Chapter 2 #2
Conrad is back to pacing. Maverick is still being a smart-ass. Neither of them is asking the right questions. No one’s wondering how she crossed our threshold with none of us knowing about it.
The priority isn’t how to get the body out of the room. It’s how the fuck it got in here in the first place. Doors, cameras, staff—something gave away and the wrong people got access.
I down the water, leave the glass on the counter, and walk past both of them without another word.
My bedroom is through the far set of double doors, but I don’t stop there. I head straight to the second door on the right: my office. My little kingdom of monitors and gear.
The lights come on with a low flicker, and a cool white glow fills the space—clean, minimalist, and designed to let me focus on the task at hand.
I turn them off, though, choosing the dimmer light bars mounted above and below my three-screen array to diffuse the room.
Harsh light distracts; soft light lets the data speak.
I pull up everything that can help me find this motherfucker, starting with the elevator logs, then the hallway cameras. Then I pull the lobby feeds, the service doors scans, and even the delivery bays for good measure. Every single one scrolls on its own screen.
There’s nowhere to hide.
I scrub every feed from four-thirty a.m. to ten-thirty a.m. They all show the same thing.
Nothing.
No movement. No audio. No footage. Each feed shows a blip at 4:39, then a frozen frame until about six a.m. A hiccup and then a held breath.
I narrow to just our hallway. Those cameras are on a separate server—something I set up when we turned eighteen and our parties started attracting DEA hobbyists who wanted a headline at the poor little rich boys’ expense. I was determined not to give it to them.
These cameras, on my private server, should have been untouchable by anyone except me.
And yet they all have the same blip, followed by a still frame.
My heart pounds in my ears, and my breathing goes shallow. The cursor blinks on the screen, but I don’t. I stare, unseeing.
No. There is no way.
I run a diagnostic, even though I know what it’s going to say.
The footage is gone. All of it. Even the rooftop cameras.
There’s no trace of the intrusion. No user shells. No ghost processes. There’s clean fucking glass where there ought to be fingerprints.
I was hacked.
They didn’t just delete footage. They wiped it clean, as if it had never existed. And they didn’t even leave a smear in the buffers.
From the moment Phoenix left last night to the second we walked back in this morning—exhausted and half-drunk and fucking proud of ourselves for cleaning up another loose end—it’s all gone.
Like it never happened.
I sit frozen.
Not because I’m shocked someone got in. That part was expected. I would’ve been disappointed if it had been as simple as checking a feed. A decent enemy shows their wit, after all.
We make enemies all the time. I know what to look for and how to be prepared.
That’s what pisses me off. Not that they hacked me, but that they didn’t trip a single one of my security measures. They got through me, and I didn’t even know it. No alarms, no lag, no heat spike—nothing.
I am Atticus motherfucking Vale. The youngest winner of the Las Vegas Def Con hacking competition three years in a row.
I have had offers to build secure systems for everything from nuclear warheads to treasury departments.
On more than one occasion I’ve had to hack government systems to erase the stupid shady shit our parents have done to keep the entire Titan Wynn empire from burning.
No one is supposed to be better than me, but someone just erased hours of footage from my home base like it was as simple as finding a fucking Netflix password.
“Motherfucking hell.”
I breathe out slowly; let the meds settle. Let them claw through the fog and force clarity.
Focus.
Prioritize.
I scan the logs again, hunting for the breach point—whatever weakness they exploited.
Nothing.
There’s no evidence they were ever inside. Just that half-second blip I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t looking for it.
The truth settles over me like a bad taste in my mouth. I wasn’t just breached. I was outplayed.
“Did you find anything?” Conrad asks, opening the door and leaning on the frame.
I don’t turn. “Yeah, but you’re not going to like it.”
He waits, saying nothing. I rotate one monitor past the privacy screen and hit play.
“What am I looking at?”
“The exact moment Phoenix slipped out of the suite last night,” I say. “Followed by the six hours where everything should be visible. Phoenix leaving, Sarah coming in with the killer. Everything.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s all gone.”
“Define gone,” he growls.
“I mean someone stripped every camera, every hallway, every angle. Not just deleted—scrubbed. I can’t even prove they were in my system. If I hadn’t gone looking, I never would’ve noticed.”
It feels like admitting a personal failure. Heat crawls up my neck; I flex my hands under the desk until the tendons bite.
“Can it be found?”
“Maybe,” I say, facing him. “If I had a week, a miracle, and that guy’s IP address tattooed on my dick.”
