Chapter 23 The Location
The apartment was quiet—eerily so. Fear had gripped everyone and thoughts was eating them up. Brielle sat curled on the edge of her blue couch, nervously biting at a fingernail, while Jaxon paced the floor in long, rigid strides wall to wall. Damon stood by the window, laptop balanced on one arm, typing furiously.
Then, suddenly, Damon turned, eyes lit with triumph beneath the shadow of tension.
“I got it,” he announced.
Both Jaxon and Brielle turned to him at once.
“The phone that cloned Brielle’s number—I've traced its signal. Whoever spoofed her ID used a burner line, but the device still pinged a local IP address before the signal was masked through a VPN. Amateurs,” he muttered with a half scoff, scrolling through his screen. “It wasn’t properly bounced through secure layers. I backtracked the bounce path and pinpointed the first tower it hit—it’s a private residential network in the outskirts of the city, near Ridgewood.”
“And?” Jaxon asked sharply.
Too many tech terms.
Damon lifted his gaze. “It’s encrypted, but weakly. I cracked it. I also pulled metadata from the clone command—it was triggered using a secondary Android device, running modified firmware. Definitely jailbroken. They used a packet sniffer to intercept Brielle’s outgoing signals and sent a fake ‘emergency’ message with a spoofed return number.”
“In plain English, Damon,” Brielle said, eyes wide and overwhelmed.
“It means someone tech-savvy hijacked your identity, lured Elena with a fake emergency, and covered their tracks like someone who’s either a skilled hacker… or someone working with one.”
There was a short, heavy silence.
Then Jaxon’s entire body stiffened.
His fists clenched.
“I know who did this,” he said through gritted teeth.
Damon blinked. “What?”
Jaxon’s eyes darkened. “It’s Caleb.”
Brielle shot up. “Caleb? What—why would you think that?”
Jaxon turned slowly, his voice low but vibrating with fury. “Because it has to be him. He’s the only one with a reason. He hates me, he’s competitive, he’s tried to sabotage my work before—but now he’s crossed the line. He knows I’m with Elena. And this… this is his way of getting back at me. He knew exactly how to hit where it hurts the most.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Brielle said, stepping closer. “There’s no proof—just suspicion.”
Jaxon started walking toward the door.
“Where are you going?” she demanded.
“To see him,” Jaxon replied, his voice like ice. “To confront him. To make him talk.”
“Jaxon, no!” Brielle blocked his path. “We can’t do this! What if it’s not Caleb? What if confronting him pushes whoever really has Elena to hurt her? We can't afford to make mistakes.”
Damon stood behind them, watching, tense.
“She's right,” Damon added carefully. “If they know we're getting close or panicking, they might make a move.”
Jaxon stopped.
Then, without warning, he slammed his fist into the wall.
The impact echoed through the apartment like a gunshot.
A framed picture on the shelf trembled and tilted sideways.
Brielle flinched.
So did Damon.
They had never seen him this way—uncontrolled, raw, dangerously close to breaking.
Jaxon leaned against the wall, his back heaving with the force of his breath.
Somewhere unknown...
The room was dim and cold. The only source of light came from a dusty overhead bulb that flickered intermittently. Elena sat against the wall, her legs folded awkwardly beneath her, her hands still bound tightly behind her back. The rope had begun to leave deep marks along her wrists. Her mouth was taped shut, but the blindfold was gone now.
Her eyes scanned the room—blank concrete walls, a single door,a single window but sealed with the burglary proof and silence beyond it.
She didn’t know how long she’d been there.
Minutes?
Hours?
Then—the door creaked.
Elena tensed as a man stepped in, tall and broad-shouldered, with a cap pulled low over his face covering a scar below his right eye. In his hands, he held a metal tray.
He set it down in front of her.
“Lunch,” he grunted and didn't wait for a reply before he placed the tray beside Elena.
He crouched, then reached forward. “I’m taking the tape off, alright? Don’t scream.”
He peeled the duct tape from her lips.
Almost instantly, Elena let out a sharp, desperate scream.
“HELP! SOMEBODY—PLEASE!”
Her voice cracked. She screamed again. Louder.
The man didn’t flinch.
“No one’s going to hear you,” he said calmly. “This place is soundproof. You can scream your lungs out if you want. Won’t change a thing.”
Elena stared at him, her chest heaving. Slowly, the fight faded from her eyes. But her voice remained steady.
She wants to scream but couldn't.
“You want me to eat?” she asked, lips dry and cracked. “Then untie my hands.”
He raised a brow. “Why? So you can make a run for it?”
Elena tilted her chin upward claiming her confidence, calm but firm. “I know I’m important to your boss. Whoever it is.”
The man narrowed his eyes. “What makes you think that?”
“Because I haven’t been beaten. I haven’t been tortured. And I'm being fed,” she replied. “If I wasn’t important, I’d be in worse shape by now. It’s only been three hours.”
That gave him pause.
She was right she can't eat with her hands tied behind.
He stared at her for a moment, then sighed heavily.
“Don’t try anything funny,” he muttered, walking behind her.
He bent down and undid the ropes, then stepped back.
Elena rubbed her wrists, biting back a wince as the blood returned to her hands in sharp, stinging pulses.
