About brand risk. They expected me to accept relocation to a secure, undisclosed location until this situation was resolved. Any refusal could be construed as failure to act in the best interests of the company and its shareholders.
There it was again. Control in the clothes of concern.
Eli read the email over my shoulder without asking. “If we stay,” he said quietly, “we are playing on their sandbox. Every system here is one they can touch. Out there, at one of our safe houses, I control more variables.”
“Out there,” I repeated, looking up at him. Off grid, away from my office, away from my glass tower, into his world, into a house that would be more him than me. Closer to him than I already was.
Every part of me that loved my skyline rebelled. Every part that had just been marched barefoot down forty nine flights with my heart in my throat knew he was right.
“Fine,” I said. “Pack whatever you need. Your safe house better be worth the paranoia.”
The words tasted like defeat and relief wrapped together.
I pushed back from the table to go find my own bag. My phone buzzed in my hand again. Unknown number this time.
A map opened when I tapped it. A dropped pin in a wooded area, remote and quiet. Under it, a single line.
Can not wait to see the two of you there.
My skin went cold. Eli had mentioned that exact area earlier in passing, a verbal outline of a place we could disappear to. It had never touched a screen.
I turned the phone and held it out to him. He looked at the coordinates, his face closing down in a way I did not like.
The safe house he had thought was off the grid was already marked.
There was no system they could not reach.
Which meant, whether I liked it or not, the only variable left that might still be trustworthy was not made of code or glass at all.