Chapter Five – Digital Ghosts[Part 2]

“You were both,” Cass says. “Those traits travel in packs.”

Despite herself, Ava huffs a weak laugh.

Cass nudges her. “Look. You want out? I’ll help you run. New IDs, cash, a crappy apartment in Idaho. We can change your hair and get really into farmers’ markets.”

Ava closes her eyes, just for a second.

She sees Vince’s face. The old woman’s. The rubble. Damian’s hand on her wrist.

Idaho feels like another planet.

“I don’t want out,” she says. “I want this to stop. I want him to stop.”

“Which him?” Cass asks softly.

Ava doesn’t answer.

She doesn’t have to.

Cass squeezes her knee. “Then we go to the source. Carefully. On our terms as much as possible. You get in the room. I get in the network. We find out what’s actually on that drive and what’s missing. Then we decide how to use it.”

“And if he catches you?” Ava asks.

Cass’s grin is thin. “Then I finally get to find out if ‘eaten by billionaire’ is as glamorous as it sounds.”

Ava stares at the screens one more time.

At the glitch in the data.

At the static gap where something important should be.

At her own frozen face under Damian’s hand.

She straightens.

“Fine,” she says. “We do it. But we do it fast, and we do it my way.”

Cass’s brows lift. “Which is?”

“I’m not sneaking into his server room,” Ava says. “I’m going to walk through the front door and make him invite me upstairs.”

Cass whistles softly. “Remind me never to underestimate your death wish again.”

“It’s not a death wish,” Ava says. “If someone’s going to decide who burns, I’d rather it be me.”

Cass looks at her for a long moment.

“Okay, Joan of Arc,” she says finally. “Text me when you’re on your way to his building. I’ll prep a ghost trail on your device and see what I can ride in on.”

Ava nods.

Her phone buzzes on the coffee table.

She glances down.

Unknown number. No name. Just a short, clean text.

> 9:30. Kade Dynamics.

> Don’t be late.

Her heart stutters.

She doesn’t need the signature to know who it is.

Cass leans over to read, then groans. “Of course. Of *course, he sets the meeting before we even commit to having it. Do you ever date men who ask permission first?”

“I don’t date men who threaten to ruin my life,” Ava says.

Cass arches a brow. “Could’ve fooled me.”

Ava ignores her, fingers already flying over the screen.

> Ava: You’re assuming I plan to come.

> Unknown: I don’t assume. I calculate.

> Unknown: And I don’t make empty reservations.

The three dots blink like a heartbeat.

> Unknown: 9:30, Ms. Moretti. Or the next time we speak, your father is in the room.

Cold washes through her.

Cass reads the last line and goes very still.

“Well,” she says softly. “So much for ‘on our terms.’”

Ava locks the phone.

“It’s fine,” she lies. “This just means we were right. He’s not going to leave this alone.”

She stands, grabbing her coat from the arm of the couch.

“I have ninety minutes to make myself look like a woman who isn’t terrified,” she says. “Then I’m going to walk into Kade Dynamics.”

Cass watches her, eyes dark.

“You’ve got this,” she says. “And if you don’t, you’re not going in alone. I’ll be right there in the wires, flipping off his firewalls.”

Ava almost smiles.

“Try not to get eaten,” she says.

“No promises,” Cass says. “Now go. And, Ava?”

She pauses at the door. “Yeah?”

“If he kisses you again,” Cass says, “please remember this time that we hate him.”

Ava’s cheeks heat traitorously.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she says.

She steps out into the hallway, the door closing softly behind her.

Outside, the city hums, bright and indifferent.

Somewhere across the river, a dark glass tower is already waiting.

Waiting for a girl with the wrong last name.

And a man who doesn’t believe in clean victories—only leverage.

### Damian

Forty-seven floors above the street, the city looks quiet.

It’s a lie, of course. Under the glass and steel, the same currents are running—money, rage, and hunger. Damian watches them through floor-to-ceiling windows, coffee cooling untouched on the table behind him.

“Got something you should see,” Nolan says.

Damian doesn’t turn right away. Nolan knows better than to crowd his boss when he’s thinking.

“Is it about last night?” Damian asks.

“What else,” Nolan says.

