Chapter Twenty One
Nadia
Kendra’s cabin is too quiet. Not even peaceful, just quiet in a way that makes every sound feel louder than it should be. Wind presses against the windows in slow, dragging breaths. Somewhere upstairs, Rhys could be shifting in his sleep, the faint creak of floorboards following like a warning.
I’m being crazy. Nothing is creaking, but… I can’t quite shake this feeling. I haven’t been sleeping. That’s what this is. The phone sits on the table between Kendra and me. Dead. Black. Harmless-looking. But it’s a blatant lie.
“That’s it?” Kendra asks, leaning forward to get a better look.
“This is what they used?” She’s unimpressed by the device, but of course she would be. It’s just a phone to her. To me, though, it’s an omen. One of pain.
“It’s all they needed.” Kendra hums under her breath, already reaching for it.
“Let’s see how smart they thought they were.”
The phone comes apart faster than it should. Back panel. Off. Battery. Out. Screws. Gone in seconds beneath Kendra’s practiced hands. I watch everything. Not because I understand it, but because I need to.
Because this…this thing controlled my life for two fucking years. No more , I vow. Not anymore. Kendra pauses halfway through, her brow furrowing slightly.
“That’s… weird.”
“What?” I ask, my chest tightening.
Kendra doesn’t answer right away. Instead, she angles the motherboard under the dim living room light. She reaches for a small tool, nudging something loose. A chip, I realize. It’s small. Out of place.
“Yeah,” Kendra mutters to herself. Then, to me she says,
“That definitely doesn’t belong there.” I lean down, arms braced on the coffee table to see what she sees.
“What is it?”
“Not standard.” Kendra turns it between her fingers.
“It’s a cheap phone, but someone added this after manufacturing. A custom mod.”
“For what?” I bite back my agitation. Not with Kendra, but with the situation. With the feeling of helplessness creeping up on me once again. Kendra glances up at me.
“Remote access. Monitoring. Maybe signal boosting.”A beat of silence passes, waiting for me to piece it together.
“They were watching it.” I surmise, already suspecting as such.
“Yeah,” Kendra replies simply.
“And you.”
That’s probably how they knew where Rhys and Kendra were, how they could be used against me despite the trade. The silence becomes heavy between us. My gaze drifts to the gutted phone on the table.
It looks smaller now. Less like a threat and more like proof. Proof of all that I went through, from birth to even now because of them. Olympus. Though, it’s unnecessary. The mental and physical scars are just as strong a proof as a shitty phone with a callous ringtone.
Snapping out of my reverie, I watch Kendra as she slides the SIM card out next, slotting it into a reader connected to her laptop.
Her fingers move fast across the keyboard, windows lighting up in rapid succession.
The monitor is covered in lines of code, network logs, fragments of data I can’t follow. Still, I don’t look away.
“Most of it’s wiped. Whoever set this up knew what they were doing.” Kendra reveals.
“Can you still get anything?” I ask. Kendra tilts her head slightly, eyes narrowing at the screen.
“Maybe.” A few more keystrokes. A pause. More keystrokes.
“Huh.” That makes me straighten.
“What?”
She doesn’t answer immediately. She clicks into another window, pulling up a rough map. Nodes, connection points, faint markers, all blinking in and out.
“These are the last consistent tower pings before it went dead.” She says. As I step close, the map sharpens, making my stomach drop.
“No .” Kendra leans forward, tapping the screen.
“They didn’t route this all over the place as you’d expect. No international bouncing, no heavy masking on the tower side.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I argue.
“They were careful.”
“They were.” She agrees.
“Just not here.” She zooms in on the map, and the cluster tightens. One location. Familiar. Too fucking familiar.
“Stonebridge.” I confess quietly, the name of my home a whispered curse. Kendra nods once.
“Every consistent connection? Local towers. Tight radius.” She glances up.
“Whoever was sending those messages-”
“-they weren’t far away.” I finished for her. My chest constricts. That same cold, suffocating pressure from two years ago crawling back up my spine. Suffocating me. Stabbing me.
All that time. All those messages. All those pictures. They weren’t watching from a distance. They were there.
“That’s not all,” Kendra adds, and I have to force myself to focus.
“What else?” I don’t speak until I’m sure my voice won’t shake.
From fury or panic, who the fuck knows. If Anton could see me now. He’d bask in the glory of Olympus while scolding me for my weakness, reprimanding me. The signet ring on his pinky sure to cut my cheek open. Kendra pulls up another screen, logs tied to the SIM, fragments of connection attempts.
“This chip?” She remarks, nudging the small piece of metal on the table with her nail. “It boosted signal stability. Kept the device locked into specific towers longer than it should’ve.”
“Why?”
“To make sure it didn’t bounce.” I understand what she’s saying.
“So, it stayed local.”
“Exactly.” She confirms.
Silence settles again. Heavier this time. Because now it’s not a theory. It’s a fact. My attention is drawn back to the map. At Stonebridge. At the place I once left behind. The home I returned to, thinking it was safe. Only, it was never safe in the first goddamn place.
“They never left.” The revelation hits me like a freight train. Kendra doesn’t disagree.
A soft chime cuts through the room. Sharp and sudden. Both of us freeze. Kendra’s head snaps toward her laptop.
“That’s not-”
The screen flickers and a new window forces itself open. No code. No interface. Just a black screen
with white text. I can feel my pulse spike, something cold and familiar locking around my ribs like chains with the sole intent to drown me. Kendra’s fingers hover over the keyboard, unmoving.
“I…I didn’t open that.” She mutters quietly.
The terror mixes with the astonishment that someone could out-hack her, could bypass the multitude of safeguards and firewalls she has in place to protect her. The text blinks once. Then it resolves. You should’ve left it buried.
The room goes completely still. Neither one of us is breathing. I don’t move, frozen into a statue where I stand. My eyes stay locked on the screen.
On the words. On the confirmation of the one thing I didn’t want to be true. They’re still watching. Kendra exhales slowly beside me.
“Well.” She mutters, voice tight.
“That answers one question.” Still, I don’t look away. My jaw sets, eyes hardening.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. The wind hits the windows again. Harder this time, as if something was trying to get in. To get to me.
“They’re here.”