Chapter 37
RYKER
I was fucking pissed. The motherfucker had hacked into Sebastian’s cameras. I’d built so many firewalls and security measures it should have been impossible.
I slid into his office chair and my fingers flew over the keyboard. Bass stood behind me, next to the women.
“I need to see how they got in and close the damn door.”
“Do your thing, mate.”
I pulled up the camera server first. No brute-force attempts. No obvious external scans. No failed logins piling up. The feeds were clean. Too clean.
That was what made me fucking suspicious.
“They didn’t hit the cameras head-on,” I muttered.
Sebastian leaned in. “Then what did they hit?”
I dragged up the device list on the network. Cameras. Server. Door locks. Phones. A dozen “smart” conveniences nobody thought twice about.
My attention snagged on one entry.
Entry Panel.
The wall tablet by the door that controlled access, viewed cameras, logged movement.
A convenience dressed up as safety.
I clicked into its logs and my neck tensed. A fresh remote session token had been issued twelve minutes ago. A token created at the exact minute Sebastian’s phone buzzed at the table.
“They walked in through your panel,” I explained.
“That’s on our secure system.” Ella swore under her breath.
“Yeah, and it’s a trusted system. That’s the problem. The panel can view feeds by design, so if they compromise it, they don’t need camera admin. They watch through the viewer.”
Sebastian’s face went hard. “How does someone compromise the panel without being here?”
I pulled up outbound traffic.
There it was. An address it had never talked to before. “Because it’s integrated with the building. Remote maintenance. Vendor support. ‘Required updates.’ One stolen support login and suddenly it answers to someone else.”
Ella’s hands curled into fists. “The building tech.”
“Or the vendor,” I said. “Or a property manager account. Doesn’t matter. Someone had legitimate access at some point and abused it.”
“Fix it,” Sebastian growled. I realized this situation had triggered him. We’d lived it before when we’d met a twisted motherfucker named Xavier.
I isolated the panel into a dead segment first; no access to cameras, no access to locks, nothing but a blank wall.
Then I killed remote maintenance and forced a credential reset on every camera, every lock, every session token.
It was clear that whoever was behind the texts and cameras were demonstrating how easily they could reach us.
Their message was loud and clear. They were in control.
The feeds flickered once and steadied. For a second, the room breathed.
Then Sebastian’s phone buzzed again. He looked down, his expression tight.
“It’s not a text,” he said. “It’s an alert.”
Ella’s eyes sharpened. “For what?”
Sebastian frowned. “Admin login. On the camera server.”
My blood went ice cold. “That’s not possible,” I said, already pulling up the active sessions.
Two sessions. Mine and another one. The second wasn’t coming from outside. It was coming from inside the penthouse network. I tracked the IP, and I ground my teeth together. “Your living room TV.”
The penthouse had separate networks on paper, but “smart home” always found a way to blur the lines. One bad device could still see more than it should.
Ella’s voice turned vicious. “Our TV?”
“Smart TVs aren’t very smart,” I said. “Always on. Always talking. If it got compromised earlier, it’s been sitting quiet, mapping. Tonight, they used it.”
Sebastian was already moving past us. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Unplug that fucker,” I called. “Don’t put it on standby.”
He vanished, then came back with the power cable in his hand. “It’s dead.”
“Good.” I killed the rogue session again, forced another token purge, and locked everything down tighter than it had been an hour ago.
Sloane stood in the doorway, pale but steady. “So they can watch us anywhere.”
“They can try,” I answered. “But now they know we know. That changes the game.”
Ella stepped closer to Sloane. “Are you staying with Ryker tonight?”
“Yes,” I answered for Sloane. There was no way in hell she was going to be alone, even if I had to tie her up again.
I watched the monitors, the clean feeds, the quiet hallway, and the ugly truth underneath all of it.
“We stop treating this place as safe,” I said. “Not forever. Just tonight.”
“I’ll text Kip to see if we can stay there for the evening. They have the kids so that will work if they’re available,” Sebastian said.
“Stay beside me,” I said to Sloane as we prepared to leave.
She nodded. “Okay.”
As we moved for the door, the system pinged again.
Motion detected.
Private landing.
The feed showed nothing.
But I didn’t believe in nothing anymore.