Chapter 23 The Cost of Trust
Eli’s POV
My mouth still tasted like her when the engine sound faded.
It took everything I had to stay against the wall and not drag her back into me when the last echo of it died. Her breath was unsteady, eyes wide, lips swollen from the kiss she had started and I had been one second away from losing myself in.
If we kept going, this would not be about Berlin anymore. It would be us, with all of this wrapped around it.
I forced myself to take a step back, then another, until there was enough space to think.
“We need to move,” I said. My voice sounded rough, like gravel. “Not from here. From defense to offense.”
She nodded once, jerkily, then bent over the table to look at the gutted camera like she could carve the threat out with a screwdriver. That was good. Anger and focus I knew what to do with. The way she had whispered it is already us whispered back in my skull, but I pushed it aside. One crisis at a time.
“We take this,” I tapped the circuit board, “and the logs off that drive, and we build a sacrificial rig. Off site. No contact with this cabin. We let them think they are still watching while we poison their feed.”
“Burner laptop on the ridge again,” she said, already tracking. “Maybe a second one in town, air gapped. Nothing touches Ward or Mercer until we have wrapped it in three layers of your medieval fishing line.”
I almost smiled. Almost.
Calling Lucas was the part I had been putting off since we saw the red LED in the safehouse. No avoiding it now. I stepped onto the porch with the satphone while Sloane labeled the boards with little sticky notes, hands steady in a way mine were not.
He picked up an octave higher than usual. “Please tell me you are about to say you overreacted and the safehouse was clean.”
“Someone planted a very advanced device in my cabin,” I said. No softening. “Built using Mercer prototypes that were never supposed to exist. They also left us logs from Berlin, her penthouse, and one of our own sites on a drive. If they can walk into my personal property, we are past overreacting.”
Silence crackled down the line. Then, “You took a client to an unregistered cabin,” Lucas said. “Without approval. While people are trying to put hands on her. And now you are telling me it is compromised too.”
“I am telling you our safehouses are not as safe as you think,” I said. “Full Ward care is the exact playground they are dancing in. I will send Mila sanitized hardware signatures and log snippets. That is all that hits our systems for now.”
“We need you back under command,” he snapped. “You going rogue up there with Mercer is not going to help anyone when this blows.”
“Being under command is how someone got enough of our procedures to dress your fortresses like stage sets,” I said. “You want to pull my credentials after we get her through this, fine. Right now, I will take broken loyalty over blind.”
He swore, said something about liability and contracts. I let him get it out, then cut the call.
When I stepped back inside, Sloane was watching me from the table, arms folded, eyes like blades. “How much of your career are you planning to set on fire for this,” she asked. “You are choosing me over your company.”
“I am choosing you over broken systems,” I said simply. “Ward can survive without my perfect obedience. You cannot survive another hit from people who already know our playbook.”
Something flickered in her expression, softer and scared. Then she ducked her head back to the board.
We dismantled the camera together, every screw photographed, every chip catalogued. Her fingers flew over my notebook, sketching where we could inject false telemetry, how we could make their network believe we were in one place while we moved in another.
By the time the light outside turned gold, my head buzzed with equal parts strategy and the memory of how she had felt pinned between me and that wall.
That night we sat on the rug in front of the fire with a bottle of cheap whiskey between us. The flames threw light over her face, turning the hard planes I was used to into something warmer.
“I used to measure success by whether a client walked out of a building,” I said. “Alive, upright. That was it. Job done. With you, that feels… insufficient.”
She turned the glass in her hand. “You want me unbroken,” she said softly.
“Yes.” I stared into the fire. “Getting you to forty would mean nothing if you are a shell who jumps every time someone drops a fork.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then, “When you said you let a client walk into an ambush because you backed off too far, what did that look like.”
I swallowed. If I was going to ask her to trust me with her leaks, I owed her this truth.
“She wanted to go to a local school without a convoy,” I said. “No armor. No visible guns. I said no. She pushed. Said living like cargo was not living. I had been controlling every variable for months by then. I felt like a warden, not a guard. So I compromised. Took half a team instead of all. Relaxed patrol patterns. Trusted a local partner we had not fully vetted because I wanted to give her one damn day that did not feel like war.”
“And,” she prompted when I stopped.
“And the route we took was the one they hit,” I said. “If I had stuck to my calls, maybe it would have been different. Or maybe they would have just shifted tactics. I will never know. I only know I gave her autonomy and she died in the gap.”
We looked at each other across the small space, the fire popping softly between us.
“So with me you are trying not to lock me in a box,” she said. “And not open the door so wide I walk into a bullet.”
“Pretty much,” I said. “Turns out balance is harder than either extreme.”
She huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh. “You keep telling me I am not responsible for how cowards use my code. The same applies. You made a call. Someone else pulled the trigger.”
Mila’s voice cut through our little bubble later, during our narrow contact window. “Firmware from your cabin bug is pinging a cluster of servers leased through shells,” she said. “Follow the paper trail far enough and you land on a subsidiary under Noah Rye’s new firm. Not front and center, but close enough.”
After I hung up, I showed Sloane the summary. Corporate diagrams, ownership structures, Noah’s name sitting just off center like he was trying to stay clean.
Her face hardened, eyes going glacial. “If he is not the puppeteer,” she said, “he is at least selling them the strings.”
The way she said it, I knew that for her this was not just another suspect. It was an old wound ripped open. And the cost of asking her to trust me now was going to be higher than anything Ward had ever written into a contract.