All Chapters of A Story That Doesn’t Belong To You: Chapter 191 - Chapter 200

Adrien had been pacing the narrow living room of the safehouse coffee growing cold on the table beside him, when his encrypted phone buzzed. He didn’t flinch. The screen flashed a single word: HALE.Ryan, still half-asleep on the couch, sat up at the tone of Adrien’s voice. “Who is it?”“Hale,” Adrien muttered, already swiping to answer. “He wouldn’t call this early unless something broke.”Static cracked briefly before Hale’s voice came through strained, hushed, like he was speaking from a moving car. “Adrien, I need you listening carefully Viktor’s financials are shifting. Offshore accounts whole clusters being drained and rerouted through ghost corporations.”Adrien stilled. “He’s liquidating.”“Maybe Or he’s being forced to I cross-referenced the transaction pattern it doesn’t match his usual rhythm. Someone inside is moving the funds without his authorization.” Hale paused. “I think someone in his circle is betraying him.”Ryan frowned. “That doesn’t make sense No one close to hi

The safehouse was quiet too for what they’d just survived. The hum of the old refrigerator was the only sound breaking through the silence.Adrien sat on the edge of the couch shirt half-torn, streaks of blood drying along his ribs. His knuckles were raw, his breathing uneven Ryan crouched in front of him with a towel, a bowl of warm water, and a stubborn look that didn’t match the tremor in his hands.“Hold still,” Ryan murmured.Adrien’s jaw tightened as Ryan dabbed at the gash near his shoulder. “It’s fine,” he muttered.Ryan didn’t look up. “You keep saying that every time you bleed You’re not fine.”Adrien gave a low chuckle that turned into a wince. “You sound like Hale.”“Then maybe Hale’s right,” Ryan shot back quietly.The towel soaked pink as Ryan pressed gently against the wound. Adrien flinched but didn’t pull away. The dim lamplight carved shadows across his face, making the bruises beneath his eyes stand out. He looked worn When Ryan finally glanced up, his voice soften

The safehouse had become something between a fortress and a home Morning light filtered through cracked blinds, catching dust in golden ribbons that cut through the air. For once, it was quite not the heavy kind of silence that came after gunfire, but something gentler. Temporary, fragile.Ryan woke first the faint scent of coffee filled the air, and for a heartbeat, he forgot what day it was forgot the war waiting outside their walls. He followed the smell to the kitchen and froze in the doorway.Adrien was there Shirt sleeves rolled, bandage still visible beneath the fabric, leaning over the counter with a small smile tugging at his mouth as he fixed the radio. It was a mundane scene, so ordinary it almost hurt to look at.“You’re up early,” Ryan murmured.Adrien glanced over his shoulder. “Yeah I think the circuits were jammed again.”Ryan leaned against the doorframe. “You sure you’re not just fixing things because you don’t know how to sit still?”A faint grin. “Maybe both.”Ryan

The air inside the new safehouse was heavy with static like the silence before a storm. Adrien hadn’t slept. He sat cross-legged on the floor, eyes locked on Hale’s encrypted drive looping the same corrupted data over and over Every attempt to decode it only deepened the digital noise.Ryan hovered nearby, a cup of untouched coffee cooling beside him. The dim lamplight made the dark circles under his eyes more pronounced. “You’ve been at it for four hours,” he said softly.Adrien didn’t look up. “Encryption this complex isn’t meant to be cracked. It’s meant to bury itself if handled wrong.”“Meaning if you mess up, it self destructs?”“Exactly.” Adrien leaned closer, scanning the shifting lines of code. “Hale used a split key cipher. Half the algorithm is stored locally; the other half was buried remotely. If we find the host server, we can unlock everything.”Ryan studied the flickering monitor. “Where would he keep something like that?”Adrien hesitated. “Not where. Who. Hale never

Adrien’s hands were already moving before Ryan could speak grabbing cables, reconnecting the power, forcing the broken workstation to life. Smoke rose from the shattered casing, but the screens flickered back on, one by one, stuttering to green.“He’s initiating the data release early,” Adrien muttered, voice clipped. “We have less than fifteen minutes before it goes global.”Ryan stood behind him, trying to keep up. The fractured glow from the monitors cast both of them in cold light, their reflections ghosted against the glass walls. “Fifteen minutes? Adrien the servers are gone. You smashed the CPU”“It doesn’t matter,” Adrien cut in. “He mirrored it. There’s still a remote key somewhere in the system.”His fingers flew across the keyboard, typing faster than Ryan could follow. The screen filled with encrypted scripts command lines buried under firewalls, a digital maze built by the same mind that built him.“Come on…” Adrien’s tone dropped to a growl. “Show me where you’re hiding