All Chapters of Her kiss,His Downfall : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The greenhouse was skeletal.Long, arched ribs of oxidized steel lined the cracked concrete path. Glass panes—what remained of them—hung at jagged angles like forgotten teeth. Moss had claimed the floor. Vines had crept into the gutters.It smelled like rot and wet iron.Perfect.Damon stood at the center, hands in the pockets of his charcoal coat, unmoving. No guards. No car within a mile. No phone on him—she’d made that part of the terms.Ava saw him as she approached from the trees.He didn’t turn. He didn’t flinch.Just waited.When she finally stepped into the glass skeleton of the building, her boots cracked dry ivy beneath her.She didn’t speak. Not yet.She approached slowly, stopped two paces from him, eyes locked on his chest.Then, without permission, she patted him down. Quick. Efficient. Arms. Torso. Waist. Ankles.Nothing.Damon stayed still the entire time.Only when she stepped back did he speak.“Good to see you too.”Her voice was low. “Shut up.”He almost smiled—but

They worked in silence.Not out of tension — but velocity. Focus. Urgency.Ava’s fingers moved across the keyboard like a blade. Damon hovered beside her, offering strings of keywords, alternate aliases, ghost companies he remembered from legacy board reports.Ella Mireaux hadn’t left much.Which meant someone had cleaned up after her — but not enough.Ava leaned into a records database most people didn’t know existed: discontinued civil arbitration archives. The kind that never made trial. The kind that lawyers buried by sealing outcomes instead of filing verdicts.There it was.> CASE 132-B — Ella Mireaux v. Weston / Hale Biogenetics Filed: April 2012 Settled: Never. Status: Deferred Indefinitely. Sealed. Named third party: Blackwood Consolidated Holdings (Redacted)Ava looked at Damon.“Ever heard of Weston-Hale?”“Blackwood owned them until 2013. Gene therapy trial division. All assets sold for pennies and buried under a non-compete ban.”“Why?”Damon stared at the screen.“They w

The room was dark except for the steady flicker of Damon’s monitor.He’d isolated the license plate.Even though it was a burner — one of those DMV-voided numbers reserved for classified tests or diplomatic shuttles — there were still traces. Faint digital echoes in the old registry logs.Damon zoomed in, layer by layer, until the pixelation sharpened into something usable.Plate ID: FXC-1941No owner.No insurance record.But one name under the manufacturing release:> FALKEN LOGISTICS – Transport Node 6Damon leaned back, lips tightening.He knew the name.They weren’t a real company.They were a holding pool.Used by K.N. operations to house personnel movers — the ones too messy for corporate fleets, too quiet for police escort.He pinged the plate’s GPS ghost. Nothing.But fuel tracking logs? Those were harder to erase.Damon pulled up a triangulation of refueling sites that Falken used along upstate corridors.One ping stood out.> GasPro Station – Exit 16A – I-88 Eastbound Times

The SUV roared down the county highway, headlights off, tires whispering over blacktop slick with night dew.Vin kept one hand on the wheel, the other hovering over the dashboard’s kill switch for the GPS relay. Just in case.In the back, Damon sat sideways, tablet on his lap, fingers flying across a surveillance grid he’d built years ago—his own personal “God’s Eye.”Signal check:—Local comms: dead.—Thermals: quiet.—Satellites: no reposition requests.—Traffic cams: unchanged.Nothing was moving behind them.Nothing watching.He leaned forward.“I’ve got nothing,” he muttered. “No plate scans. No drone relays. No comm intercepts.”Vin didn’t look back. “That’s because they’re not coming.”Ava turned, her face lit by the red glow of the overhead dash.“That’s not good news.”“No,” Damon said. “It means they want us to run. Want to see where we go. Who we call.”He zoomed in on the cell towers they passed.Still nothing.Not even a passive ping.“Too clean,” he said. “This fast, thi

They sat inside the back of the SUV, parked under a camo tarp just off Route 9, engines off, signal-scramblers humming.Damon projected the decrypted map across the dashboard screen — dim, glowing in the twilight. His voice was low and steady.“Ella gave us three decimal pairs. I filtered them against known off-grid zones. One hit.”He tapped the map. A red dot blinked in the center of a greyed-out grid.“Site 6R. Federal Transport Division. Shut down after the Cascade Blackout. Supposedly condemned.”Ava leaned forward.“Supposedly?”Vin was already nodding. “I ran ops around there. Half the buildings are just hollow facades. Cameras still move, but there’s no power. No thermal read. Someone’s faking ‘dead.’”Micah, in the back seat, let out a hoarse breath.“They did that on purpose.”Damon turned to him.Micah continued, “Sites like 6R weren’t abandoned. They were repurposed. Black Loop Protocols rerouted infrastructure to off-record use. They didn’t erase the facilities. They eras