5. Chapter Five
Chapter Five
Zavin
Resh falls into step beside me as we leave the residential tier, but he doesn’t speak. Not in the corridors. We walk in silence until the operations room seals behind us and the security field engages.
Only then does his composure crack. “Selin is dead.”
Fuck. Not Selin.
Twenty-six-year-old Selin, who was sharper than operatives twice her age.
She came to me four years ago, a Sethrai female working the entertainment quarter’s lower tiers, running information between pleasure houses for credits that barely covered her food.
An ear for languages and a memory that retained conversations verbatim — when I offered her a position in my network, she accepted on one condition: she would never work under Kazren’s oversight.
She’d seen what his version of employment did to the women in his direct operation, and she wanted no part of it.
I agreed because we thought the same way.
I built her a cover that kept her invisible to the family ledger, ran her listening post through my personal channels, and for four years she gathered intelligence from visiting dignitaries and traders with a discretion that made her one of my most valuable assets.
She trusted me to keep her outside Kazren’s reach.
My claws extend against the table surface. The scrape of keratin on stone is the only sound in the room.
“When.”
“Nine days ago.” Resh pulls up the intelligence map on the central display, a three-dimensional render of my network’s cells.
Red blooms across the projection in three places.
“A blade through her throat in a service corridor during the shift change. The official report calls it a contract dispute.”
I press my palms against the table. The stone is cool beneath my scales, grounding, steadying.
“Her cover was blown by information that shouldn’t have been accessible from any single point in the network.
” Resh highlights the connections between three red nodes.
“And she’s not the only one. Same signature as two other compromises this quarter.
The operative feeding us military repositioning data from the Korvan trade summit is burned, and the Zhael listening post went dark overnight.
I got our operative out before they reached her, but the data stream is gone.
We spent three years building those positions. ”
A hiss leaves my mouth.
Three years of intelligence gathering, gone.
Selin is simply the latest loss in a pattern I’ve been circling for weeks. Three operations in different sectors. Three compromises tailored to their targets.
“Do we know who’s responsible?”
Resh shakes his head.
“Only that they’re pulling information from cells that should be sealed off from each other. No compromised passwords. No careless courier. Whoever this is understands the architecture well enough to move through it without triggering a single safeguard.”
“Who benefits?”
Resh leans back from the display.
“If your intelligence arm keeps taking losses, your value to House Sethrak drops.” He chooses his next words carefully. “A second son without a network is a second son without leverage.”
The list of people who benefit from my weakness is considerably longer than the list of people I trust.
We both understand this family well enough to map the beneficiaries without drawing them on the display.
Kazren, who’d consolidate power the moment my network goes dark.
My father, who measures his sons by their usefulness and has never hesitated to discard the one that falls short.
Or someone outside the bloodline entirely, a faction within the House positioning itself for whatever comes next.
“This isn’t an outsider.” My finger traces the connections between the red nodes. “Whoever is doing this has had access to the inside, either now or before.”
“Which narrows the field.”
“And makes every accusation dangerous.” I meet Resh’s gaze. “If I’m wrong, I declare war against an ally within the House. If I’m right, I show my cards before I have the proof to survive the consequences. Either way, I don’t get to make accusations without evidence that can’t be dismissed.”
The muscle in Resh’s jaw works, the only breach in his composure. He wants a target. He wants to move against whoever killed Selin and burned our operations and left us blind in three sectors.
“So we find the proof,” he says.
Any killing requires absolute proof.
“Quietly. No one outside this room hears a word of it until we have proof. Short of killing every suspect in the House, and I can think of several I’d happily start with, we need to trace the lateral access back to its source.”
I force the loss down where it belongs.
“We find who’s using the network. We find who they’re passing information to. Then we build a case that survives scrutiny from anyone who tries to bury it.”
“How fast?”
“Slower than I’d like.” The timeline opens on the display, and I study the shrinking gaps between incidents. “The first compromise was months ago. The second came weeks later. Selin was killed nine days ago.”