Damian pivots, crossing the office with unhurried steps. Nolan stands beside the wall display, sleeves rolled, tie loosened, security tablet in hand. Ex-military, ex-private contractor, now head of Kade Dynamics’ physical security.

And one of the few people Damian trusts to bring him bad news straight.

“Feed four, elevator bank,” Nolan says, swiping up a video window.

Grainy black-and-white footage fills the screen: the freight elevator inside The Axiom. The doors slide open. A server wheeling a cart steps in.

And then her.

Hood back. Mask in place. Dark hair damp from the rain.

Damian watches himself step into frame—rain-dark suit, bored expression, eyes already cataloging exits.

The doors close.

The elevator starts to descend.

In the clip, he tilts his head, says something. She answers.

Nolan scrubs forward and drops the feed into slow motion. “I’ve enhanced what I could,” he says. “Watch her eyes.”

He zooms in on her face. The mask hides her mouth, but her eyes are clear.

Sharp. Amused. Not afraid.

Not like the others.

Damian remembers the moment he realized she wasn’t just another rich thrill-seeker. The offhand crack about Milan. The assessment in her gaze. The way she called him a myth and then tested the edges of the story herself.

“Ran her face through every database I have access to,” Nolan says. “Government, private, criminal. Got Jack.”

“Meaning?” Damian asks, though he already knows.

“Meaning this woman doesn’t exist,” Nolan says. “No DMV. No visa. No hospital records. No school photos. Not even a bad fake in a socialite register. The mask and fake name she checked in match a ghost identity that was scrubbed this morning.”

Damian’s jaw flexes.

“Somebody with serious resources either built that alias and burned it,” Nolan goes on, “or wiped both after the fact. Either way, she slipped through systems that don’t let people slip.”

Damian studies the frozen frame. The way her eyes tilt, half daring him, half testing him.

Interesting.

“What about last night’s footage?” he asks. “What did we pull before the system went offline?”

Nolan switches feed.

The view snaps to the auction hall. Emergency lights. Chaos. Damian pinned her to the seat, his mouth on hers.

He feels, briefly, the ghost of the contact. Heat where there should have only been strategy.

“Got partial,” Nolan says. “Not as much as I’d like. The auction’s internal security stack was hit with a secondary intrusion during the blackout. You can see the gap here.”

He taps the hover-timeline. A thin red bar. Static. Then the feed resumes.

“Someone else was in their system,” Nolan says. “Not us. Not their usual admin. I’m still tracing the signature, but odds are good. You weren’t the only one interested in Lot Seventeen—or in her.”

Damian’s gaze stays on the still.

She looks like trouble in every way that matters.

“Any luck on the tattoo?” he asks.

Nolan swipes to a zoomed still of her wrist, red light washing over a faintly stylized **M**.

“The closest match I can find is an old downtown crew insignia,” Nolan says. “Could be tied to one of the legacy families. Moretti, Marchetti, half a dozen others who played in the same mud back in the day.”

“So she’s wearing a ghost mark from a ghost crew,” Damian says mildly. “How poetic.”

“Or she’s connected to somebody who still thinks those lines mean something,” Nolan says. “At the very least, she’s not just some influencer who wandered into the wrong party.”

A pause.

“Whoever she is,” Nolan adds, “she’s not random.”

Damian considers that.

“She walked into that room without backup,” he says. “She tried to buy a war she couldn’t afford. And whoever’s behind the data tampering moved *after* she did.”

“You think she’s the leak?” Nolan asks.

“I think she’s a variable,” Damian says. “And I don’t like variables I don’t control.”

Nolan glances at the frozen still again. “What do you want me to do?”

“Keep digging,” Damian says. “Trace the secondary intrusion. See who’s been erasing her ghost. And put a quiet flag on anyone in the old families’ orbit who suddenly develops an interest in Axiom security footage.”

Nolan nods. “And the girl?”

Damian’s fingers tighten once in his pockets, then loosen.

“I invited her to coffee,” he says.

Nolan blinks. “That’s… one way to interrogate a ghost.”

Damian finally lets the faintest hint of a smile surface.

“This woman doesn’t exist,” Nolan had said.

Good.

“That makes her dangerous,” Damian says. “And very, very interesting.”

He turns away from the screen, already planning the next move.

He doesn’t believe in clean victories.

Only leverage.

And whoever she really is, he fully intends to find out.