Chapter 13 Trust Is a Weapon Too #2
Matteo nodded once. “The one they hid where it would make you move.”
Elena’s pulse hammered. “Where is it now?”
Matteo’s gaze shifted to her laptop bag. Not to the zippers. To her hands again.
Her stomach clenched. “On me?”
Matteo didn’t say yes. He didn’t say no. His silence told her the answer was worse than either.
Elena pulled her laptop bag open carefully, too carefully, because she could feel the heat of his attention like a hand on her spine.
Inside, the laptop sat in its padded compartment, and beside it - what she’d thought was just a sealed envelope - sat a slim case, matte black, the same finish as the device in her hands.
She swallowed hard. The smell of smoke thickened, or maybe it was her imagination, her body reacting to a threat that wasn’t visible until it decided to be.
Elena looked at Matteo. “You said the backup is gone.”
“It is.” Matteo’s voice remained controlled, but his eyes flared with something that looked like regret. “This is the part they want you to keep thinking matters.”
Elena’s hands trembled. She forced them still. “You’re telling me they planted the tag in what I recovered.”
Matteo’s gaze held hers. “I’m telling you they planted it in the proof they wanted you to carry.”
Elena stared at the case as if staring harder could make it innocent. Her mind flashed to the safe room, the way intruders had moved with speed and certainty. They hadn’t needed to steal everything. They’d needed to place a tether.
Her voice came out thin. “So my evidence - my voice proof - has it.”
Matteo’s jaw flexed. “If you’ve already recorded the voice proof, then yes.”
Elena’s breath caught. She hadn’t told him everything she’d kept. She hadn’t told him because she’d been trying to keep one piece of herself unboxed. She’d believed that withholding could protect her, that secrecy could be armor.
Now she understood the armor had been turned into a leash.
“You waited,” Elena said, and she hated that accusation because it sounded like fear wearing anger. “You knew and you didn’t tell me.”
Matteo’s eyes sharpened. “I didn’t know until the directives updated. I didn’t know until I saw the pattern.”
Elena’s throat tightened. “The pattern.”
“The way they routed your storage,” Matteo said. “The way they staged access. The way they forced the fire when they did.”
She could feel her thoughts snagging on the words. Forced access. Forced fire. Forced compliance. She wanted to believe him. She wanted to tear him apart at the seams for making her carry a trap.
Elena swallowed and looked away, scanning the caravan interior like she could find the rest of the enemy hiding in the seams. The walls were too thin. The air too stale. The silence too loud.
“Show me,” she said finally. “Show me the directives you’re talking about. If you’re going to bargain, do it with your hands clean.”
Matteo’s gaze didn’t soften, but it sharpened further, like he was deciding whether he could give her anything without cutting his own throat. He lifted his phone and unlocked it with a thumb that didn’t shake.
He angled the screen just enough for her to see fragments - short coded strings, timestamps, and a line of text that meant nothing to her until she recognized the signature he used when he received commands from the chain that controlled The Shadows.
Her stomach dropped.
“You’re being told to verify something,” Elena said.
Matteo nodded. “I’m being told to confirm your state.”
Elena’s mouth went dry. “My state.”
“You’re alive,” Matteo said, and his voice turned colder around the edges. “You’re moving. You’re carrying proof. You’re still useful.”
The words hit her like a slap. Elena had lived her whole life refusing to be owned by anyone - family, institutions, editors, men who believed they could buy attention and call it love. Now she was reduced to utility by a system she couldn’t even see.
She stared at the device in her hands, at the matte finish that could hide a heartbeat.
“Why now?” she demanded. “Why after the raid?”
Matteo’s eyes stayed on hers. “Because the tag gives them a new destination. And because they expect me to follow the destination.”
Elena’s pulse thudded. “So your plan is to follow it.”
“No.” Matteo’s voice tightened. “My plan is to weaponize it.”
Elena’s breath caught. “Weaponize it.”
Matteo leaned in slightly, not close enough to touch, but close enough that she could smell that clean scent beneath smoke. “They want me to chase the proof like a dog after a whistle. I’m going to make them chase the wrong thing.”
Elena’s fingers closed around her voice proof case. “Then why ask me to decide what to reveal?”
“Because if I decide for you,” Matteo said, “they’ll predict it.”
Elena’s laugh came out sharp. “So you want me to be unpredictable.”
Matteo’s gaze held steady. “I want you to be honest enough that the enemy can’t script you.”
Honest enough. Elena felt the phrase like a demand. She didn’t know how to be honest under pressure without handing someone a knife.
