Page 88 of Fractured Loyalties
Longer than mine. And colder. He knew how to disappear into legal shadow. Preferred it. The only reason I remember him is because he once looked at me and said, “I don’t hunt. I wait.”
The fact that he’s stirring now?
Means someone whispered my name again.
And this time, I’m not the only thing they’ll find.
This time, Mara exists.
I close the panel. Stand slowly. The air in the room feels heavier. Not wrong. Just thick. Like the oxygen has been filtered through memory and returned to me soaked in static.
I step into the hall.
The house is silent, but I check every lock. Every sensor. Every weak point.
Not because I think they’ll come tonight.
But because I know how they think.
I’ve been them.
And I’ll be damned if they think I’ve gone soft just because I’m building a world she can live in.
They want to see if I’ll flinch.
Let them look.
I only flinch when I’m aiming.
And I never miss.
I check the comm log for fresh pings. Nothing. No updates from Lydia. No flagged movements. Just stillness again, pretending to be peace.
I lower the brightness on the terminal and set Mara’s mug down gently on the tray. My eyes drag back to the secondary screen. That contract Lydia flagged—the one I paused. It’s still sitting there. Waiting for a verdict.
I hover over the accept key. Don’t press it.
Instead, I open the client message logs. I scroll.
There’s one note. Not a directive. Just a tag: "High discretion. Minimal footprint. Target must not know."
I hate those lines. Not because they mean anything real. But because the people who write them think they sound precise.
They don’t. They’re a permission slip to crawl under someone’s skin without leaving a mark.
My cursor drifts back to the main request.
There’s a pattern in the payment routing. Subtle. But I’ve seen it before.
I copy the chain and run a silent trace. It redirects three times, then lands on a node I’ve used myself—in Berlin. A ghost wallet I thought I’d wiped clean.
That makes my pulse tighten.
No one should know that string still exists.
Unless they were watching me even before Mara.
Unless this request isn’t about the job at all.
