Chapter 4 Atticus
Atticus
In a good encryption algorithm, changing even one single bit of input completely changes half of the output. If you flip one microscopic zero to a one, the result explodes into something that looks totally unrelated. It’s called an avalanche effect.
My life without Phoenix is everything that follows the avalanche effect.
The idea that one tiny mistake in my code, one potentially fucked up zero or one is going to make it impossible to find her…it’s the most terrified I’ve ever been in my entire life.
I can’t breathe right. There’s a constant ache behind my eyes. I haven’t been able to force anything into my stomach without throwing it right back up, so I’m just not eating.
One wrong digit in this search string, and every packet of data, every camera feed…all of it might as well vanish into thin air.
I’ve been locked in my office since the moment I learned Phoenix was taken.
I’ve always prided myself on control. Always maintaining the fiction of appearing like I had it all together, even if everything was falling apart on the inside. Neat appearance, regulated passions…I held everything exactly as I wanted it.
Until her.
Now she’s gone and I can’t breathe.
I never told her what she meant—no. What she means to all of us. What she means to me.
There. I said it. I have feelings for Phoenix fucking Jones. I’m not fucking made of code after all.
The hotel moves as usual on the other side of the wall—elevators gliding, lights cycling, people living their lives like gravity still applies.
In here, I take that rhythm apart. One screen shows camera tiles from the service corridors while another shows a timeline of every door opened, every badge swipe, every elevator call.
The third holds the power log. A straight line means normal.
Dips mean someone touched something they shouldn’t have.
I trace the pattern again. Camera 18B went dark at 11:12 p.m. The hall lights never flickered, which tells me it’s not a building-wide outage.
Camera 18C, two corners away, stayed up.
Camera 17A is down. 17B is up. Off, on, off, on—like someone was picking threads out of a sweater without pulling the whole thing apart.
You can’t do that from a laptop in a guest room. You have to stand in the hallway with a maintenance key and open the panel. You have to flip the switch with your hand. You need to know which panel is which. You need to belong—or look like you do. Because otherwise, I’d catch you.
There’s no more doubt. No room to question the facts sitting right in front of me. Someone who works for us is working against us. Someone we trusted enough to have access somehow managed to steal into our building and take the most valuable thing in this building.
One person alone can’t be responsible. It would take one person to cut cameras and cause the security blackout.
Someone else walks her through the blind spots in our system.
Someone else keeps Security busy with a noise complaint down the hall at the right minute for the right reason.
That’s at least three roles. Probably more, because whoever did this didn’t leave behind a trace.
My team didn’t catch the dry run for this. That sits wrong in my bones. My team should have caught this. My team…
My fucking team.
“Maverick,” I say loudly, voice steady. “Now.”
When he steps into the open office door, Maverick looks more presentable than I feel. Dressed in trousers and a white button-down that he has the sleeves of which rolled up on his forearms, he’s holding the tie he must have taken off in one hand.
“Yeah.” He takes one look at the screens, then at me.
“You hear from Con or Storm?” I ask.
“Storm just checked in.” He plants his hands on the back of the chair across from me. “Zeus’s rear leg is broken—they said it’s a clean break, and they’re gonna set the bone. He’s going in for surgery now. Conrad’s staying with him. Storm will pry him away in a couple hours if there’s any update.”
I should be relieved. I’m not. Relief and dread can live in the same space. They do now.
Mav watches me. “He’s close to the edge.”
“Of course he is.” The words come sharper than I want. I take a breath. “We all are. Con found the dog injured and no Phoenix in sight. He’s allowed to be on that edge, man. I’m surprised he hasn’t gone straight over and into the darkness yet.”
“It’s not just him,” Maverick says, quiet and carefully neutral.
I angle my chair so that I can give him a look. “Meaning what.”
“Meaning if he doesn’t get to say what he needs to say to her, it’s going to eat him alive.” He pauses. “And you’re going to be right behind him, chewed up by the fact that you kept her at an arm’s length until it was too late.”
My expression tightens. “We’re not doing that tonight.”
“Didn’t say we were.” His mouth almost curves into that goddamn sardonic smile he wears when he’s manipulating people around him. “Just calling the hand the way I see it.”
I turn back to the monitors because looking at him makes me too aware of what he’s right about.
We’re not braiding each other’s hair and baring our souls.
We have work to do. “Watch this,” I say, and highlight the dead feeds.
“These weren’t killed from my system. Someone physically opened the panel and shut them off after I removed all the remote access to the system.
That takes a badge, a key, or a friendly hand that could get close enough. ”
“Security,” he says.
“Bingo. We need to start there.” I bring up the roster.
