Chapter 24

Her Obsession.

What Goes Around.

It started with a ghost signal, an old comm line I’d used once, buried in a protocol no one but me should’ve remembered. The kind of line you rig when you’re planning to disappear forever. A dead channel. Untouched. Untraceable. Or so I thought. Someone pinged it from an encrypted node that hadn’t seen daylight in three years. I narrowed my eyes at the screen.

“Sloppy,” I muttered, fingers already moving.

Most people wouldn’t have caught it. Hell, even most professionals wouldn’t have thought twice. But I wasn’t most people. I didn’t just build systems. I built ghosts. I chased the signal through five international reroutes, Singapore to Zurich to Dubai to somewhere in the Balkans. Every stop wrapped in false credentials and junk IPs meant to throw off even the best trackers. Except I wasn’t tracking. I was unraveling. I peeled back the encryption like old paint, tunneled through the guts of a fake import-export firm in Cyprus. And there it was. Mirov Holdings Ltd. The name slammed into me like a punch to the sternum. My breath hitched, fingers frozen mid-keystroke. No. It couldn’t be coincidence. It never was. I forced myself to keep going, stripping back layers until the truth stared back at me in bright red headers.

Target: SPECTRA | Alias: The Ghost | Status: ACTIVE | TERMINATE ON SIGHT

Secondary target: Conner O’Neill. Reason: Association. Asset interference. Rising influence. Unknown leverage.