Chapter 63 Morgan
Morgan
The safehouse didn’t look like much from the outside. A weathered cabin tucked into a cluster of pines, half-hidden by the bend of the road. Inside, though, it was all reinforced locks, blackout curtains, and the faint hum of Cyclone’s gear taking over the dining table.
Ruby disappeared down the short hall, earbuds in, pretending she wasn’t listening. She was good at that. Sixteen and sharp enough to know when to keep her head down. sometimes I would see her whispering to one of the men like she was giving them information.
I lingered near the kitchen, trying not to hover while Cyclone worked.
His laptop screen glowed pale against his face, lines of code spilling so fast it may as well have been another language.
Every so often, he muttered something—“not right… no, that’s intentional…
”—then tapped harder, like the keys had personally offended him.
Damian stood behind him, arms folded, watching. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the screen once.
Finally, Cyclone exhaled, the sound sharp. “They weren’t just probing.”
My chest tightened. “What do you mean?”
He turned the laptop toward Damian. Even from where I stood, I could see it—two streams of data layered over each other, one mine, the other an echo.
“They mirrored her breadcrumbs,” Cyclone explained, his voice flat but laced with anger. “Every file she sent me, every coordinate she tagged—they duplicated the path. Let her do the work, then watched where it went.”
Cold spread through me. “So… Luthor knows everything I found?”
“Not everything,” Cyclone said, pointing to a section highlighted in red. “You hid better than you think. Half the trail dead-ends in my firewall. But the other half…” His jaw tightened. “They have fragments. Enough to know you were feeding us. Enough to know you matter.”
Damian’s expression didn’t change, but the air around him did. Darker. He leaned closer to the screen. “Where’s the tracer end?”
Cyclone clicked again, and a map bloomed across the screen. Not here. Not even close. A warehouse district two counties over.
“They funneled the signal through three relays,” Cyclone said. “But they got sloppy with the last one. Too fast, too much data. I pinned it. If we move tonight, we can hit them before they wipe it.”
“Is it a hub?” Damian asked.
Cyclone’s mouth pressed thin. “Looks like it. Not main operations, but definitely a feeder. Storage, maybe comms. Either way, it’s Luthor’s.”
I realized my nails were digging crescents into my palms. I’d thought I was helping, pushing the team closer to answers. Instead, I’d painted a target on my back and lit up a breadcrumb trail for the enemy to follow.
Damian’s gaze found mine, steady, unflinching. “This isn’t on you,” he said, like he could read the guilt plain on my face. “You gave us the break we needed. Now we use it.”
Cyclone slammed his laptop shut, already reaching for his gear. “They think they’re watching us. Time to flip the script.”
The room felt smaller suddenly, charged.
Ruby’s door cracked open down the hall, her eyes wide, her face pale.
She didn’t say anything, just looked at me, and in that moment I understood—no matter what Damian and his team uncovered, no matter what trail we followed next—everything I loved was tangled in it now.
And there was no going back.