There was a fractional pause—the sound of systems reconfiguring, permissions shifting.Then Elias’s voice joined the line, calm and already engaged.
“You’re moving,” Elias said.Not a question.
“Yes,” Kol replied.“Florida is compromised.She's not safe there.”
No one argued.
“Status?”Elias asked.
“It was a direct assault as you saw,” Kol said.“Punitive.Loud.Designed to terrorize, not extract.They wanted her to know she’d been found.”
Eliza spoke before Kol could.“I think,” she said carefully, choosing each word, “they meant to scare me.”She paused.“The guns did.The violence did.But them?”She shook her head once.“No.Not really.”
A low sound of acknowledgment came through the line.
“How do you think they found you, Eliza?”Mara asked.
Eliza took a breath.“Not digitally.Not directly.If it had been data, Mateo would have seen it.I don’t think it was external at all.”She hesitated, fingers curling into the fabric of her sleeve.“I think it was me.”
Kol’s grip tightened on the steering wheel.“Explain.”
She took a breath before she continued, voice steadier now, as if saying it out loud made it more real.“I’ve been thinking about it since we left Florida.There are long stretches of time in my captivity that I can’t account for.They found us in a place no one knows about, and it happened really fast.”She swallowed.“The only explanation that fits is I have something implanted somewhere in my body.A microchip that I never knew was there.This is my fault.”
Kol didn’t say anything at first.He slowed the vehicle, scanning the road once before pulling cleanly onto the shoulder.Gravel crunched beneath the tires as he cut the engine.
“No,” he said quietly.Not denial.Resolve.
He turned toward her, eyes already searching her face, her neck, her arms as if he would spot it.His jaw flexed once.“If they put something in you without your knowledge, it comes out.Now.”
Eliza nodded.She trusted him.That was the terrifying part.
“Tell me what I need to do to find this fucking thing, Mateo,” Kol practically growled.
“You’re going to need the scanner I know you have in your golf box, and the Covenant med bag,” Mateo said as Kol swung around to grab the kit from the back seat, and Eliza took the scanner out of the glovebox.
Kol grabbed the scanner from Eliza, hands precise despite the storm under his skin.He ran it slowly along her body, watching the readout with a growing, ugly certainty.
There.
His breath went shallow.
“Just under the skin,” he muttered.“Upper left shoulder.Small.”Too small.Too invasive.He continued to run the scanner all over her, determined not to leave anything behind, he found another inside her right elbow.“Two in total.”
He grabbed what he needed from the kit, sterilized everything he needed, and placed her right arm on a sterile pad.He looked up at her.
“This is going to hurt,” he said, voice low.Controlled.“I won’t lie to you.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“And I am so fucking sorry I have to hurt you.”He whispered as he wiped her skin with iodine and a local anesthetic to numb the site.
“Kol,” Eliza said in a strong voice.“This is not your doing, and you are helping me to get this fucking thing out of my body, so do not apologize, and you had better not feel anything more than pissed at the person responsible.”
Kol worked fast.Clinical.Gentle where he could afford to be, brutal where he had to be.Eliza gasped when he cut, a sharp sound she tried to swallow back, and it tore through him like shrapnel.He hated every second of it—hated that her body flinched under his hands, hated that the pain was coming from him even as he saved her.
“I’m sorry and pissed,lvitsa,” he murmured, more to himself than to her.
When the chips finally came free, slick with blood and impossibly small, Kol crushed them between his fingers without thinking.The casings snapped with a sound that felt far too quiet for the violation it represented.Then threw them from the car.