“We need to find everyone who was on from eleven to one with access to those corridors. Cross that list against anyone who took a smoke break or lunch break or vanished right before midnight. Pull every record of every single fucking door that was propped open, even briefly. If an alarm was reset too fast, I want to see it. Because the answer is in the details. In the code.”
“I’m already running housekeeping, banquets, and night engineering.
” Maverick stares down at his phone. “Two housekeepers used the exact same phrasing to explain why they were in the service hall. You know that doesn’t just happen.
I’ve got them separated. We’ll see who remembers their script without the other. ”
“Good.” The power log clock ticks a minute forward. I trace the dip again with my finger. “There’s a two-minute wobble near Camera 18B. Then a manual reset. Whoever did this knows the system and our halls and our building like it’s their own body.”
“We can put our own team on the board too,” Mav says. “Nobody is off-limits as far as I’m concerned.”
I nod. It tastes like swallowing a blade, but I nod. “Do it.”
Silence. The server hum grows louder in my head. I rub at the ache behind my eyes and feel the restraint I keep wrapped like gauze around the things I don’t say.
“I want this over,” I tell him. “When we get her back, I’m putting a tracker on her phone, her bag, her shoes. I don’t care if she throws it at me in retaliation. I’ll take the bruise.”
His expression brightens in that sideways way he does when he’s about to say something I’m not going to like. “About that.”
I turn fully. “About what.”
“I kind of already gave Phoenix a tracker.” His hands go up when my expression tightens further. “Relax. Not the creepy kind. The poker chip.”
“Poker chip?” I ask, even though I already have an idea what he’s talking about.
“You gave each of us one for Christmas a few years back—your ‘Bond phase,’ remember?” His mouth tilts. “You hid the electronics in them. Tap-to-open doors, little breadcrumb signal if it passes one of your readers. I kept mine on me. One night I…gave it to Phoenix. For luck.”
“Which one?” My chair scrapes back. I’m already at the keyboard. “I engraved IDs on all of them.”
“Of course you did.” He digs into his wallet and slides a twin from a narrow pocket. “Chip twelve.”
“Mav, you’re a fucking genius.” Relief flashes through me so fast it makes me dizzy.
Something I can hold. Something I can analyze instead of sitting here useless.
I open the sandbox program I built when I handed out those stupid, smart gifts—my private network of readers tucked under tables and behind counters for comps and games.
If the chip gets near one of my hidden readers, it whispers its ID and the reader whispers back the time and place.
Nothing constant. Nothing invasive. It will ping when the stars line up and send the GPS location of any of them, and I can track it.
I query Chip-12. The map populates with a flicker—one small dot, then an empty field where I want a trail.
“Come on,” I say to the screen. “Talk to me. Tell me where you are.”
Maverick rounds the desk and leans in. “Where was she?”
I zoom. The blue ribbon of the river cuts the city. A gray finger reaches into it—our pier.
“The pier,” I say. The word sits heavy between us. “Last ping at twelve-oh-seven a.m. Then nothing.”
“Boat,” he says, voice flat. “The only reason to take her to the pier would be to put her on a boat. They…that’s not good, Atticus.”
“Or they put her in a container that moved past a reader and then into dead metal.” I swallow. I keep my tone even. “Either way, she isn’t on land anymore.”
For a second, I let myself feel it. The gut-wrenching terror. The image of her in a place that doesn’t deserve her. Hurt. Bleeding. Fighting to come back to us.
The promise I make to myself stretches tight enough to hurt as it emblazons itself on my very soul. I swear I will get her back breathing, or I’ll join her in the afterlife.
Then I lock it down tight. “Okay. It’s not good, but it’s something. It’s a start.”
Maverick straightens. “Storm’s bringing Con in as soon as Zeus can travel. I’ll get the car. We start at the pier.”
“Go.” I dump the dot to the wall map, already pulling the list of anything that left from that dock between midnight and one. “I’ll pull public ship data, tug jobs, and private service calls. If a dinghy fucking sneezed, I’ll get information on it and make sure she’s not there.”
Maverick pivots for the door.
“And Mav—” He pauses. I meet his eyes. “Good job giving her the chip.”
His face softens, then resets. “Find me something else to work on,” he says, and is gone.
The office goes quiet again. The hum of impatience mixed with the fans of my servers returns. I set the system to scrape every manifest and radio call after midnight. I set alerts that will scream at me if Chip-12 breathes near any reader again—ours, downtown, at the marina, anywhere.
I rest my hands flat on the desk and let the restraint thin for one heartbeat.
Hold on, Kitten.
“I’ll do whatever it takes to bring you back to me. I can’t lose you before you know how much you mean to me.” I murmur the words aloud into the quiet office.
Give me one thread, and I will pull the world apart at the seams.