35. Milo
THIRTY-FIVE
MILO
Ipull into Mom’s driveway at eleven p.m., and the porch light is on since she’s expecting me.
I always text ahead, because the one time I didn’t, Ray met me at the door with a frying pan and Dennis had the Glock out. Gloria called it a proportional response. I called it attempted manslaughter. We agreed to disagree.
Inside the house is dark except for the kitchen window, where I can see someone moving behind the curtain.
Probably Gene. Gene doesn’t sleep. I’ve never once arrived at this house at any hour without Gene being awake, doing some form of quiet domestic labor.
Folding towels. Polishing the banister. Sorting the recycling into categories so specific I’m convinced he invented some of them.
I let myself in with my key. The entryway smells like Pine-Sol and the sweet, yeasty scent of baked bread. There’s always something baking. Mom runs this house the way a general runs a forward operating base, and the oven is her artillery.
Gene is in the kitchen. He’s in a bathrobe and slippers, wiping down the counter. The turtleneck underneath the robe is gray tonight. There are always turtlenecks. Kinky motherfuckers.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Milo.” He nods without looking up. “Your mother left you a plate in the fridge. Chicken parm. There’s also banana loaf on the counter if you want something sweet.”
“I’m good, thanks. I’m just heading downstairs.”
“I’ll bring you tea.”
“Gene, you really don’t have to—”
“Chamomile or peppermint?”
The thing about Gene is that arguing with him about caretaking is like arguing with gravity about falling. You can have a philosophical objection, but you’re still going to hit the ground.
“Peppermint.”
He nods and reaches for the kettle.
I head for the basement and unlock each bolt in sequence, press my thumb to the pad, and the lock chirps its happy little beep. The door swings open and the cold hits me like a wall.
My kingdom. My brain in physical form.
Some people meditate. Some go to the gym.
Others have hobbies that don’t require a biometric pad and a power bill that could fund a small nation.
I come here, where the racks hum and the backup batteries blink green and the cables snake across every surface in a tangle that looks like chaos but is actually a filing system only I understand.
It’s like the inside of my skull, except the inside of my skull also has three unfinished snack lists, a theory about whether pigeons are government drones, and the bass line from a song I heard in a gas station in 2019 that I will never identify but will also never stop hearing.
I drop into the chair, boot up, and open the encrypted channel.
Me:
You up?
Four seconds.
FENRIR:
I don’t sleep.
Me:
Ever?
FENRIR:
Not when there’s work.
Me:
Well, that’s healthy. We love a work-life balance icon.
Fair enough. Neither do I, which is why I’m in my mother’s basement instead of in bed with the woman I love—which is where I’d rather be.
But the tracker in Sage’s choker says she’s at her apartment with Eli.
Hopefully dealing with whatever pent-up sexual rage those two have been building since Eli tried to break up with her on behalf of all of us. Bastard.
But anyway, she’s safe. They’re fucking it out. And I have a dog pack to dismantle.
Me:
Running the Brock text trace again. Different angle.
FENRIR:
You’ve run it four times.
Me:
Fifth time’s the charm.
I pull up the spoofed text logs. Sage is hiding them. Keeps deleting them like it’s going to keep them from me. But I’ve been in her phone this entire time, watching them all come in and logging each one.
Have I alerted the others?
I’ve had the chance every day this week and I haven’t taken it. Tell Holden and she’s back in the house until somebody’s dead. Tell nobody and I’m a man reading her phone in his mother’s basement.
I pick the basement. Nobody made me.
Just like I’ll keep the fact she tried to ditch Eli with her buddy Jamie today.
That’s right, folks. I’m fucking everywhere.
The routing chain for these spoofed texts is eleven VPN layers deep.
I’ve cracked eight. Each one routes through a different country.
Two of the servers don’t exist anymore—a hosting provider in Montenegro that shut down in 2021 and a proxy service in Estonia that got seized by Europol.
Whoever set this up built their chain through infrastructure that was about to die. The trail goes cold at the corpse.
This is craftsmanship. Patient, specific, deliberate.
Which means he’s smart. I hate when they’re smart. The dumb ones are so much more satisfying. You pull one thread and the whole thing unravels and they’re standing there with their browser history open going, “How did you find me?”
Because you’re an idiot, Charles. Now fuck off back to your incel group.
This guy won’t be that easy.
There’s a knock at the door.
“Come in,” I call out.
