Her Obsession. Chapter 57

**Conner**

By noon the house felt wrong, too bright, too quiet, like it was pretending nothing had happened. I planted myself in the surveillance room anyway, because stillness made me dangerous. Liam paced. Matteo leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching me the way you watch a fuse. Nico sat in his chair like it was a cockpit, wires snaking everywhere, six monitors stacked with code, maps, dead ends.

“We know who they work for,” Liam said, for the tenth time. “So we find Yakov.”

“Find me a place to start,” I said. “A rumor. A shell company. I don’t care if it’s a myth. I’ll build a map out of smoke if I have to.”

Nico blew out a breath. “Yakov’s a ghost’s ghost, boss. The compound probably relocates every year. Paperwork’s fabricated three layers deep. If he sneezes, it looks like weather.”

“Then stop looking for him,” Matteo said, calm in that lethal way he had. “Look for them.”

“We are,” Nico muttered. He tapped a few keys, and one screen filled with an old grid. “Her safe house network. The one Ghost gave us access to.”

“Gave you access to,” Liam corrected. “I’m pretty sure she’d put a bullet in me if I touched a keyboard.”

“Good instincts,” Nico said without looking up.

He dove back into the tangle she’d left behind: ghost networks, decoy tunnels, a sandbox trap she’d built and then taught him to build. Most of it was clean, she’d scrubbed after she cut our access, like she always did. But she’d also taught him how to sweep the edges, the parts most people forget.

“There,” he murmured. “See that artifact? Latency spike on a dead camera. Looks like nothing. It isn’t.”

I stepped closer. The graph was a sawtooth of tiny deviations.

“What is it?” Matteo asked.

“A heartbeat,” Nico said. “Not hers, hers is too clean. Someone else touched this line after she severed us. Tried to sniff her trail and bounced off the sandbox. The only reason I can see it is because of something she drilled into me last week, always check the noise floor.”

“Plain English,” Liam said.

“Someone hunted her. And failed. But they brushed us on the way out.”

I felt my jaw tighten. “Mirov’s leftovers?”

“Could be. Could be Yakov. Could be a contractor with more guts than sense.” Nico’s fingers moved. “Following the smear… okay. It hopped a proxy in Prague, then a dead node in Warsaw, then, hold on, bounced through a municipal uplink in… northern Romania?” He squinted. “No, that’s just the pivot. After that it goes dark.”

“Romania,” Matteo said, eyes narrowing. “You’re thinking what I’m thinking?”

“I’m thinking it’s a corridor used by certain Eastern crews who like the Carpathians for… privacy.” Nico rolled his chair back. “It’s not a location. But it’s a vector. And it lines up with three rumored compounds from old chatter.”

“Old doesn’t help me,” I said.

“It helps you not to run blind,” he shot back. “Give me time, I can cross-reference leasing records, rural grid draws, fuel deliveries...”

“We don’t have time,” I said, harsher than I meant. The note in my pocket felt like a shard of glass.

Silence stretched. Liam stopped pacing and dropped into a chair, elbows on his knees.

“Boss,” he said softly. “She left the way she did to keep us alive. That’s her logic. We can be smart without being slow.”

“Smart and slow look the same from where I’m standing,” I said.

Matteo’s phone buzzed.

He glanced at the screen. Unknown number.

“Don’t,” Nico said immediately. “Could be a trace.”

Matteo hit accept and put it on speaker. “Matteo.”

A woman’s voice came through, cool and unhurried, almost bored. No accent he could place. “Tell your boys if they like their heads attached to their bodies, they stop searching. Now.”

My eyes met Matteo’s. He stared back, level.

“Who is this?” he asked.

“Someone who knows how to keep you breathing,” the woman said. “Relay the message, soldier boy.”

“You threatening us?” Liam asked, leaning toward the mic.

“I’m telling you facts,” she replied. “Two ghosts went home. That’s all you need to know. You go digging where you’re not invited, you don’t just die. You make them die with you.”

My hand curled into a fist on the table. “Put me on with Sage.”

A pause. Then, flatly, “No.”

“Then tell Yakov...”

“I don’t tell Yakov anything,” she said, and there was the faintest thread of contempt under the calm. “And neither do you. Sit tight. Forty-eight hours. If they’re alive, they’ll walk out. If they’re not, no amount of noise you make will matter.”

“Who are you?” Matteo asked, and I could hear the shift in his tone, recognition crawling around the edges, like he’d heard this cadence once in a different life.

“Someone doing you a favor. It’s the only one you’ll get.” A click, then: “Oh, and tell your hacker to stop grinning. He only found that line because she taught him how to look for it. You’re welcome.”

The call went dead.

Nico’s smile faded. “Okay, that was… unnerving.”

“Forty-eight hours?” Liam scoffed. “I can’t sit on my hands that long.”

“We’re not sitting,” I said.

Matteo slid the phone into his pocket, eyes on me. “If that was a trap, it was a good one.”

“It wasn’t a trap,” I said. I didn’t know why I believed that, but I did. The voice had the steel of someone used to standing next to monsters and not flinching. “It was a warning.”

“From who?” Nico asked.

“Doesn’t matter, clearly someone connected to the girls enough to care,” I said. “We take the forty-eight. But we don’t go idle.”

Nico nodded slowly. “Quiet work. No pings that cross borders, no crawlers that touch the wrong backbone. We stay local, we build the board.”

“Build it,” I said. “Find me the vector again. Find me everything that eats power within two hundred kilometers of those mountains that doesn’t report to anyone. Find me trucks that shouldn’t be there and contractors that don’t exist.”

Liam stood. “And us?”

“We drill,” I said. “We change rotations. We prep packs. If forty-eight turns into forty-seven and an explosion in the distance, we move.”

Matteo’s lips twitched, something like approval. “And if it’s a bluff? If they’re bleeding out right now?”

I looked at the wall of screens and saw nothing but snow.

“Then we move sooner,” I said. “And we don’t stop.”

I reached into my pocket and touched the paper again. Two words. I’m sorry. Forty-eight hours felt like a lifetime. Or a countdown. Either way, the moment it hit zero, I was going to war.