Her Obsession. Chapter 21

**Sage**

I made sure that Conner was securely in his room. Hopefully getting some sleep. God knows he needed it. His steps had been heavy, like he was carrying the weight of a thousand decisions, most of them made for other people. He hadn’t said goodnight, just gave the cameras one last glance like he knew I was watching. I was. I always was. Once I was sure the door had shut behind him and his phone had gone dark for more than three minutes, I started feeding prompts through to Nico. The little hacker prodigy was still up, still glued to his monitors, tapping away like caffeine and paranoia were his blood type. Good.

The soft ping from my encrypted server hit his system and I watched as his posture changed, shoulders straightening, fingers freezing for just a second before he lunged at the new data packet like a starving dog. He clicked into it, and I gave a small nod of approval. He might be useful yet. He just needs a little help standing on the right edge of the knife. While he pored over the code I’d spoon-fed him, I stood up from my corner of controlled chaos and reheated a cup of noodles in my chipped black kettle. The steam rising smelled like processed regret and convenience. Whatever. It was hot and edible. Back in my chair, I took another bite, balancing the cup between two fingers while my other hand flipped through channels. Not entertainment, feeds. Monitors. Movement. I had eyes on everything. Conner’s house. His club. The safe house I’d turned into my own temporary war room. I’d set up three physical redundancies, motion-triggered fail-safes, and a drone stationed three clicks out just in case someone thought they were clever. I wasn’t taking chances anymore. Too many bodies had dropped already, and I wasn’t letting his be next. I opened another window on my screen, facial recognition scans cycling through everyone currently in his operations. Staff. Drivers. Dealers. Bartenders. Liam’s guys. Background checks, financial flags, digital footprints, anything that screamed anomaly or threat. I’d scanned most of them before, but now I was digging deeper. Anyone with access to Conner was a variable. And I didn’t do unknowns. I paused on one name, tapping my nail against the desk. A cousin, second degree, with an oddly clean record. Too clean. I marked it for further review and pulled up the feed from the alleyway behind Conner’s club. Motion. A cat. I exhaled. False alarm. Back to Nico. I typed three quick lines of code and watched him react like I’d lit a fire under his chair. He was catching on faster now. Good. If he kept up, I’d let him in on the patching protocol I’d designed. Maybe. I leaned back in my chair and looked at the still frame of Conner's sleeping form, half sprawled, one arm draped over his stomach like even unconscious, he was guarding something.

“Don’t get too comfortable, Irish,” I murmured. “This peace is borrowed, not bought.”

I wiped my mouth with the sleeve of my hoodie and got back to work. Because somewhere out there, someone was watching me the way I was watching him.

Paranoia wasn’t a symptom, it was the only reason I was still alive.

"Ah... Ghost?"

The voice crackled through one of my earpieces, barely above a whisper. Nico. I switched one of my monitors back to the camera I had on him. He was hunched at his desk, looking around the room like I might crawl out from the ceiling tiles and stab him in the throat. I clicked into his mic feed and let my voice filter through his speakers.

"Yes?"

He jumped. Really jumped. I didn’t even feel guilty for smirking.

“Do you see this?” he asked, still wide-eyed, pointing a shaking finger at his screen.

A few keystrokes and I was looking at exactly what he was seeing. Someone was testing the perimeter. They were good, better than most I’d seen in months. A shallow ghost trace trying to break the handshake protocol we’d just implemented. It wasn’t a brute force attack. This was surgical. Controlled. Someone was probing, testing, trying to see how much we’d notice before they went deeper. But the thing about a new firewall? It bleeds curiosity. If you push too soon, it screams back. I watched the code flicker, rerouting attempts bouncing off the scaffolding Nico and I had built.

“Shit,” he muttered. “They’re poking at the architecture.”

“No,” I corrected coldly, already typing, “they’re mapping our response time.”

I was already rerouting the firewall’s echo responses, feeding false security protocols to stall the breach while I traced the inbound IPs. Whoever this was, they were careful, multiple proxies, location masking. But they weren’t me.

“You see where it’s coming from?” he asked.

“I’m trying,” I said, voice clipped, already stringing together fragments of digital breadcrumbs. “They buried it deep. Military-grade, possibly black market.”

“Yours?” he asked, not even trying to hide the nerves in his voice.

“No,” I said. “Mine don’t get caught.”

He swallowed audibly. On the fourth loopback, I caught a static flicker, a stutter in their cloaking. A mistake. Small, but there. Someone moved too fast, tried to open two ports simultaneously. Rookie error. Overconfident. I froze the moment in the packet stream and blew it up on the screen. Bingo. A fragment of an origin trail. Just enough.

“Nico, write this down,” I said. “Cairo. Sector 9. Former Interlink node, now privatized. We’ve got a ghost in the system. Not ours.”

“That’s old Spire intel territory,” he said, eyes widening. “I thought they were disbanded.”

“Only the ones with names and pensions,” I muttered. “This smells like freelancer work. Big paycheck. Specific target.”

I didn’t need to guess who the target was. My eyes flicked to the corner of the monitor where a live feed of Conner’s room still ran. He hadn’t moved. Still asleep, still safe, for now. I hardened the firewall around his network again, doubling the nodes and adding three new cloaked monitors to intercept anything with even a whisper of that Cairo signature. Then I pulled up the feed from my drone and adjusted its range. If someone was coming for him, they wouldn’t get within ten clicks without alerting me now.

“I’ve rerouted everything to a secondary sandbox,” I told Nico. “You’ll work out of there until I say otherwise.”

“Do I ask what happens if they break through?”

“You don’t,” I said flatly, eyes still on Conner’s feed. “Because they won’t. Take notes, AI boy."

Nico let out a low whistle but started typing again, fingers flying over the keyboard like he suddenly had something to prove. Good. I didn’t need fear, I needed competence. I scanned the perimeter feeds one more time, cross-checking thermal and infrared. All quiet. For now. But quiet never lasted. I reached under the desk, fingers curling around the familiar weight of my sidearm. If they were probing defenses, it meant they were close to making a move. And when they did? I’d be ready. Because no one touches what’s mine, not without bleeding for it.