Chapter Four
Elise
I should tell my father.
The thought came before I even got my apartment door fully closed. A man I didn’t know, one who clearly didn’t belong in this town, was asking questions about him. Protocol said escalate. Flag it. Let someone else decide whether Brady Holliston was a curiosity or a threat.
Instead, I dropped my keys on the counter and let the thought sit there with them.
Great. Brilliant move, Elise. Just casually ignore the one thing your entire family has drilled into you since you could walk.
“If it smells like a threat, report it.” But nooo, here I am, pretending the gorgeous, dimpled mechanic who is definitely not a mechanic is just a fun little puzzle I get to solve all by myself.
This wasn’t like me.
I didn’t go rogue over a man.
Something was different this time, but I was struggling to identify what it was about Brady that made the mystery of him feel exciting rather than dangerous.
My apartment was quiet. Small. Functional. Nothing in it tied back to anything that mattered. The laptop on the table wasn’t connected to anything it didn’t need to be. It never was.
Normal channels were for people who wanted to be seen. I didn’t.
I opened a contained session, isolated it, and pulled what I needed from a non-indexed layer I kept for situations exactly like this.
Then typed in his name.
A payload of information came easier than I expected.
Of course it did.
The universe should make doing the wrong thing hard, but instead it rewarded those who learned the loopholes. Either this was decoy information or I was dealing with someone who probably didn’t bother with a password for his phone.
Who are you, Brady Holliston?
I typed in a few more queries then leaned back slightly as the information populated.
East Coast. Boston ties. Old money that had learned how to remain cutting edge.
His father, Gabe Holliston, ran a tech company.
Background stuff. Infrastructure. Quiet influence that didn’t need to announce itself to be essential.
That explained the shoes.
Expensive Italian leather in a grease pit. I knew it. I knew those shoes didn’t belong next to Roy’s beat-up work boots. But knowing it and seeing the Holliston empire laid out in clean, searchable rows still hit different.
I moved deeper.
Family structure surfaced easily: siblings, public appearances, business conflicts, a life that left a digital wake whether anyone intended it or not. I was skimming past one result when a name stopped me.
Burke.
I followed a Reddit thread to a personal blog and skimmed a post about how growing up in a small town in the shadow of two rich families who hated each other had actually been a good thing.
The author didn’t share anything I could flag as useful unless lemonade being the beverage of choice even while eating cookies was code for something nefarious, but I doubted it.
The Hollistons and the Burkes.
Rival tech families.
Choosing to reside in the same small town each summer: Firebrook Valley.
Odd.
I scanned articles. Mentions. Carefully neutral-worded press releases over something that wasn’t neutral at all.
I narrowed the search, filtering out noise automatically and letting only what mattered rise.
Bella Holliston. Brady’s older sister.
Married.
To a Burke.
I read it once.
Then again.
And a third time, because it still didn’t make sense.
Okay, brain, explain this to me like I’m five.
Two families who’ve been at each other’s throats for decades suddenly merge via holy matrimony and then .
. . open a chain of charitable restaurants?
That’s not how billionaires do conflict resolution.
That’s how people in movies pretend to do it right before the plot twist.
Conflict at that level didn’t dissolve because two attractive people exchanged vows and discovered the power of community outreach. Real life didn’t work that way.
The expansion of that search brought up something else.
Cookies and Coffee: owned by Mabel Weaver. Hers was a template for the chain of restaurants the Hollistons and Burkes were creating.
I skimmed the overview, expecting branding, strategy, positioning. Instead, I found community centers, job training, scholarships.
I blinked.
That was either the most carefully constructed image campaign I’d ever seen or . . .
No assumptions. Only facts matter.
I moved on.
Focus, Elise. One layer at a time.
Brady.
I narrowed the scope until it was just him.
Unlike the rest of his family, he hadn’t kept himself out of public view. There were photos. Events. Enough online presence to build a picture without trying too hard.
Horses.
I paused again, this time longer.
Friesians.
Not casual ownership. Not a hobby picked up and abandoned. There was commitment there. Resources. Time.
He looked ridiculously good on a horse. Too good. My stomach did a stupid flip again even though I was trying to prove he was dangerous. Stop it. His level of physical attractiveness doesn’t matter.
