Chapter 114 He Knows

Chapter 114 He Knows
“Someone cloned your device’s exact digital signature,” Marcus says, laying a laptop open on the kitchen counter, the screen filled with lines of code that mean nothing to me at all. “They built a passive secondary pathway through your service provider. It means every single piece of data that hits your antenna routes to a secondary server before it even finishes loading on your screen.”
I fold my arms over my chest, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. The room feels entirely too tight despite its high ceilings. “Explain that in plain English. What do you mean by a mirror?”
“Basically, it’s not a person. It’s a mirror,” he tells me. “Someone’s established a duplicate connection to your phone. Every text you send, every call, every location ping. All of it’s been mirrored to a second device in real time.”
I stare at the screen, my stomach dropping through the floor. “You’re saying someone’s been reading everything on my phone.”
“For weeks, at least,” Marcus replies. “Maybe longer.”
Eli goes very still beside me, and I watch him make the connection a half second before Marcus says it out loud.
“This is how Ghost knew you and Zeke were at that warehouse,” Marcus continues. “When you called Eli just as you and Zeke were leaving. He was already reading everything before it left your device.”
A violent spike of rage flares up through my chest, burning away the lingering fatigue. My knuckles turn white where I am gripping my arms.
“Who,” I demand through gritted teeth, “was mirroring it?”
Marcus hesitates for the first time since he walked in, and that hesitation tells me everything before he even says the name.
“The mirror traces back to a device registered to a Danielle Brooke.”
The room tilts slightly. I hear the name and my brain simply refuses to attach it to anything real for a full three seconds, refuses to let Danielle, who dragged me back into a friend group after Chloe’s war, who staged a fainting distraction outside Principal Mercer’s office just to buy me time, exist in the same sentence as a mirrored phone connection feeding my private life to a man who nearly had me killed.
The room falls into a heavy, suffocating stillness as images flash through my head in rapid succession. Danielle borrowing my phone at the café because hers was supposedly out of battery, and smiling as she handed it back across the table.
Everyone else keeps talking around me, the conversation moving fast now, and I stand there in the wreckage of it, only half listening.
“Every conversation Lucia and I had about the case,” Eli is saying, “he was intercepting it. Every plan discussed inside this house, if she had her phone anywhere nearby, he had access to it too.”
“That’s why he’s always one step ahead,” Dad concludes. “He’s had a direct line into this family this entire time.”
My stomach churns with a nauseating mix of betrayal and pure fury. Everything we survived, the near misses, the adrenaline, the fear that kept me awake at night, was orchestrated using my own pocket. I was walking around carrying a wire for the man trying to destroy my family.
“The hallway picture,” Eli says suddenly. He turns his head to look directly at me. “The picture someone took of you in the corridor right after your argument with Chloe. We couldn’t figure out how the photographer got that angle without you noticing.”
“Danielle was standing right beside me,” I whisper, my breath catching in my throat. “She was holding her phone at her hip while she was pretending to look through her bag. I thought she was just flustered by the scene Chloe was making. But now…”
Nobody says anything for a second.
“Marcus, destroy the phone,” Dad says finally, already reaching for it.
“Wait.” Eli steps forward before he can take it. “If we destroy the connection immediately, Ghost knows we found it. Right now, we still have an advantage he doesn’t know we have.”
Everyone looks at him.
“So what are you proposing?” Marcus asks?
“We leave the mirror alive,” Eli says. “Feed it something false. Give him something he’d kill to know.”
The room goes quiet, everyone turning the idea over, and slowly I watch my father’s expression shift from suspicion into something closer to approval.
Marcus stops typing, looking up with genuine interest. “A controlled feed.”
“Exactly,” Eli agrees, turning to me. “We could have Lucia text me something false, and just specific enough to be believable. Could be David’s location tonight, unguarded. He wants a window of vulnerability, if we give him one that looks completely authentic, he will move on it and we’re waiting for him instead of the other way around.”
David studies him for a long moment, and then nods. “Do it.”
We set the trap carefully. I type out the message myself, my thumb hovering over the send button longer than I expect it to, fully aware that Danielle, wherever she is right now, is about to read something meant to lure a killer straight into a trap I helped build.
《Dad just left the house. He took only two guys wuth him, not the full team. He said something about meeting an informant at the old water facility on Fourth Street at eleven. He wouldn’t let me come and he isn’t armed properly. I’m worried. Should I call Marcus?”
I hit send.
I make my way up the wide spiral staircase to my bedroom later that night, holding my phone loosely in my palm like a piece of active ordinance.