That earns me a sharp look. I meet it with a level one of my own.
“They were good,” I add. “Better than I’ve ever seen. This wasn’t brute force. It was surgical. Whoever did this studied my systems beforehand. For weeks.”
Maverick appears, arms crossed. “So, what do we do?”
I have no idea. For the first time in years, I’m at a loss and I don’t have a plan simmering at the edge of my mind ready to go.
“I don’t know. We can’t prove she wasn’t killed here. We can’t even prove we weren’t here, which means if the wrong person asks the right question, we’re fucked. If we’re fucked, then Phoenix is left unprotected.”
“One problem at a time,” Maverick says. “The corpse is our biggest, most immediate problem. How do we—”
“No.” I get to my feet. Heat pools in my gut, the migraine pulsing spikes behind my eyes.
“The actual problem is that no one should’ve been able to do this.
The system I built is a closed loop. The cameras outside our door are air-gapped.
Meaning the only way to get to them is from this room, with my passwords and biometric signatures. ”
“You think one of us did this?” Conrad asks.
“Not unless you learned to code in three languages overnight.”
“Fine, I get it. But we need an exit strategy for the body,” Maverick says, and he’s right. “And we need to figure out what to do with Phoenix.”
“Phoenix isn’t a priority,” Conrad snaps.
“I agree, she is a distraction we can’t afford, we should send her—”
“Tell that to Storm,” Maverick laughs. “Not to sound cliche but I’m pretty sure he’d burn the entire fucking world down for her.”
Fuck. He has a point.
“I hate to admit it, but Maverick is right. If she can keep Storm calm, we need to keep her close. At least for now”
Con gives us all a flat look, his jaw visibly clicking.
He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like watching the girl he thought he loved once upon a time on her knees sucking us off. But if this is gonna work out, he’ll have to get used to sharing. At least with us.
“There are no cameras besides yours,” Conrad offers, changing the subject. “No one can prove Sarah was here. That helps, right?”
“It helps us,” I say, a little too relieved he’s agreeing to keep her around. “But it helps them, too. We don’t know anything about what actually happened.” The back of my neck prickles with awareness while the office suddenly feels too small.
My worry silences everyone.
Conrad finally sets the tablet down. “So we go quiet. We keep the clean team out of this. Just us.”
“And the body?”
Maverick raises his hand like he’s in class offering the answer to an equation and not soothing a wild animal. “Hear me out. Rooftop chopper. Midnight with the lights off. Bag and tag. No one sees a thing and we’ve disposed of a third body overnight.”
I glare. “Where are you landing a helicopter in Savannah at midnight without triggering ten noise complaints and a press alert?”
“I don’t know, Atticus. Somewhere. At least I’m offering solutions to the endless problems you’re presenting”
I press my palms to my temples. “God, you’re exhausting.”
Conrad snaps, “Do you have a better plan?”
“No,” I admit. “Not for the body. Not today. But I have a bigger concern.”
“Which is?”
“Why all of this is happening.”
That stops both of them.
“Why her? Why Sarah?” I ask. “She wasn’t useful. She wasn’t connected. She flirted with you, Maverick, but that’s not exactly a death sentence.”
Maverick mutters, “She tried to give me head, and I may have told her to go get lessons.”
I ignore him. “This wasn’t just a body dump. It was symbolic. The lilies on the table…everything timed. Controlled.”
She wasn’t placed there haphazardly. She was placed that way to be found—by us.
“And it was personal,” Conrad says quietly.
I nod. “They erased everything after Phoenix’s departure. The minute she left, the cameras went dark. And they stayed dark until after we walked back in. It’s not just about them not being seen coming in. It’s about us not being seen leaving.”
“You think it was a warning,” Conrad says. “They’re trying to prove something?”
But there’s something more in his stance. He’s guarded in a way that he wasn’t only moments ago. I lift an eyebrow. “Con?”
“I fucked her.” He admits. “She’s the one I was with when Phoenix was hiding in the closet.”
“A performance, then.” Maverick frowns. “Someone we’ve all been with at one point, maybe? But then, who’s the real audience? Clearly, they’re not trying to paint Phoenix as the guilty party. Us, though, they aren’t shy about throwing into the lion’s den.”
I don’t have an answer. For once, the pattern refuses to show itself to me.
What I do know is that this isn’t just about making us look guilty. There were easier ways to do that. This is about making us doubt our control. They want to prove they’re a bigger threat than we are.
And honestly…they just may be.