Chapter 22 Live Broadcast, Hidden Knife
Live Broadcast, Hidden Knife
Ava’s mouth had been covered by tape long enough for the room to start smelling like fear warmed by breath.
The broadcast control room was all harsh light and humming equipment, the kind of clean that only existed because someone had decided blood was inconvenient.
Roman stood over the console, gun angled down, jaw locked so hard it ached, watching her on the monitor like she was already slipping out of his hands.
Her eyes found his through the glass of the feed - wide, furious, and too aware - and for one sick second the desire to touch her overrode everything.
He wanted to drag her into his arms, rip the tape free, and make her believe he hadn’t let the world take her from him.
But the screen kept rolling, the feed kept broadcasting, and the man behind the switch - whoever had turned Ava’s pain into leverage - had one objective: erase the evidence before it could become a weapon.
“Roman.” The voice that came from the speaker wasn’t amplified enough to be a performance. It was intimate, like the traitor had leaned close to the mic and smiled. “Don’t worry. Your girlfriend’s going to be fine.”
Ava’s body jerked against restraints. Her shoulders strained, and the chair’s metal legs scraped with a sharp, ugly sound. Roman’s fingers tightened around his gun until the polymer bit his palm.
“Cut it,” he said, low and controlled, like he could command the wires. “Now.”
The traitor didn’t answer him directly. Instead, the feed zoomed - an automated camera shift - tightening on the slim folder stamped with Ava’s private seal as it lay on a table in front of her.
The folder looked harmless on-screen. Paper and ink.
Evidence. Her life’s work distilled into something a person could steal with a flick of a wrist.
Roman’s throat went dry. He’d watched Ava fight for that seal in every room she’d ever entered. He’d watched her refuse to be erased. Now the traitor held her proof up like bait.
Ava’s gaze sharpened, and the subtle movement of her eyes told him she was reading the timing.
She was tracking the broadcast delay, the camera cycle, the exact second the system would lock into “transmission complete.” She couldn’t talk, but she didn’t need to.
Her whole body screamed: They’re almost done.
Roman reached toward the console’s panel.
The room wasn’t just a room; it was layered security, a control nest built to keep people like him out.
He’d seen systems like this during briefings - command channels that only opened when a commander’s identity matched the authorization token burned into the hardware.
He pressed his palm to the biometric reader anyway, because discipline was the only thing that had ever kept him alive.
The reader flashed green.
Not because he’d earned it.
Because his name - his command credentials - had been predicted.
A low tone vibrated through the floor. The console’s status lights shifted as if the system recognized him the way a gun recognizes a finger.
A countermeasure engaged automatically, routing his access through a sandboxed channel - protective, and yet it felt like being pushed into a cage with clean bars.
Roman leaned closer, eyes scanning the holographic feed overlay. The traitor’s voice returned, amused.
“You’re Elite Commander Roman Vey.” A pause, savoring. “Even your devices know you’re loyal.”
Roman’s spine went rigid. He didn’t correct the traitor because correcting implied uncertainty. He didn’t ask questions because questions were how traps learned how to close.
He moved anyway - fast, precise. He yanked open the maintenance latch on the side of the console and exposed a service port. Cold air kissed his knuckles. The interior smelled faintly of ozone and machine oil.
A small access module sat inside, wrapped in a seal of its own.
He didn’t break it. Instead, he snapped it free with a sharp twist, the adhesive tearing with a brittle sound, then jammed the module into a bypass slot he’d memorized from a forbidden training packet years ago. The one he’d sworn he’d never need.
The room’s hum deepened. The overhead monitors flickered.
Ava’s image jumped, the broadcast stuttering for a fraction of a second - just enough to let Roman believe he might reclaim her.
Then the feed snapped back, cleaner than before, like the system had already rehearsed the interruption.
Ava’s eyes met his again, and this time there was more than rage.
There was something rawer. Fear, carved into intention.
She’d been sedated earlier - he could see the faint slackness in her jaw, the way her breathing didn’t fully settle into rhythm.
But on-screen she looked alert in the way people looked when they were counting seconds instead of taking comfort.
Her eyes shifted down toward the folder.