“I can’t publish,” Elena said. “Not like this. If the tag points to us, every outlet becomes a target.”
Matteo’s eyes narrowed. “Then don’t publish.”
Elena flinched at the simplicity of it. “You’re telling me to stop.”
“I’m telling you to choose.” Matteo’s voice remained controlled, but the tension in his jaw looked like it had been carved out of restraint. “You wanted truth. Here it is. Publishing now makes you visible to the chain that hunts you. It makes you a public flare.”
Elena stared at him. “And if I wait?”
Matteo didn’t answer right away. The silence stretched just long enough for Elena to feel the weight of what he wasn’t saying.
Finally he spoke. “If you wait, you might lose the only clean proof you have before they sanitize it again.”
Sanitize. The Zurich archive. The way data could be scrubbed mid-transaction. The way they’d already watched the pattern of her evidence get eaten and redirected.
Elena’s chest tightened. “So we’re choosing between being hunted privately and being hunted publicly.”
Matteo’s eyes flashed with something like approval at her clarity. It was the worst kind of compliment. It meant he’d been steering her toward a decision she didn’t want to make.
“Exactly,” he said.
Elena swallowed and forced herself to breathe. The air tasted like smoke and cold metal. “Then we bargain. You extract your plan. I decide what to reveal. I want your real plan, Matteo. Not the version you tell yourself to sleep.”
Matteo’s expression didn’t change much, but the muscles around his eyes tightened. He looked like he was fighting himself - like revealing too much would make him responsible for whatever followed.
“Your voice proof,” he said, “isn’t just evidence. It’s a lure. It’s a way to pull the tag to its destination.”
Elena’s throat tightened. “You’re saying they want it broadcast.”
“They want it carried,” Matteo corrected. “Broadcast is just a convenient amplification.”
Elena’s fingers tightened around the case. She didn’t like the word carried. It made her feel like an object again.
“What do you want from me?” she asked.
Matteo’s gaze remained on her, and this time there was something rawer in it. Not softness. Not romance. A kind of controlled urgency. “I want you to give it to me now.”
Elena’s stomach dropped. “Give it to you.”
Matteo nodded once. “So I can remove the tag from the signal path.”
“You can do that?” Elena asked, and she heard the hope in her own voice like a betrayal. She hated herself for wanting it.
Matteo’s eyes didn’t brighten. “I can try.”
Try. That word carried the shape of failure.
Elena looked down at the device and the case in her hands, and she felt something inside her shift.
She’d been withholding because she feared manipulation.
Matteo’s guardedness had made her paranoid.
But this - this was the truth of it. If she held the evidence, she was a target.
If she handed it over, she might lose control of what it became.
And yet the alternative was worse. The alternative was staying the hunter’s prey.
Elena lifted her gaze. “If I hand it to you, you tell me the rest of your plan. The part you keep inside your head like a blade.”
Matteo’s throat moved, and she saw him swallow. He looked at the phone again, at the screen he’d unlocked. Then his gaze returned to her, and he made a decision.
“Okay,” he said. “Give it to me. And I’ll tell you what you need to know to decide whether to publish after the tag is neutralized.”
Neutralized. Elena didn’t like that he had a future plan already shaped in his mind. But she also didn’t like pretending she could do this alone.
Elena opened the slim case and pulled the small recorder out, the one she’d managed to keep when the safe room burned.
It looked harmless in the dim light - plastic, buttons worn from her thumb.
But the moment she touched it, she felt the weight of her own voice in her pocket.
The way Tomas Rinaldi’s words had sounded when she’d first captured them.
The way betrayal had tasted like bile in her mouth even before she understood what it meant.
She held the recorder up between them. “This is what I have.”
Matteo’s eyes tracked it without moving closer. “It’s incomplete.”
Elena’s jaw tightened. “I know. It’s why I’m still angry.”
Matteo’s gaze locked on hers. “You can be angry and still move smart.”
Elena pressed the recorder into his hand. His fingers closed around it with practiced care, like he was holding something fragile and dangerous. His thumb didn’t linger on her skin. He didn’t pull her closer. He didn’t pretend this was tenderness.
He just took it.
For a moment, the room felt too quiet, too intimate for violence.
Elena could hear the faint vibration of the air-conditioning, the slow tick of cooling metal in the kitchenette.
She watched Matteo’s face as he looked at the recorder - his eyes scanning it the way he scanned threats.
The expression he wore wasn’t relief. It was focus sharpened into something almost painful.