“She wouldn’t do that.”
“I know. Which is worse.”
I ran a hand through my hair. “Any chatter?”
“Erin’s laying low. Too low. Bishop's still active, though. Looks like he’s trying to clean house, redirect suspicion toward Jack, even Ava. There’s a press release scheduled for tomorrow.”
I clenched my jaw. “We need to pre-empt it.”
He nodded. “I’ve got timestamps, logs, everything prepped. Jack said he’ll record a video if we need it.”
I glanced at the wall clock. 7:03 AM. Too early to move, too late to wait.
Gray finally spoke. “She has to be ok... right?”
“Ya,” I said with a croak. “She has to be.”
“But?”
I met his eyes. “But every day we don’t hear from her; I start preparing for the worst.”
Ava emerged from the hallway, hoodie pulled tight, laptop under one arm and a file in the other.
“Judge Morris had three sealed complaints filed against him in the late ‘90s,” she said, voice scratchy. “All dismissed. Two different counties. One was from an intern who later recanted. The other two? Gone. Erased. And I just started digging.”
Gray’s eyes darkened. “This goes deeper than just Erin.”
“We knew that already,” I said. “Now we prove it.”
I tapped the phone again, testing the relay system, then stood and faced them both.
“From this point on, we assume every message is monitored. Every file flagged. Every move watched.”
The room fell silent.
Outside, the woods looked the same. Calm. Quiet.
But inside me, something had shifted.
Not just anger. Not just resolve.
It was the weight of knowing I’d already let too much slide. That I’d told myself for too long, I was doing the best I could inside a broken system.
But now we were outside it.
And we weren’t going back.
By late afternoon, the cabin had settled into its usual rhythm, tired bodies, sharp minds. Ava was sorting through transcripts with a pen clamped between her teeth. Jack paced as he dictated voice notes into his burner. Gray hadn’t looked away from his laptop in over two hours.
I had half a dozen tabs open across the cabin’s rigged comm setup, rerouting everything through Kane’s black site relays. It wasn’t pretty, but it was private. For now.
Then a sound cut through the quiet:Ping. Ping. Ping.
Gray’s head snapped up. “Shit...”
“What is it?” I asked, already crossing the room.
“Chatter. A lot of it.” He was already typing, pulling up overlapping encrypted threads. “Something just lit up the back channels, internal groups, MC boards, encrypted strings Kane flagged for us.”
