Page 111 of Fractured Devotion
Reyes nods.
I let out a deep breath. “Jesus, she was scared.”
“More than scared. Monitored.”
I scroll through the logs. Everything points to consistent external pressure. Reyes flips to the next slide. It shows access history from secure nodes and time-logged entries that don’t match Harper’s usual routines.
“Looks like someone was dragging her into something deep,” he says. “But whoever it was knew how to stay under the radar.”
“You’re saying this wasn’t suicide.”
He hesitates before saying, “I’m saying she didn’t fall alone.”
I sit back. My chest feels tight, like I’m trying to breathe through a wire mesh.
“She left no notes, and her messages are clean. There are no data leaks. Just these anomalies.”
“What about the footage?”
Reyes shakes his head. “The rooftop camera doesn’t cover the north ledge. So there’s no footage. Nothing conclusive.”
Which means someone planned it.
“Then we go analog,” I say, pulling out Harper’s desk key from my drawer. “Let’s see what she was hiding while alive.”
Reyes watches me with the same weary empathy he always wears when we’re about to dig up something foul. The kind that doesn’t just stink, it stains.
And I already know.
This won’t end cleanly.
Harper’s workspace smells faintly of perfume and scorched plastic, like she left something burning, and no one bothered to put it out. Her desk is still sealed with the flimsy corporate tape the security team puts on after an internalincident—thin red stripes with MIRAMONT SECURITY printed in white.
I slice through it with my scalpel. Petty rebellion, maybe. But I’m not in the mood for protocol.
Reyes closes the door behind us and sets up a portable scanner. “I’ll go digital. You go messy.”
“Fair.”
Inside the desk drawers are colored gel pens, a stash of granola bars, a mini recorder, and notebooks filled with obsessive scrawl and half-legible notes. Harper’s handwriting is all loops and slants, like someone always rushing, always halfway through a thought.
“Check this out,” Reyes mutters. He turns a tablet to me.
It’s a folder buried three directories deep and misnamed as a scheduling archive. Inside is a series of logs tagged “Veritas,” each with a timestamp and a brief entry.
“She was recording meetings,” he says. “One-on-one consults and off-book encounters. Some of them with staff I don’t even recognize.”
“Any mention of Celeste?”
“Not directly. But she was tracing someone who had access to the security feed and analytics platform, someone rerouting live data into ghost nodes.”
I glance up. “Kade?”
Reyes shakes his head. “Too soon to say. But if he was in her notes, he’s not in them now. It’s like someone erased the trail, sloppily. There are data fragments, just enough to make us suspicious. But not enough to point fingers.”
I pull out one of the notebooks and flip through. A Post-it note falls free. It’s a crude drawing of two eyes drawn in red ink, the pupils inked in like camera lenses. Below them is a single word: WATCHED.
Reyes looks over my shoulder. “She knew.”