Gene enters with the mug of peppermint tea on a small tray. There’s a napkin folded into a triangle and a small shortbread cookie beside it. He sets the tray on the one clear corner of my desk and leaves without a word.
I take a sip. It’s good. Gene makes excellent tea. It’s possible he makes it under duress, but the quality isn’t affected.
FENRIR:
I’ve been running a parallel analysis on the text metadata. The timing’s changed.
Me:
Changed how?
FENRIR:
The early messages clustered late at night/early morning—consistent with someone sending when they assumed she’d be home and alone. But the pattern shifted about two weeks ago. They’ve moved to daytime. Clusters in the late morning and early afternoon, with a tighter window than before.
Two weeks ago. I check the timeline twice and get the same answer both times.
Me:
That’s when she went back to the diner.
FENRIR:
That was my read. The new clusters track her shifts. A burst just before she starts, sometimes one partway through. The night sends have nearly stopped.
I pull up the logs and overlay them against the shift schedule Holden built when we set up the watch rotation. Fenrir’s right. The texts used to come when she was housebound, alone, awake at 3 a.m. with her throat aching. Now they come when she’s pulling on an apron.
He knows when she’s working.
Me:
So he’s keyed into her routine. The second it changed, his timing changed with it.
FENRIR:
Which raises the question of how he knows it changed.
Fucking hell. I rub my eyes, already feeling the first warning prickles of a migraine. “Son of a bitch.”
Me:
He’s either watching her in real time or he’s got a feed.
FENRIR:
Possibly. Or there’s a calendar, a shared doc, anything cloud-synced. How does the diner communicate shifts?
Me:
The system is a literal dry-erase board in the break room. The boss takes a photo of it and puts it in a WhatsApp group chat. They communicate changes in that group.
FENRIR:
WhatsApp isn’t that hard to crack if you go through a device. Probably how he’s getting info.
Me:
I swept everything after the first text though. The whole house’s devices. Everything was clean.
FENRIR:
It was clean two weeks ago. Before she went back.
That lands like a kick. Because a clean sweep two weeks ago doesn’t mean clean now. New routine, new devices in play—the diner’s POS, the Wi-Fi there, her texting us from break. A dozen new surfaces, any one of them a way in.
Me:
Can you pull the diner’s network? Anything she connects to when she’s on shift?
FENRIR:
Already pulling it.
Me:
If he’s watching he’s watching through a screen, that could be his way in.
FENRIR:
That’s the assumption I’m working.
I flick through the texts again. The worst ones land just before her shift—the rope, her throat, next time. He doesn’t fire those off in the dark anymore. He sits with them. Picks the words. Times them to hit her right as she’s tying on her apron, so she carries them through every table she waits.
What a fucking creep.
Me:
Can you cross-reference the send-time with anything that might match a physical location or a time zone? Give us an idea if this guy is physically keeping track of her movements or doing it digitally somehow.
FENRIR:
Already running it. But the spoofing platform strips geolocation metadata before routing. I’m trying to reconstruct it from the VPN exit nodes, but the chain was built to prevent exactly this.
Me:
So we’ve got her schedule reflected back at us but no idea what he’s reading it off. We know exactly when he’s watching and nothing about how. Super helpful. Truly. The data gods are generous today.
FENRIR:
Patience. We’ll figure it out.
Me:
Patience is for people who don’t have a woman getting death threats every other day.
Long pause. Two words.
FENRIR:
I know.
That’s the thing about Fenrir. He’s a ghost. No face, no name, no voice that isn’t run through a processor that turns him into a genderless digital hum.
I’ve worked with him for two years and I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup of one.
I don’t know where he lives, what he looks like, how old he is, or what name his mother gave him.
It could be Pat, for all I know. And I’ve never met a Pat I could trust.
But I know he cares. Not about me, specifically.
About the work. About the people on the other end of the data who are being hurt by the people he’s tracking.
I’ve seen it in the way he stays online for eighteen-hour stretches when we’re close to a breakthrough.
In the messages he sends when the stakes go up.
I know.
The door opens again. Gene. This time he knocks once he’s already got the door open.
Uncool, Dad. This is my private space.
But at least he’s carrying a plate with three slices of banana bread, a pat of butter, and a knife. He sets it on the tea tray.
“Working brains need carbohydrates to think clearly,” he whispers.
“Thanks, Dad.”
He hovers.
“It’s midnight, Dad. Go to bed.”
“Your mother would like to know if you’re staying the night.”
“I’m not staying. I’ll be another hour, tops.”