Chapter 17- Seconds To Burn
I woke to the sound of my phone vibrating so hard it slid off the nightstand and clattered on the wood.
My stomach dropped like someone had whacked it. I was in the guest suite at Blackwell, lights grey as dawn. I had slept in the dress I’d been given, because I couldn’t bear to take it off. Damian was gone. Marcus was probably already at the command center. Clara’s last text was a string of swear words and coffee emojis. My chest felt like a fist.
I twisted the phone in my hand and forced myself upright. The house was a soft, dangerous thing around me—oil paintings, quiet hallways, the sense that every portrait watched you choose the right face. You’d think after everything I’d stop being surprised at betrayal. You’d be wrong.
Downstairs, Alvarez had set up a temporary command hub in the old library—cameras, screens, a knot of men. When I walked in they all looked up like I’d walked into a courtroom mid-verdict. Damian met me first. He looked like someone who hadn’t slept and had decided to seem like it was fine anyway. Fine. The word is a liar.
“You okay?” he asked, and there was worry there, the kind that felt like a hand on a burned place.
“As okay as someone who’s been in a war staged by half of her family can be,” I said, and it came out sharper than I meant. He didn’t argue. He only said, “Stay close.”
Marcus was already on three devices, thumbs moving like tiny blacksmiths. He looked up when I stepped in, tired and wired. “We intercepted a ping,” he said. “An upload scheduled in twelve minutes. Origin appears to be routed through Ainsley & Co.” He flicked a file onto the big screen. A countdown glowed: 11:47…11:46.
“Can we stop it?” I asked. My voice felt thin.
“We can try to pull the stream,” Marcus said. “But it’s already seeded across several nodes. We need to cripple the seed or it blooms. If it goes public, Ward wins control of the narrative again.” He rubbed his face, then looked at me. “It’s named—get this—ELENA_FULL_TRUTH.mp4.”
The room tilted. I’ve been angry and humiliated and betrayed, sure, but the idea of someone—some twisted, anonymous force—deciding to make my full life public, like a dossier with my heart scribbled in the margins, made my bones go hollow. Who gives them the right?
“Who uploaded it?” Alvarez asked. His voice was the only thing steady in that room. He had that cop-speak that means you’re leading, whether you like it or not. “Can we trace the seed?”
Marcus dug his nails into the tablet. “We traced the primary node to Ainsley & Co., but that’s a shell. Their account was accessed through an internal Blackwell relay last night.”
A silence like a held breath. Damian’s mouth tightened. I felt it. He looked at me, and for a second everything collapsed into that look—guilt, apology, calculation—and I couldn’t tell which part of him I wanted.
“Internal relay?” Alvarez asked, skeptical. “From the estate?”
Marcus nodded. “From an IP assigned to the estate’s admin servers. But we can’t be sure—IP spoofing is a thing. Someone could have routed through here to frame us.”
“Someone stuck a match to our house and expected us to burn,” I said. I shouldn’t have used “we.” I shouldn’t have included him. But part of me was tired of pretending I could be cleanly separated from the people who sheltered me. The house had shelter, but it had teeth.
Damian stepped closer. “Either way,” he said, voice low, dangerous, “we stop the seed. Marcus, can you de-auth the relay? Force a new cert? Push a kill-switch?”
Marcus’s fingers moved like wind. “Maybe. I can attempt a hard reset on the relay, but if someone’s already got a brokered cert we need to pull the power from the node itself. Physical. There’s an equipment room in the north wing. I’ll need a team.”
“You take it,” Alvarez said. “And Elena, I want you quiet and off-camera until we figure this out.” He didn’t say “safe.” He said “quiet.”
I wanted to argue—loudly, hysterically. What would quiet do? Let Ward spin his web? But his face was steady, and the truth is when a cop tells you to be quiet, it’s because noise will get you killed by reputation, even if not physically. So I nodded. “Okay.”
Damian’s fingers wrapped around my wrist, firm. “I’ll go with Marcus,” he said. “Clara will stay with you.”
They moved fast—two shadows slipping through an architecture I’d been learning to hate and fear. I watched them go and suddenly felt very small.
Then Marcus paused, turned back and said, “There’s something else.” He walked to the screen and pulled up a file that had just surfaced in the network logs—a small packet buried like a bone. He hit play.
