Chapter 25 Back to the Fire
Eli’s POV
For a few long rings we just stared at the screen like it might bite.
Noah Rye. The name sat on Sloane’s phone like a lit fuse. Her hand twitched toward it. I caught her wrist before she could swipe.
“Let it go to voicemail,” I said. “We record, we analyze, we call on our terms.”
Her eyes flashed. “He is using my work to come after me and you want to send him to voicemail?”
“I want to eat the bait without swallowing the hook.”
We hung there, locked. Then I reached for my field recorder, thumbed it on and set it down between us. “Speaker,” I said. “I stay close. We listen and we learn.”
She tore her wrist from my grip, hit accept, set it to speaker.
“Hello, Sloane,” Noah’s voice slid through the cabin, warm as oil. “You always did know how to disappear. You would have made my job easier if you had asked me first.”
I watched her body more than the phone. Shoulders drawing back, chin lifting, rage tightening the thin skin at her throat.
“You seem very well informed for someone I have not spoken to in three years,” she said.
“I read the news,” he said lightly. “Kidnapping attempts, fire alarms, mysterious absences. Some of us worry, you know.”
“By worry, you mean keeping eyes in a lot of places,” she said. “And toys running in the wild that should never have left our lab.”
He hummed, a little pleased sound. “You remember our little god mode joke. I am touched. I thought you tried to erase that from your vocabulary.”
God mode. He had just stepped into the circle and drawn a line in her blood.
“I remember building something that should never be used to watch anyone shower, Noah,” she said. “Or walk into their garage. Or sleep in their bed.”
“Come now,” he said, mock hurt. “You really think I would waste our masterpiece just spying on you in your pajamas.” A pause, then a lazy chuckle. “Even if Berlin hotel security was a bit porous for your tastes.”
There it was. Tying Berlin and his tool set in one careless sentence. Too much knowledge to be a rumor.
I scribbled notes on a page with my free hand. Vocal pattern, no hitch when he referenced kidnapping or spying, micro pause when she said misusing their work. He liked being half accused and still standing. It made him feel untouchable.
“Who are you selling it to,” she asked, dropping a lure of her own. “Who did you hand our code to, Noah.”
“Handing,” he said. “Present tense, I like that. Relax. You are not the only one who knows how to keep clients confidential.” His voice cooled a fraction. “The world wanted omniscience. You walked away as soon as it got messy. Someone had to give them what they asked for.”
“So you did,” she said. “And now here we are.”
“I am not the only one writing lines in this story,” he said. “Come back to the city, Sloane. Hiding in the woods does not suit you. You are a spotlight creature, not a shadow.”
The words landed heavy. He did not say lake or cabin, but he knew enough to paint the picture.
He hung up before she could answer. The phone screen went dark. The recorder light blinked steady on the table.
Sloane’s hands shook once, then flattened on the wood. She looked like she might be sick or start breaking things. Maybe both.
“He knows I am gone,” she said. “He knows enough to throw Berlin in my face. And he is playing coy about god mode like it is a party trick instead of a loaded gun.”
“Then we treat him as part of the network, not the whole thing,” I said, cold settling in. “Whoever is pulling the strings is using his infrastructure, maybe his ego, but they also have their own agenda.”
Her laugh was bitter. “Of course they do. My life is now a collaborative project.”
Staying here was no longer an option. They knew she had gone dark. Noah had turned his attention toward her absence like a cat toward a closed door. If we were going to fight this, we had to go back to where her influence actually mattered.
“We go home,” I said.
“Home is full of cameras and board members drawing knives with smiley faces on them,” she replied.
“Exactly,” I said. “The real battleground is there. Mercer. Ward. Press. Regulators. We control your re entry. No more vanishing. You walk in like you own it, because you do.”
We spent the next hour mapping it out at the table. Dummy tracking node broadcasting my ring’s signature at your penthouse. Another at Mercer HQ during certain hours. Harper planting one, a vetted Ward operator planting another. We traced routes into the city that would let us watch what the enemy hit when it thought you were standing still.
Harper would coordinate the official story. Temporarily focusing on security and recovery, now with a twist of visible leadership. A tightly cut list of Ward personnel would be looped in, no more full firm blast.
Later, by the window, she stood looking out at the lake with her arms wrapped around herself.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“For what,” I asked.
“For dragging me out of my tower when I would have stayed and told myself I was fine,” she said. “I needed time to break and put myself back together where no one could live stream it. I hate that you were right.”
“You are not a problem I am trying to fix, Sloane,” I said. The words came out before I could file them down. “You are the person I am choosing to stand beside while we fix everything else.”
Her inhale caught. She did not look at me, but her reflection in the glass softened around the eyes.
Packing felt wrong this time. We were not just throwing clothes in bags. We were dismantling something we had built together without meaning to. Two mugs in the sink. A blanket forgotten on the couch. Her paperback with a leaf stuck in as a bookmark. Evidence that for a few days we had been something like a couple hiding from the world instead of a billionaire and her bodyguard on the run.
She lingered everywhere. Fingers trailing over the back of the chair where she had sat wrapped in his sweatshirt. A hand on the doorframe, eyes on the dent in the wall where she had bumped him with her shoulder laughing two nights ago.
“This is ridiculous,” she muttered when I caught her looking one time too many. “It is just wood.”
“Wood that held,” I said. “That is not nothing.”
We drove out at dawn, the lake a mirror in the rearview, the road ahead stretching toward New York. The air inside the SUV tasted like coffee and unsaid things.
Halfway to the highway, my secure tablet pinged. Lucas. I almost ignored it. Then I saw the subject line. Media.
I opened the message. A link. A clipped screenshot.
Is Mercer CEO Hiding With Her Bodyguard Lover In Remote Cabin.
The grainy zoom showed the dock behind us, two figures sitting too close, legs dangling over water. Her head tipped toward mine. My shoulder nearly touching hers. Blurred, but clear enough if you knew what you were looking for.
I passed the tablet over.
Sloane looked at the photo, at the headline, at the comments already piling up below. For a second she just stared.
Then I watched it hit her, the realization that our so called sanctuary had been watched all along, and that now our fault lines were not just under assault in secret.
They were being tried in the court of everyone.