My finger traces the line connecting the three points.
“The first breach was careful. The second was faster. By the time they reached Selin, they weren’t testing anymore. They already knew it worked.”
The old ache stirs again, keen enough that I have to force my focus back to the display.
“The first two operatives survived. Their covers were burned and their intelligence streams were lost, but whoever was behind this left them breathing. Selin got a blade through the throat. That changes things.”
I meet Resh’s gaze. “Someone stealing information wants access. Someone willing to kill for it is protecting something. Either they’re preparing for a larger move, or Selin got close enough to the truth that they couldn’t risk leaving her alive.”
The dead are owed action, not mourning. The weight of it sits compressed in my chest. Beneath my own adrenaline, the residual trace of the human female from two floors above registers along my jaw. Cheap tea and clean skin, a persistent thread my biology refuses to discard.
She carved through eight layers of our encryption on borrowed bandwidth. In minutes, she demonstrated exactly the capability I need to trace whatever is bleeding my network from the inside.
The breach itself was loud. Exactly the kind of noise a rival house makes when it throws an ambitious operative at our walls and loses him.
Anyone reviewing the logs afterward would see the same thing: a failed intrusion out of the Splits, caught and contained before any real damage was done.
We log a dozen attempts like that every quarter.
Whoever has been bleeding my network doesn’t work that way.
They’ve never triggered a safeguard. Never tripped a monitor.
Months of leaks, burned operatives, and compromised cells, and not once have they left a fingerprint obvious enough to follow.
This intrusion woke every security system in the architecture.
Every alert. Every trace protocol. The intruder practically announced herself.
The breach was never the danger.
The danger came afterward.
I pulled the human through a window and put her to work.
Nobody outside this room has any idea she’s here.
Resh and I are the only ones who know who she really is.
That decision exists nowhere in the House records.
On paper, these are two unrelated events: a failed intrusion from the Splits and a routine contractor brought into the Warrens. No reason for anyone to connect them.
Until someone does.
The moment they place those pieces side by side, Miro stops being a ghost. And if the person asking that question is the same one who found Selin, then I’ve just painted a target on her back.
I surface to find Resh still watching me, patient in the way he gets when my attention has gone somewhere he can’t follow.
“The human female’s capabilities are exactly what we need,” I say.
“You trust her?”
“I trust that she’s motivated. The alternative to working for me is the Splits.” I close the intelligence map. “People will do remarkable things when they want something badly enough.”
My thoughts drift briefly to the eight-by-ten room, the failing equipment, the six cartridges she had left, and the way she’d looked at that datapad as though losing it would cost her a limb.
“She didn’t break into my systems because she was curious. She did it because she needed a way out, and she was willing to risk her life to get one.” I meet Resh’s gaze. “That kind of motivation is useful. And her competence is the most impressive thing I’ve encountered in years.”
Resh nods.
“Brief the inner ring. Rotate every operative with exposure to the compromised cells. Harden the field procedures and retrace every point of contact.” Selin’s name sits heavy in my chest. I promised to keep her safe and I failed.
“I’ll handle the audit. Quietly. And if anyone asks what the human female in the residential tier is doing, the answer is ventilation calibration. Nothing more.”
As though pulled by an invisible cord, I find myself heading back toward her quarters the moment Resh and I part ways.
The food arrives as I reach her corridor, carried by a servant from the kitchens.
I take the tray from him and dismiss him before he can ask questions.
A glance over the containers confirms what I requested.
Protein. Fresh fruit. Vegetables. Actual food instead of the processed ration blocks sold in the lower districts.
The tea concentrate sits in a sealed flask at the edge of the tray.
The addition made sense at the time. I’d tasted cheap tea leaves on her scent, and people tend to appreciate familiar comforts when everything else in their lives has been stripped away.
A contractor who eats properly works more effectively.
A contractor who sleeps properly makes fewer mistakes.
That’s what I’m telling myself anyway.