11. Knox
ELEVEN
KNOX
“Someone dug him up.”
“Nobody dug him up, Eli. He’s under six feet of sand in the middle of fucking nowhere—”
“Then explain how his phone is sending texts.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do if you’d all shut the fuck up for thirty seconds.
” Milo’s voice is the sharpest I’ve heard it.
He’s sitting on an overturned crate with his laptop balanced on a toolbox, fingers moving fast, face lit blue-white from the screen.
He hasn’t cracked a joke since Holden dragged us out of bed twelve minutes ago, which is how I know exactly how bad this is.
Milo fills silence the way most people fill lungs. When he goes quiet, the air gets thin.
Holden’s garage smells like motor oil and cold concrete. There’s a single bare bulb overhead. Door is mostly shut, the house between us and a sleeping Sage.
Unknown
How’s the throat?
Bet it would have hurt less if you’d let me fuck it.
Then the contact card. Brock smiling. Beer in hand. Dead for weeks.
“It’s his number,” Milo says, still typing. “Same carrier, same SIM registration. Can’t be his actual phone. But it could be a clone. Which wouldn’t be easy. Ordinarily, you’d need physical access to the device . . . ” He trails off.
“You buried it with him, right?” Holden is pacing. Three steps, turn, three steps, turn. Jaw so tight I can see the muscle jumping from across the room. “Phone, wallet, everything. It all went in the hole with him?”
“Ah, not exactly,” Micah says.
Micah’s hands flatten against his thighs.
His eyes flick up to mine, then back to the laptop screen.
“We didn’t bury the phone with him,” he says, quiet but steady.
“We did a factory reset and ditched it at the airport after withdrawing the last of his cash. Milo even microwaved the SIM at a 7-Eleven. The idea was if they figured out we were running a clone and faking his location, they’d chase the last known signal out west. Not to where we actually put—”
“—the body,” Milo finishes. “Which was in the opposite direction, as planned. Holden’s protocol, not mine.”
“Bullshit.” Holden stops pacing and rounds on them, voice low and lethal. “I said cover your tracks, not walk the fucking phone into a goddamn convenience store.”
“Phone—airport. SIM card—convenience store.” Milo doesn’t flinch. “It’s forensics 101, boss. You move the device, you break the event chain. That’s spread. So if they do find a body, they don’t have all the evidence they need in a tidy package.” His eyes lock on Holden’s. “Like you wanted.”
Holden breathes through his nose but doesn’t argue—he just doesn’t like that the protocol left a loose thread someone else is now pulling.
“So the physical phone is wiped,” Eli says from his corner. Quiet. Careful. Testing whether he’s allowed to speak. When Holden doesn’t cut him off, he continues. “The SIM is fried. Which means whoever sent this text couldn’t have used Brock’s actual device.”
“No shit,” Holden mutters.
“Which means they spoofed it,” Milo says.
His typing slows. Stops. He stares at the screen like he’s just confirmed something he was hoping to be wrong about.
“I’ve got the clone running on a private server.
The account’s still active—has to be, because I’m using it to run his socials and cycle his purchases. ”
“Purchases?” Holden asks.
“Small transactions. Coffee shops, streaming services, gas stations along a route that makes it look like he’s road-tripping down the coast. But the best part—” Milo looks up and grins.
“Is that the money gets rerouted through three shells before it lands in the accounts of several rape crisis charities. Seemed fitting.”
Nobody comments on that. Milo made the right choice.
“Point is,” Milo continues, “if someone sent a text through Brock’s actual number—through the carrier—it would show up on my clone.
It’s a mirror. Everything that hits the account, I see.
” He turns the laptop around so we can see the screen.
Brock’s message log. Sage’s name isn’t in it.
“There’s nothing here. No outgoing text to Sage. No contact card sent. Nothing.”
“So it didn’t go through the carrier,” Micah says.
“It went around it. Someone used a spoofing service to make a message look like it came from Brock’s number without actually routing through his account. It’s not hard if you know what you’re doing. Costs about twelve bucks and a burner email.”
“Can you trace the spoof?” Holden asks.
“Maybe. Depends on the service. Some of them keep logs, some don’t.
The good ones don’t. Stephen doesn’t strike me as someone who’d leave an easy trail.
” He’s already typing again. “But here’s what’s interesting—the contact card.
You can’t spoof a contact card the same way you spoof a text.
That was crafted. Someone built it manually and attached it.
Brock’s photo, his number, his email. It’s not pulled from a real phone—it’s a package.
