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Chapter 65: The ghost in the wires
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2025-09-15 00:27:40
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Crossed Lines Chapter 68: Hands on the board
POV: DamonThe office was quiet, long after it should have emptied. The skyline stretched beyond the glass, fractured into a thousand lights, but Damon’s gaze wasn’t on the city. It was on the dossier open in front of him.Not a company report. Not a merger draft.Elara.She had left the dinner with Clarisse looking composed, but Damon knew better. He had watched the way her shoulders had held too stiff, the way her eyes lingered on the exits. A perfect mask, yes. But masks always cracked in private.His fingers tapped lightly on the arm of his chair. He didn’t have to guess to know what Clarisse was circling. Clarisse was predictable in her arrogance. If she thought she smelled blood, she’d press until she either owned it or destroyed it.But Damon had already confirmed what Clarisse only suspected.Elara wasn’t just another name on his acquisition sheet. She was ShadowByte.And that changed everything.He leaned back, the leather creaking faintly. ShadowByte had left footprints agai
Crossed Lines Chapter 67: Steel under silk
POV: ClarisseThe report landed on her desk at dawn, a slim dossier wrapped in the kind of silence that already screamed failure.Clarisse slid a manicured nail under the seal, her eyes cool even as irritation curdled in her chest. The first page was all she needed. Contract terminated. Operation suspended. Assets withdrawn.Her jaw tightened. Withdrawn. That word never meant voluntary.She read further anyway, flipping through pages with the precision of someone slicing meat from bone. Every trace of the probe she’d ordered toward ShadowByte had been cut off midstream; clean, surgical. Not a stumble, not a hack-job. Someone had erased her reach.Clarisse set the file down, fingers steepling under her chin.“Elara…” she whispered, though she didn’t believe it. Her stepdaughter was reckless, yes, but this smelled of another hand. Another predator in the dark.Her aide hovered at the door, nervous. “Ma’am, do you want me to…”“Leave.”The word cracked through the room like a whip. The a
Crossed Lines Chapter 66: Silent interference
POV: DamonThe city sprawled beneath him, alive with lights, a grid of order masking chaos. Damon leaned against the glass of his office window, jacket draped over the back of his chair, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow. Midnight, and CrossTech’s tower was still humming. He thrived in the hours others faltered.On his desk, two files lay open. One bore Clarisse Duval’s insignia, the other… a series of network reports his internal security team had flagged. Not many men in his position read through their analysts’ logs personally, but Damon wasn’t most men. He preferred to see the fractures himself.The reports confirmed what he already suspected: Clarisse was reaching. Sloppy by her standards. Desperate, even. He had expected her to test the edges of his deal with Duval Holdings, but this? Pulling at threads she couldn’t see the ends of? Dangerous. Reckless. Predictable.His gaze slid to the second file. Encrypted packets traced back to a familiar ghost. ShadowByte.The faintest smil
Crossed Lines Chapter 65: The ghost in the wires
POV: ElaraBack in her apartment after the dinner with Clarisse.The cursor blinked on her screen like a heartbeat, steady and impatient. Elara leaned closer, chin propped against her hand, eyes scanning the activity logs she’d pulled from her hidden server.Something was off.ShadowByte’s systems were built to ghost through traffic, to mask everything under layers of misdirection. She’d run enough missions to recognize the rhythm of digital noise, the way it usually swelled and ebbed around her operations. But tonight, there was a new hum. Too clean. Too deliberate.She sat back, letting her fingers still on the keyboard.Clarisse.It was only a suspicion, but it fit too well. The sudden call, the pointed words, the weight in her stepmother’s tone, it wasn’t just posturing. Clarisse was pushing somewhere she didn’t belong.Elara closed the laptop slowly, the soft click echoing too loud in her apartment. She pressed her palms against the table, steadying herself.She couldn’t afford t
Crossed Lines Chapter 64: The Queen's gambit
POV: Elara The silence stretched between them like a drawn wire, dangerous and taut. Clarisse broke it first, her voice low and velvet-smooth. “You’ve grown sharper, Elara. Perhaps sharper than I gave you credit for.” She dabbed her lips with her napkin, movements measured, unhurried. “But steel without polish rusts. Remember that.” Elara smiled faintly, though it didn’t touch her eyes. “And polish without substance shatters under pressure.” For a heartbeat, they just watched each other, two predators locked across the table, the rest of the restaurant reduced to background noise. Then, as if on cue, both women leaned back, each smoothing away the edges of their words with carefully constructed calm. Clarisse lifted her glass again, raising it in a mock toast. “To family,” she said, her tone silk over iron. Elara mirrored her, though her hand was steady only because she forced it to be. “To knowing where we stand.” The clink of crystal rang sharper than it should have. Dinner
Crossed Lines Chapter 63: Masks and Daggers
POV: Elara The screen lit up beneath her fingers, the familiar glow washing away the last of her hesitation. Here, in the dark lattice of code and encrypted channels, she wasn’t Elara Duval, stepdaughter, corporate heir, pawn on Clarisse’s chessboard. Here, she was ShadowByte. And ShadowByte never hesitated. Her hands moved with instinct, booting her secure shell, threading into the hidden layers where the city’s elite whispered in shadows, paid for in untraceable currencies and loyalty traded like stocks. She keyed Clarisse’s networks first. Not the public-facing conglomerates polished with marble and PR gloss, but the shell companies and quiet branches she kept tucked out of sight. The ones that smelled faintly of laundering and blood. Her pulse quickened as a new file surfaced, a series of transfers under one of Clarisse’s lesser-known subsidiaries. The amounts were too clean, too exact. Payment structures designed not for efficiency, but silence. Elara leaned closer, scannin
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