Chapter 14 Eyes in the Walls
Sloane’s POV
The little red light winked at us from the second floor like an eye. One blink, then darkness.
“They know we are here,” I said. My voice came out flatter than I felt.
Eli lowered the scope slow, mouth a hard line. From this hill the Ward safehouse looked like a postcard. Trees, quiet porch, nothing out of place if you did not know what you were looking for. Now I could not see it as anything but a stage someone else had set.
I pulled the compact RF scanner from my bag and powered it on, the screen washing my hands in cold blue. Mila had already cut Ward’s official network here, power to their routers severed. What should have been radio silence around the house was anything but.
“There,” I murmured, fingers dancing over controls. “And there. Tiny low power pings, intermittent, like heartbeat pulses. Not yours.”
“Could be environmental,” Eli said, but he sounded like he did not believe it.
I raised the small directional antenna, swept slowly. The signal strength climbed when I aimed at the house, dipped when I moved away. Someone had hidden their own little web in his fort.
On the audio link, Lucas’s voice crackled, too loud in my ear. “You are sure power is cut? That site was swept last quarter. We cleared it.”
Mila answered before I could. “I am looking at rogue transmissions from the structure, Lucas. Your sweep missed something or someone added hardware after the fact. Arguing with the meter does not change the readings.”
He defaulted to defensive. “Those facilities are locked tight. The only way anyone got in there is if we had a mole or a god with admin keys.”
I listened to him deny the obvious and felt something inside me settle into a cold clarity. Ward did not actually believe its own compromise yet. That made them as dangerous to rely on as any external threat.
I clicked my mic. “You hired me as a client, but if I am breathing your air, you hired me as an asset too. I speak this language better than any of you. Let me in the building.”
There was a pause. Eli’s jaw flexed, then he sighed. “Limited entry,” he said. “Basement first. Kevlar under your flannel, earpiece in. You follow my commands. You do not freelance.”
“Understood,” I said. For once, I meant it.
The back basement smelled like dust and old paint. Our flashlights cut narrow cones through the dark. Generator hum vibrated faintly through the concrete. I could feel the layout of the space in my bones, all the places I would hide gear if I wanted to vanish from surface scans.
“Water heater,” I said, already moving toward the big metal cylinder in the corner. People always forgot basements.
Behind it, taped to the wall, was a small black box with a jury rigged power line. Not on any Ward inventory list I had seen.
“Secondary router,” I said, pulse ticking faster. The MAC address flashing on my scanner had a familiar rhythm. I had a habit, years ago, of embedding tiny jokes into my hex choices. Hard to describe, easy to recognize if you had written them. Whoever coded this had studied my work or stolen it. Either way, I swallowed the shiver and said nothing. I did not need Eli carrying that guilt too.
We swept upstairs next. The room clearly meant for me had been turned down like a magazine photo shoot. Fresh linens, bottle of imported water oozing condensation, a perfect bowl of fruit.
And in the center of the pillow, a single red rose and a card.
My hand shook when I picked it up. You bring him here, too? How intimate.
The word too hit like a slap. Berlin flared in my head, the hotel bed, his weight above me, the feeling that for one night I was not Sloane Mercer, asset and threat. My cheeks burned hot and then went cold.
Eli’s jaw clenched so hard I could hear teeth grinding.
Room by room, the picture got worse. A pinhole camera in an outlet plate. A microphone wired neatly under the lip of a chair, impossible to see unless you crawled. A bug tucked behind a thermostat. Every device more sophisticated than the last, wired into that ghost network I had already met in the RF scan.
In the living room, the television flickered on without anyone touching a button. Static swam for a second, then resolved into stark white text on black.
WELCOME HOME, SLOANE. WELCOME BACK TO WORK.
My stomach dropped.
That had been one of my half joking slogans for an early internal test platform years ago. Not public, not printed. I had said it in a lab at three in the morning once, exhausted and drunk on caffeine. Noah had laughed and written it on a whiteboard.
Now it stared at me from a screen in a house I had never been in.
Plot twist, I thought grimly. You are not the one writing the system anymore.
We killed power ourselves this time, manual and brutal, yanking cords from walls and cutting feeds until the house went still. Outside again, in the clean cold air, it looked normal. That was the worst part. To anyone else, it was just a cabin in the woods.
“If your fortresses are cardboard,” I asked quietly, “what is left?”
Eli looked at the house like it had betrayed him personally. In a way, it had. His whole identity was built on safe structures, on places he could promise were beyond reach.
“Somewhere not in any Ward plan,” he said finally. “There is a cabin. Lakeside. My godfather left it to me before Ward existed. It is not on any list. No Ward funding, no Ward routers. I go there when I need to remember what quiet sounds like.”
I blinked. Personal, not professional. There was nowhere left to run to that was not compromised, so he was offering me the one place that still belonged to him alone. Inviting me into his sanctuary, not as a client, but as someone he trusted enough to share it with.
Accepting meant letting go of the last illusion that any system would save me. It meant trusting a man instead of code, and that was far more dangerous.
“If this goes wrong,” I said, meeting his eyes, “it is on you.”
He did not flinch. “It is already on me,” he said quietly.
And for the first time, I believed him.