Designed to land in Sage’s chat and make her think the dead man she helped murder is texting her. ”
“Psychological warfare,” I say.
Everyone looks at me like they’re surprised I made a sound.
“He’s not trying to hack us. Or find the body. He’s trying to break her.” I look at Holden. “That’s not tech. That’s cruelty.”
Milo points at me without looking up. “What he said.”
“Has Odin’s team found anything on Stephen yet?” Micah asks. He’s looking at the floor, but the question is aimed at the room.
Eli is the first to answer. “The number he was using to contact Brock is—”
He stops talking the moment Holden’s gaze cuts to him—a look that says not you without making a sound.
Eli closes his mouth.
“They’re stuck until Stephen makes a mistake they can track,” Holden finishes. “Odin told me at the hospital it’s all a dead end. I’ve been checking in with Fenrir daily, doing everything I can to find a thread, but . . . ” He shakes his head.
There’s nothing more to say. Nothing any of us doesn’t already know—Stephen was the only contact in Brock’s phone Odin’s team couldn’t account for. Brock kept him completely separate. No trail. Nothing.
“I’m doing everything I can too. But this guy is a serious pain in the butt,” Milo says. “We have exactly three things—he knew Brock, they were in some weird secret relationship, nobody that knew Brock admits to knowing Stephen. Not even Tyler, the self-proclaimed bestie.”
“And now that secret boyfriend is coming for our girlfriend,” Micah says.
“Worse than that, he knows what happened to her.” Holden’s voice tightens.
“That text was specific. Just like the method he used to hurt her was specific. He knows what Brock was doing to her that night, and he knows how we stopped him—” He pauses.
Resets. “That’s not a stranger on the other end of a phone.
That’s someone who’s been watching. Not just Sage, either. All of us.”
“The question is how,” Eli says. “How is this guy watching without us seeing?”
The garage goes quiet. As though everyone is holding their breath, thinking the same thing and nobody wants to say it first.
“Milo.” Holden’s voice has dropped into that low, flat register that means he’s about to ask a question he needs the right answer to. “Your clone. Your server. How sure are you that it’s secure?”
Milo’s fingers stop. “It’s secure.”
“How sure.”
“It’s secure, Holden. I built it myself. Multi-layered encryption, isolated network, rotating access keys—”
“You built it yourself. Which means you know exactly how it works. Which means if someone was good enough they’d have a single point of failure to target. You.”
Milo’s head comes up. It’s the first time tonight he’s looked anything but focused. He looks offended. “Nobody’s in my system.”
“You’re checking from a laptop on a crate in a garage at three in the morning.” Micah’s voice is quiet but pointed. “Can you actually verify that from here?”
The pause is a fraction too long.
“No,” Milo admits. “Not fully. I can see surface-level access logs remotely, and nothing’s flagged. But if someone breached at the server level—the actual hardware—I wouldn’t see that from a remote connection. I’d need to be in the room. Hands on the box.”
“Then you need to go and check,” Holden says. “First thing.”
“Fine. But if I’m checking my servers, then we need to check everything.
” Milo hesitates. Rubs the back of his neck.
“All devices. All your phones, laptops, tablets. Anything that could be hacked. If someone spoofed Brock’s number to text Sage, then I want to make sure nobody’s sitting on any of our devices listening in—especially on Sage’s phone. ”
“I’m fine if you take my stuff,” Micah says. “But you can’t take Sage’s without telling her why.”
“I know. I’ll talk to her about it when she wakes up.”
“No,” Holden says immediately.
“Holden—”
“We’re not telling her. Not yet. She’s still recovering. Still having nightmares—”
“We have to tell her.” Micah pushes off the wall. “This isn’t something we can hide from her.”
“Remember the cameras, Holden?” Milo puts in.
“You were so pissed at me because I didn’t ask her permission.
This is the same thing—she needs to know.
Needs to be the one to make decisions about her own safety.
” Milo’s voice is the closest to pleading I’ve ever heard it.
“We can’t hide this from her. She’ll see right through us. ”
“No! We keep her out of this!” Holden rounds on him. “This guy just put a noose around her neck! I’m trying to protect her—”
“Stop,” I say, my voice booming over the top of them.
“That’s what Milo said about the cameras.
That’s what Eli said about leaving. Every single time one of us decides we know what’s best, she’s the one who ends up hurt.
” I take a step closer and lower my voice.
“Fury isn’t a child, Holden. She’s a woman who killed a man, survived a hanging, and loves us despite the danger we bring. She can handle a text message.”