Chapter 48
Callum
I knew the second the lights flickered that we were fucked.
Not a power surge. Not a faulty grid. This was surgical. Purposeful. Like a scalpel slid clean through the artery of our safehouse.
"Kill the feeds," I barked, already moving. "Offline, now."
Emerson didn’t question it. Fingers flew across the keyboard, slamming commands. Screens died. The room dimmed. The hum of routers cut out like a breath held too long. But the damage was done.
Kieran cursed behind me, low and vicious. "That wasn’t random."
"No," I growled. "That was a fuckin’ signal."
The door burst open—Seraphina, wild-eyed, blade drawn. Her hair was braided tight, but strands had already slipped loose. She took one look at the room and knew.
"How bad?"
"Bad enough," I muttered, yanking the backup drives from the wall. "We were compromised. It came from inside. "
Kieran slid beside me, helping with the drives. "How? We've cycled every line of code through our firewall three times this week."
"Because it wasn’t code from outside ." Emerson spun his screen toward us, still powered by the emergency battery. The screen pulsed red with a blinking diagnostic.
"It’s Langston’s software," he said. "From that humanitarian grant suite. Buried under the resource-sharing tab. It piggybacked off our own sync protocols."
My jaw clenched hard enough I thought I might crack a tooth. "He fuckin’ hid a tap in a UNICEF-flavored pony show."
A blast from the south wall made the entire floor tremble. The lights shuddered. Glass cracked. My pistol was already drawn before I turned.
"MOVE!" I roared. "Burn the house! NOW!"
The next five minutes blurred into heat and chaos. Emerson sprinted for his server caddy, grabbing what he could. Kieran lit the emergency burn sequence in the lower comms room. The whole safehouse stank of ozone and betrayal.
Then I realized—one of us was missing.
"Where the hell is Seraphina?"
Kieran looked up, face pale. "She went back for the hard copy files. The old safe."
My blood ran cold.
I didn’t think. I moved .
The hallway to the archive room was a funnel of smoke and heat. The fire suppression system had kicked in, but not fast enough. The walls blistered with heat. And there—through the haze—her silhouette.
"Sera!" I bellowed.
She turned, coughing, arms full of files. She looked like she was about to tell me to leave her.
Not a fuckin’ chance.
I shoved through the fire door, grabbed her by the arm, and yanked her out just as another blast shook the stairwell. Metal groaned overhead. A pipe burst. We crashed to the ground just outside the threshold, her on top of me, ash streaking her cheeks.
She was bleeding .
I grabbed her face, tilting it to the light. "Are you daft?! You were trapped !"
She swatted at my hands. "You didn’t have to play hero!"
I leaned in, furious and breathless. "You just can’t stand watchin’ people you care about bleed?"
I didn’t say it like an accusation. I said it like a confession.
She froze.
Then, quietly, she snapped, "I’m not the one who throws myself into flames."
I didn’t flinch. "Exactly. "
Silence thickened between us. Not soft. Not sweet. It was rage and care and everything in between, jammed into a single breath that neither of us dared take.
Behind us, the rest of the team poured out into the alley, dragging packs and crates. Kieran was coughing, Emerson limping slightly. Everyone was accounted for. Barely.
The safehouse was gone. Smoldering.
Emerson crouched beside the wreckage, coughing into his sleeve. "We lost half the archived footage. The non-duplicated stuff. It’s gone."
I stared at the flames. "We’re not makin’ him bleed."
They all turned.
I met Kieran’s eyes. Then Seraphina’s. My voice dropped.
"We’re playin’ right into his fuckin’ hand."
Langston. Crest. All of them. The whole shiny mask of humanitarian bullshit—meltin’ away to show the rot underneath.
We weren’t the ones huntin’ anymore.
We were bein’ hunted.