Slowly.Intentionally.
The camera tilted, as if someone had reached up and adjusted it by hand.
Mateo went very still.“That feed shouldn’t be accessible.”
“It isn’t,” Kol said quietly.“Not from the outside.”
Luca felt the cold settle in his gut.“Meaning?”
“Meaning whoever did this didn’t breach us,” Kol replied.“They walked through.Used keys that already existed.”
The feed cut.
In its place, a single line of text bloomed on the screen.
You’re Looking In The Wrong Direction.
The room seemed to contract around them.
Mateo dragged a hand down his face.“They’re not threatening us.”
“No,” Kol agreed.“They’re correcting us.Letting us know they’re ahead.”
“And that they can reach us anywhere,” Luca said.“Whoever this prick is, he’s got an ego bigger than Texas.”
His mind raced, mapping access rings, redundancies, fail-safes.The Covenant had been built to survive external attack, but this wasn’t that.What had been done to protect them from an internal attack?
“Anything else?”he asked.
Kol hesitated, just long enough to matter.“They accessed another feed before the message dropped.A mobile signal.”
Mateo’s head snapped up.“Which one?”
Kol didn’t answer.
Luca didn’t need him to.“Mara,” he said.
Kol nodded.“They didn’t touch her.No breach attempt at all.But they brushed her signal.Light enough to avoid alarms but heavy enough to make a point.It also doubles down on this being an internal enemy.They knew what her mobile signal was, we changed it after we took her in, but they knew it.”
Luca felt heat slice through his chest.“Why the fuck would they—”
“To provoke you,” Mateo said.“To force a reaction.”
“And to show me I should have seen it sooner,” Kol added quietly.
Luca turned on him.“This isn’t on you.”
Kol didn’t argue, and it was clear that he did not agree.
“We lock everything down,” Mateo said.“No movement.”
“No,” Luca said immediately.
Both men looked at him.
“If we freeze, we give them control of the tempo,” Luca said.“They’re already inside our loop.”
Mateo’s jaw tightened.“You’re too close to this.”