I let the image settle for one stupid second before moving forward.
Education came next. Recent. That spring. Business degree.
Then nothing.
No immediate move into the family company. No announcements. No obvious next step. Most heirs didn’t hesitate when the road was already paved for them. They stepped onto it, waved at the cameras, and called it destiny.
Or walked away, proclaiming another path.
Brady hadn’t done either.
I widened the timeline, looking for anything that explained the anomaly. There were appearances, scraps, family mentions, little public pieces that confirmed he existed and had money and excellent cheekbones.
Nothing that explained what would have brought him to Basin Ridge.
And why work in a garage? For information gathering, maybe. As a cover, if I wanted to be paranoid. Even tech companies at the Holliston/Burke level didn’t have access to the type of security systems my family designed.
But perhaps they wanted to?
That could explain why he was looking for my father.
Couldn’t it?
Not without evidence.
Surface-level intel wasn’t enough. I shut down the active session and spun up a clean container. No shared cookies. No residual tracking. If there was anything buried, it wouldn’t be in a current feed. It would be in something someone thought was scrubbed.
I widened the date range, stripped the search terms to their roots, and pulled from archived snapshots instead of anything live.
There.
A fragment.
I went still.
It shouldn’t have survived.
I accessed it through a cached mirror rather than touching the original thread. Old discussion. Partially indexed. Poorly archived.
Sloppy.
My mouth pressed into a thin line.
People always think deleting something makes it disappear. It doesn’t. It just detaches it from the obvious path. The internet keeps copies of everything. You just have to know where to look.
The thread started to open.
A sharp knock hit the door.
I froze with my fingers still above the keyboard.
No one came here unannounced.
I let one second pass, then reached for my phone and brought up the external camera feed.
The screen flickered on.
Keaton.
Of course it is. Because the universe has a sense of humor and today it’s feeling extra spicy.
I’m in the middle of digitally stalking the first man who’s made my brain short-circuit in years and my big brother decides this is the perfect moment for a surprise visit.
Fantastic. Ten out of ten for poor timing. No notes.
I closed the laptop lid with a soft click, stood, and crossed the small living room. My bare feet were quiet on the worn rug. I paused at the door, took one steadying breath, and opened it.
Keaton stood there in jeans and a buttoned-down shirt, holding a covered dish that smelled like heaven. The compound’s cook, Rose, had clearly gone all out again. Enchiladas verdes, the kind that made me homesick even though I was only twenty minutes away.
“Hey, little sis,” he said, voice warm, big-brother casual. “Haven’t seen you in a couple days. Figured you might be surviving on coffee and spite again.”
I stepped aside so he could come in. “I eat. Sometimes.”
He grinned and walked past me, setting the dish on the tiny kitchen counter like he’d done it a hundred times. Which he had. “Rose sends her love and a warning that if you don’t come home soon, she’s making that kale thing you hate to punish you.”
I closed the door, locked it out of habit, and tried not to look at my laptop like it was a bomb. Don’t ask about Brady. Don’t ask about Brady. This puzzle is mine. For once, something is just mine.
Keaton wandered the living room the way he always did, slow and curious, like he was checking that my normal-person apartment was still normal. He picked up a coffee mug from the side table, turned it over, then set it back down.
“So. We finally stabilized the adversarial defense.” He glanced at me. “Dad’s team reworked the recursive filter we’ve been chasing for six months. It’s isolating prompt-injection attempts before they contaminate model state. Sub-fifty milliseconds in live testing.”
I stopped moving.
“Across how many environments?” I asked.
“Three. Including the government sandbox.”
That wasn’t incremental. That was structural. If it held at scale, it cut the attack surface dramatically. Deployment timelines would shift. So would liability models.
“That changes integration,” I said. “You can’t just drop something that aggressive into live architecture without rebalancing failover.”
His mouth curved slightly. “Exactly. We’re calling it Sentinel-7 internally,” Keaton added. “Dad wants you back on integration.”
I set the serving spoon down slowly. “Integration,” I repeated.
“Yeah. It plugs directly into your containment framework. If the injection layer misclassifies even once, it cascades. No one maps failure states like you do.”
There it was.
They’d solved the recursive loop.
Now they needed the scaffolding to keep it from collapsing everything around it.