It was an audio. It started with static and then a voice, a man’s, familiar and quiet. I recoiled because the voice—low, smooth—was Damian’s. My stomach dropped. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want to watch him get framed. I also didn’t want him to be the villain if he wasn’t. The audio played on.
“You’re sure?” a second voice asked, male, clipped—cold.
“I am,” Damian’s voice. “It will draw them away. She’ll be safer. It’s controlled.”
“We can’t be seen as collaborators,” the other voice said. “This has to look like abandonment. Sympathy is the currency.”
A third voice—laughing, older—toted in: “Do it. It’s the perfect smoke. We all get what we need.”
The chuckle was Ward’s. The audio ended with a click.
The room turned upside down. I felt like someone had punched my diaphragm. He’d—he’d been on that call. The footage from the matchbook camera was one thing—Damian slipping an envelope—but this was him confirming the plan.
I looked up at him on the screen and then at the exit where he’d just left. I wanted to run after him, demand an explanation until my throat bled, and at the same time I felt a strange, stupid ache that he sounded like he was trying to protect me. The mix made me sick.
“You lied,” I said to the quiet room. Not a question. It hit harder than I expected. My throat was raw. There were people watching me in a dozen directions and none of them could hear how my bones were splitting.
Marcus said quietly, “It’s possible he was coerced. The other end’s voice—the one that answered—has some spoofs we can’t trace yet. But he’s on the tape.”
My head swam. Coerced. Or guilty. Or both. None of the options made me calmer. Trust had become a negotiation and the terms were always changing.
I left before the rest could speak. I walked out into the morning that had the feeling of a stage before the curtain opened—everybody waiting for the moment when things either exploded or resolved. Clara met me at the doorway, mascara smeared, eyes rimmed. She hugged me like she was trying to get herself together.
“Whatever you do,” she whispered in my ear, “don’t let them make you small.”
I clung to that like a rope. It helped. A little.
They called me later in a van, the three of us—Damian, Marcus, me—riding like fugitives. He kept one hand on the gear shift, the other on the radio, and when our knees brushed, a spark ran up my leg. The world felt fragile enough to break. We rode through streets that smelled like wet concrete and unmade decisions.
Before they let Marcus into the relay room they frisked him like he was a suspect. People in suits and badges ushered me into a small server closet. Damian stayed at the door.
Marcus was at the racks, hands moving with surgeon precision. He tried to de-auth, then he hit a wall. “They’ve got a backup broker,” he said. “Someone’s mirrored the master. It will take hours to scrub, and by then the seed will have propagated.”
“You can isolate nodes,” Damian hissed, like a man who’d always thought in terms of control. “Cut power to the north wing. Slam the breakers. It’ll try and stop the broadcast.”
Marcus looked at him. “If we cut breakers, we trigger every fail-safe. The feed will be mirrored to external caches. We could black out the house, but they’ll spin it as obstruction.”
A choice: blackout the house and hope to stop the seed, or watch the truth bloom and suffer the fallout.
Damian met my eyes, and in that look there was a rawness that wasn’t defense or strategy—just human. “You tell me,” he said. “Do you want us to cut the grid?”
“I don’t trust you,” I said. It wasn’t dramatic. It was small but true. It landed like a blow.
He flinched, not because of the words but because they were honest. “I know,” he said, and it was the worst and best answer. “But I will not let them kill you with lies.”
“Then cut the grid,” I said, and the decision felt like throwing a match into a basin of gas we’d been circling for months.
Marcus slammed his palm on the console and the hum in the room fell like the sound of curtains dropping. Alarms began a small, urgent chant. We were about to either control the narrative or give Ward the stage he’d always wanted.
As the breakers fell and the servers blinked out, Damian took my hand. The contact was small and hot and dangerous. He leaned in and kissed me — not like a possessive claim this time, but like a person begging not to be lost in what we’d started.
The lights died. The van lurched as the world around us cut to black.
In the dark, with the house whispering and the network dying like breathing slowed, I heard my phone vibrate. One last message lit my cheeks in the sudden night: UNKNOWN SENDER — You chose. Watch the world burn with us or burn it yourself.
My hand tightened around Damian’s in the blind. I had chosen. And the seconds before the broadcast were the loudest silence of my life.