When I push my bedroom door open, I find Eli already inside, standing near my desk and leaning over a spread of printed blueprints and maps, holding a thin black marker held between his fingers.
He has pulled off his leather jacket, tossing it over the back of the desk chair, leaving him in a fitted black shirt that clings to his broad shoulders.
I close the door behind me, leaning my back against the door. “You know, normal bodyguards usually ask for permission before turning a client’s private bedroom into a command center.”
Eli doesn’t look up immediately, placing a red mark on the blueprint. “Normal bodyguards don’t have clients who text false information to gangsters at ten o’clock at night.”
“Fair point,” I concede, walking across the room toward him.
I look at the small side table near my bed. The tray of food the kitchen staff brought up two hours ago is still sitting completely untouched.
“You haven’t eaten,” I remark, gesturing toward the tray.
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been staring at the same page for ten minutes and your stomach growled loud enough that I heard it over Marcus’s typing downstairs.”
“That’s an exaggeration.”
“It’s really not.” I stand, cross to my desk drawer, and produce a granola bar I’ve been keeping there for exactly this kind of emergency. “Eat this at least. That’s an order.”
He takes it, raising an eyebrow. “You’re bossy.”
“I’m literally your boss.”
A faint, slow smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth. “I think you just like telling me what to do.”
“I like keeping you alive.”
The smirk fades, replaced by a quiet, intense stillness that fills the space between us. He slowly lowers the black marker onto the desk and he looks at me for a long moment.
“That’s a dangerous thing to admit,” he says, his voice dropping an octave and turning into something low and entirely serious.
The room feels suddenly small. The distance across the desk feels less like a physical boundary and more like an illusion waiting to be broken. I stand my ground, refusing to look away, even as my pulse picks up a rapid, fluttering rhythm against my ribs.
“Probably,” I murmur in response.
Neither of us moves for a second. Then he sets the granola bar down slowly and I realize somewhere in the last thirty seconds the distance between us has closed without either of us deciding it should.
He reaches out his hand stopping just short of touching my face, his fingers hovering near my cheek. “You shouldn’t trust me so easily,” he murmurs softly. “Not after everything.”
“I don’t,” I reply, my eyes tracking the line of his jaw, the subtle curve of his mouth. “I know who you are. I know what you did. But I also know why you’re standing in this room right now.”
He tilts his head down slightly, his dark eyes searching my face with a raw, unshielded intensity that makes my knees feel slightly weak. He takes one small step closer, eliminating the remaining space until I can feel the heat of his body, the rhythm of his breathing matching mine.
He leans in slowly, pausing when his lips are a mere hair’s breadth from mine. His warm breath brushes against my mouth, sending an electric shock straight down my spine.
“I can’t seem to be able to resist you, boss,” he whispers, his voice rough around the edges, laden with a genuine, painful vulnerability. “I’ve tried. God knows I’ve tried…” He pauses, his gaze dropping to my lips before lifting back to meet my eyes. “I don’t want to do anything you don’t want me to do.”
I look down at his mouth and know, with total clarity, that this is a mistake. Every logical voice in my head, every protective instinct I built up after finding out about him, screams at me that this is a mistake.
He has hurt me more than anyone in my entire life ever has. He has also loved me, in whatever complicated, broken way he knows how, more than anyone else ever has too, and somewhere between those two truths I stop trying to choose between them.
I close the distance myself, and press my lips against his.
It isn’t frantic. It isn’t the desperate, adrenaline soaked kiss from a rooftop or a warehouse doorway. It’s slow, quiet, both of us moving like we finally have all the time in the world instead of none of it, his hand comes up gently to cup the side of my face, mine finds the front of his shirt and holds on.
When we finally pull apart, I’m still reeling, my heart doing something entirely too loud in my chest, and some small, exhausted part of my brain wonders: if this is such an enormous mistake, why does it feel like the first genuinely right thing I've done in weeks.
Before either of us can say a word, my phone buzzes on the floor beside me.
I glance down out of habit, expecting nothing, and my whole body goes cold when I see it is a text from an unknown number.
My eyes scan the single line of text displayed on the glass:
《You really think you can use my own eyes against me?》
I stare at the screen, the warmth from thirty seconds ago draining out of me entirely, replaced by a sudden stillness.
Eli reads it over my shoulder, and I watch his expression change in real time, every trace of softness gone in an instant. He stares at the screen, his jaw clenching so hard the muscle twitches under his skin.
Ghost didn’t take the bait.
He knows.