CHAPTER 280: SILENT CHANNEL

The chair scraped against the floor before I even realized I was standing. The fork clattered against the plate, rice scattering like ash across the hardwood.

"Reynard?" Sienna’s voice barely registered.

I didn’t answer. I was already moving.

My coat was still warm from the walk home, but I yanked it on anyway and grabbed the mask from the table’s edge, fingers fumbling in quiet urgency. My phone was still open in my hand, the picture glaring back at me like it had teeth.

They were inside.

Or worse—they were close enough to make it feel that way.

I stepped into the hall and hit the elevator button three times in quick succession. The delay was unbearable. The silence behind me even worse. But I didn’t stop to explain. Not now.

As the elevator doors opened, I lifted the burner phone from my coat’s inner pocket.

I tapped Anthony’s number. The line buzzed once, twice—

"Unless you’re calling to tell me the world ended, you owe me hot tea and a foot rub," came the tired voice on the other end. "Actually, scratch the tea. Just the foot rub. I pulled a quad sparring with—"

"It’s me. Emergency. Get to my place. Fifteen minutes."

That shut him up.

"...I’m on my way, Boss," he said after half a beat. No questions. No jokes. Just pure shift in tone.

"I’ll explain when you’re here."

"Should I come armed?"

I hesitated.

"...Bring everything."

Click.

The line went dead just as the elevator touched the lobby.

I stepped out into a sea of polished tile, marble columns, and strategically placed potted trees. The front desk security officer—a stocky man with greying sideburns and two different earpieces—straightened at the sight of me.

"Mr. Vale," he said. "Something wrong?"

"Yes," I said flatly. "I want a full security escalation. Effective immediately. Double the posted staff. Double the surveillance sweep radius. Reinforce all residential entry points above floor forty."

He blinked. "We can—of course, yes, sir. I’ll notify Central Dispatch."

"And tell your cyber division I want the firewalls reviewed top to bottom. Third-party probes, penetration tests, anomaly sweeps—everything. All clearance logs from the last seventy-two hours go to me directly."

"Sir," he said, voice more serious now, "can you tell us what—"

"I don’t know yet. That’s the problem."

My eyes found the ceiling-mounted camera at the far corner of the room—the exact angle from which the photo had been taken. I moved toward it, slow and measured.

Same lens type. Same tilt.

Same timestamp window.

Someone had access to our security feed—or they’d copied it. But that made no sense. These systems were built in layers, the kind that weren’t even supposed to connect directly to the net. This building was run on a semi-isolated network.

If someone could get past all that...

I clenched my jaw.

"Run a trace on Camera L-42," I said. "I want every log scrubbed, every byte examined. Has the feed been touched externally? Internally? Anything unusual?"

The guard nodded, already paging someone on his comm.

I stood below the camera, watching the blinking light like it might blink differently just for me.

Was it a bluff?

Was the picture even real?

But no—the timestamp was exact. The angle matched. I had been there.

Which meant someone had eyes on the inside.

And not just on me.

My thoughts drifted back to the dinner table. To the four people seated under warm lights, laughing, arguing, living.

Sienna. Evelyn. Camille. Alexis.

That was what twisted my gut.

Not that someone was watching me.

But that they might be watching them.

I wasn’t afraid of dying. Not anymore. That had been burned out of me years ago. But the thought of someone bypassing our layers of protection, not to kill, not to steal—but to observe?

To study?

That was worse.

A predator who didn’t strike—but learned.

I paced back to the main desk just as the security team’s cyber chief—a thin, wired man with lenses over both eyes—appeared through the stairwell door.

"Sir Vale," he said breathlessly. "We’ve begun diagnostics. Preliminary sweep shows no abnormal log entries on Camera L-42 in the last thirty days. Power uptime, firmware integrity, internal memory—all intact."

"Are you telling me the camera wasn’t accessed?"

"I’m telling you," he said, pulling up a tablet and spinning it toward me, "that the footage you’re referring to doesn’t exist in our system. Not now. Not before. We’ve combed the archive across every rolling backup node. There’s no clip with that frame."

"But the image exists."

"Yes," he admitted. "Which is... concerning."

"That camera has a physical angle," I said slowly, pointing up. "It can’t tilt on its own."

"No, sir."

"Which means whoever took the image was physically present. Or someone accessed the raw lens feed before storage."

"That would require admin clearance and a physical decryptor key." He looked shaken. "There’s no indication anyone’s gotten that close."

"Check anyway."

He nodded. "I’ll send two men to inspect the camera casing. Micro-scratches, fingerprint residue, anything."

"Do it now. Lock it off from rotation. I want to know if it’s been tampered with by morning."

"Yes, sir."

I turned away and exhaled through my nose, slow and long.

I’d felt vulnerable before. Trapped, even. On Mars. In a courthouse. Without my System.

But this?

This was something else.

It was like someone had pulled up a chair to my life and decided to sit down uninvited.

I stared through the glass entrance doors, watching cars drift through the nearby checkpoint.

Anthony would be here soon. And when he was, I’d need to tell him everything. About the polaroids. The attic. The footprint. The girl’s stare. The message. The implications.

But until then, all I could do was stand there. Half-shadowed by sterile light. Surrounded by security. Surveillance. Layers of protection that suddenly felt like nothing more than cardboard walls in a storm.

"Sir."

The voice came from behind me—another guard. He looked nervous, holding a tablet of his own.

"We just finished a preliminary integrity check."

"And?"

"No breach. No external connections. No evidence the camera was accessed at all."

I narrowed my eyes.

"No sign of hacking?" I asked quietly.

He shook his head.

"Then how the hell did they get that image?"

He didn’t answer.

No one could.

And that was the part that scared me the most.