The man moved to the door and opened it slightly. “Eat. I’ll be outside.”
She rubbed her wrist.
He stepped out, and the door closed behind him.
Elena looked down at the tray. A plate of rice, a bottle of water, and beside it—cutlery. A spoon and a fork.
Her eyes lingered on the fork.
She grew various thoughts of escaping. Maybe when she was done eating she would call him to take out the plates and she would stab him with the Fork and escape..but she didn't know how many more men she'll have to face.
She wipped the thoughts off her mind and
Quietly, almost instinctively, she slipped it into the pocket of her jeans.
Her expression hardened.
She had a plan.
She wasn’t just going to sit here and wait.
She was going to fight.
Back at Brielle’s apartment, the tension had hardly eased. Damon stood before a holographic projection of the city map displayed on his tablet, while Jaxon leaned over the back of the couch, his arms crossed tightly over his chest. Brielle, still shaken but focused, paced slowly across the rug.
They knew they couldn’t just charge at Caleb—not without proof.
“We need to play smart,” Damon said finally, adjusting his laptop bag and glancing at Jaxon. “Let’s bait the trap and follow the scent.”
Jaxon arched a brow. “What do you have in mind?”
Damon looked at Brielle. “We send in someone Caleb won’t suspect. Someone who can plant a tracker. Subtle. Clean.”
Brielle raised her hand. “I’ll do it.”
Jaxon immediately turned to her. “Brielle—”
“No. I’m the only one who can do this without raising alarm,” she cut in. “You walk into his building and all hell breaks loose. Me? I can play it casual.”
Her confidence was edged with a boldness that surprised even Damon.
“We’ll stay connected the entire time,” he assured her. “You’ll have an earpiece. I’ll tap into the company’s CCTV system and give you the cue.”
Within the hour, the plan was in motion.
Brielle sat in the backseat of Jaxon’s matte black SUV, now parked discreetly a few streets away from Caleb’s towering office building. She had dressed down into an oversized trench coat, a headscarf wrapped stylishly around her curls, and large dark sunglasses that swallowed half of her face. She looked like a fashion-forward tourist or perhaps a blogger on the move—nothing remotely threatening.
“Can you hear me?” she whispered, adjusting the small earpod tucked into her ear.
“Loud and clear,” Damon’s voice echoed back. “You’re synced to both me and Jaxon. He’s listening from the car speakers.”
Jaxon leaned forward from the passenger seat, watching the digital map on Damon’s pad, which pulsed softly with a grid of signals.
“Remember,” he said, his voice rough with tension, “get in, plant the tracker, and get out. No extra heroics.”
“Relax, boss man,” Brielle teased. “I’ve watched enough spy movies to know the drill.”
She stepped out of the car.
The lobby of Caleb’s company was clean and modern, with marble floors and floor-to-ceiling windows. She moved toward the central atrium, keeping her head low, her body language relaxed but purposeful.
“Damon, do you have eyes on him yet?” she muttered under her breath.
“One second…” Damon tapped rapidly on his screen, overriding the building’s security protocols. He hacked into the internal camera feed, flicking through grainy images of various floors.
“Got him. He’s on the 8th floor, heading for the elevators now. In… three, two, one—”
Brielle turned the corner just as Caleb appeared, walking briskly toward the elevators with his assistant behind him, rattling off something about numbers and meetings.
Brielle steeled herself and walked straight into his path.
“Oh my gosh—I’m so sorry!” she said in a high-pitched voice, bumping into him.
Caleb stumbled a bit but caught himself, frowning slightly.
“It’s fine,” he muttered, brushing off his sleeve as the elevator doors pinged open.
In the moment his hand went to adjust his blazer, Brielle slipped the tiny tracker—a black dot no larger than a button—into the inside hem of his jacket pocket. Sleight of hand, clean and quick.
“Really sorry!” she said again with a dramatic sigh, backing away and adjusting her scarf.
He nodded, clearly too distracted to care, and stepped into the elevator.
The doors slid shut.
Brielle spun on her heel and calmly made her way out through the front doors.
Once she reached the curb, she exhaled into the earpod.
“It’s done. The bug’s in.”
“Tracker live,” Damon said almost immediately, fingers gliding over the screen of his tablet. “We’ve got movement.”
Inside the car, Jaxon’s eyes were locked on the pulsing red dot that represented Caleb’s location. It was moving—first back up to the executive floors, then after a few minutes, down through the garage exit.
“Looks like he’s on the move,” Damon said, pulling the SUV out of the alley and into traffic.
Jaxon leaned forward. “Zoom in on that location.”
Damon did. The signal was shifting direction—away from the city center. It was heading toward the outskirts, where tall office towers gave way to abandoned warehouses, isolated construction zones, and long-forgotten industrial lots.
“Why would he be going there?” Brielle asked, eyes narrowing.
Jaxon didn’t answer.
He stared at the screen with eyes hard as steel.
“He’s hiding something,” he said at last, voice barely above a whisper. “
And we’re going to find out what.”
The tracker signal blinked and veered left—deeper into an area of the map that had fewer and fewer labeled streets.
Damon glanced at the rearview mirror.
“Hold on tight,” he said, speeding up.