Roman understood. The traitor wasn’t just broadcasting Ava’s capture.
He was trying to force her evidence into a timed expiration - an automated corruption sequence that would scramble the ledger beyond recovery.
If it succeeded, Ava could still make claims in court, but the chain of custody would be shattered, and her motion would turn into a death warrant instead of a shield.
Roman stepped closer to the monitor, as if proximity could break the signal. “Ava,” he mouthed, though the room was sealed and her lips were taped.
The traitor chuckled softly through the speaker.
“Don’t look at her like she’s yours,” the voice said. “Look at her like she’s proof.”
Roman’s attention sharpened on the feed overlay. A timer sat in the corner - counting down to a “finalization.” He didn’t need it labeled to know what it meant.
He reached for the system’s broadcast override, fingers moving with the calm of someone disarming a bomb.
The console resisted; the countermeasure sandboxed him again.
He felt it like a pressure against his mind, a hard boundary the system enforced - only a commander could bypass it, only a commander with the correct identity signature.
His signature, apparently, had already been forged.
Roman’s stomach turned. He’d been told his name could be used. He’d believed it in the abstract. Seeing it in action - watching automated countermeasures obey someone else’s version of him - made it personal.
A new sound cut through the hum: a soft click, like a relay engaging.
The monitor changed.
Ava’s folder image split-screened into two feeds.
One showed the folder on her table. The other showed something else - an identical shot, but wrong in a way Roman couldn’t ignore.
The seal was still there, but the angle was slightly different, the lighting too perfect, the timestamp in the corner too smooth.
The traitor was showing him that there was more than one copy.
“You’re not the first commander to touch that evidence,” the voice said. “You’re just the first one to feel entitled to it.”
Ava’s eyes flared. She jerked her head, trying to refuse the message, trying to reject the poison being poured into the space between them. Roman could almost hear her thoughts: That’s not my room. That’s not my table. They’ve already moved it.
Roman’s hand froze above the controls. He could stop the broadcast, maybe - he could interrupt the live feed long enough to seize Ava physically.
But if the traitor already had the clean copy queued somewhere else in the system, stopping the broadcast would only delay the theft. It wouldn’t fix the core problem.
The trouble was disruption. Status quo had already broken. Now he had to decide what to remake: the feed, Ava, or the evidence trail.
“Roman,” Ava’s voice came through without sound - he saw it in her eyes, the way her brows tightened.
She wanted him to trust her. She wanted him to keep fighting for her.
And buried beneath all that was the legal instinct that had made her dangerous: if the evidence was corrupted, court would become a labyrinth of technicalities designed to drown the truth.
The traitor’s voice sharpened. “Finalization begins in ten.”
Roman’s muscles tensed. He’d been trained to obey timelines, but this one was weaponized against him. He didn’t have ten seconds to think. He had ten seconds to act.
He slammed his palm against the console again, forcing the system to recognize his command token by overriding the sandbox request with a direct hardware handshake. The panel resisted, then relented with a reluctant beep.
Ava’s image flickered hard, like someone had yanked the feed by its throat.
Roman grabbed a cable from the console’s side and yanked it free, ripping through the clean interior with a sharp crack. The monitor stuttered, the timer blinking and glitching. For a breathless second, the live stream went dark.
Then it came back.
Not with Ava.
With a different camera angle: a view down a narrow hallway in the warehouse, lit by emergency strips.
A silhouette moved at the far end, carrying a slim device in one hand.
The device’s casing was matte black, with a small indicator light glowing a steady blue - recording, transmitting, or both.
The traitor had shifted the broadcast to a secondary capture point.
Roman’s blood ran colder. They weren’t broadcasting Ava’s evidence anymore.
They were broadcasting the theft of it.
He moved like a man losing his mind - only discipline kept him from becoming clumsy.
He charged out of the control alcove, boots slapping on concrete, gun swinging up into a ready grip.
The room’s air was stale, metallic. It carried the faint chemical bite of disinfectant, masking the sweat and fear that had soaked into the floor.
The hallway door at the end of the control station was half ajar. Someone had already used it. Roman pushed through, shoulder slamming into wood and metal. Hinges squealed.