Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 61 - Chapitre 70

CHAPTER 62The security wing had more people in it than it had twenty minutes ago.I noticed that before anything else. Two additional guards at the corridor entrance. Dante's second is already at the console. The particular quality of tension that filled a room when something had happened and the people in it were still processing what it meant.Matthias was standing in front of the main monitor with his hands at his sides and the expression he wore when something had moved beyond irritation into a different category entirely.I stepped up beside him and looked at the screen.Security footage. The outer gate. Timestamp from forty minutes ago.A black SUV was parked just outside the perimeter with its engine running. The driver's door is opening slowly.Caden stepped out.He was calm. That was the first thing. Not the frantic energy of someone acting on impulse or the barely contained fury he'd brought into the corridor earlier tonight. This was different. Deliberate. He walked to the

Chapter 64The map on the table showed the city in clean digital lines.Safe routes marked in green. Blind spots in yellow. The cluster of rogue territory activity in the east marked in red, bled at the edges the way real threats always did, never quite contained to the space you drew for them.Dante had pulled every piece of intelligence from the last seventy-two hours and laid it out systematically. Movement patterns. Known associates. The two locations where Caden had been seen since the breach.I stood at the table and looked at it and understood immediately."He won't come to the estate again," I said."No," Dante agreed. "Too controlled here now. He knows what the response looks like.""He'll wait for movement." I traced the route between the estate and campus with one finger without touching the screen. "When I leave. That's when I'm exposed. That's the window he'll use."Matthias was standing with his arms crossed on the other side of the table. He'd been quiet since Dante st

Chapter 66 The car ride back to the estate was the kind of silence that had texture. Not empty. Full. Three people in a moving vehicle are processing different versions of the same event and none of us is ready to turn it into a conversation yet. I leaned my head against the window and watched the city move past in streaks of light and thought about Caden's face in that last moment before he turned and disappeared into the crowd. Not angry. Not the wounded entitlement I'd learned to read and predict. Something more unsettling than both of those things. Focused. He was building a theory. Piece by piece, from every moment of wrongness he'd felt since the party. The bond didn't pull right. The girl who reacted before things happened. The way I'd looked at him since the beginning like I already knew what he was going to do. He didn't have the answer yet. But he was asking the right questions. The gates of the estate came into view and the guards moved forward to clear us through an

Chapter 68 The files didn't add up and I had checked them three times. I was in the small office Dante had given me access to two days ago, the one off the security wing that had a terminal connected to the estate's internal system. He'd given me read access to the maintenance department logs specifically. What I'd found had taken me an hour to see clearly and another hour to believe. Missing log entries. Shift records that overlapped in ways that shouldn't be possible given the staffing schedule. Inventory transactions showed different totals depending on whether you pulled from the primary system or the backup ledger. Not a clerical error. The pattern was too consistent for error. Someone had been in these systems deliberately, making small adjustments across multiple points, the kind of changes that individually looked like rounding errors or data entry mistakes and collectively built a picture that pointed at the maintenance department and specifically at the shifts my father

Chapter 70By the third night, I had stopped expecting sleep to happen.I sat at the desk with the laptop open and the files arranged across the screen and worked through the same material from a different angle. Not looking for patterns this time. Looking for mistakes. Because no matter how carefully something was built, the person who built it had to touch it. Had to leave some trace of how they thought.I zoomed in on the access timestamps again.External clearance. Unregistered. Repeated across six weeks in the maintenance logs.I pulled the legitimate override records and laid them side by side.And there it was.Every single unauthorized external access fell within a four-minute window of a legitimate high-level override. Not after. Within. The external access was piggybacking on the legitimate one, using the brief window when the system's verification layer was engaged elsewhere to slip through without triggering an alert.This wasn't a breach in the traditional sense.Someone