Third floor:I make it up four steps before a guard materializes from nowhere and looks at me.
"Off limits," he says. Not unkindly.
"I was looking for the gym."
"Second floor. End of the hall."
There's no gym on the second floor. We both know this. He doesn't move. Neither do I.
Then I smile pleasantly and go back downstairs.
Three floors accessible. One locked study. Roof unknown. Guard rotation roughly every twenty minutes on the exterior, tighter on the third floor. Someone important is up there — either equipment or Luca himself.
I file it all and move to the kitchen.
The guest Wi-Fi connects instantly.
Too easily.
I pull up a browser and type in an address I use to test network security — a trick my hospital's IT director showed me twoyears ago after a data breach scare. The page loads halfway and stops dead.Access denied.Not a regular firewall error. A custom block, built specifically for someone like me.
I try three other routes. Same wall. Different face, same brick.
That son of a bitch built me a cage with Wi-Fi that doesn't work.
Not just the network. The whole system. Every camera angle. Every guard rotation. Every locked door — deliberate. Considered. The same way the panic button was considered. The same way the clothes in my size were considered.
He mapped me before I got here. Looked at the threat landscape, identified the most likely vulnerability, and found it in me with a burner phone and too much time.
I should be insulted.
I am. A little.
I'm also impressed, and I hate that more than the firewall. Fury I can work with. It's clean, useful, and mine. Whatever is underneath it — the thing with teeth that wakes me up at 3 a.m. — that's the problem.
I'm staring at the third access-denied message when I hear him.
Not footsteps. Luca moves too quietly for that. It's the shift in the air. The way the kitchen suddenly feels smaller, like he's eating the square footage just by existing in it.
"The IT director at Bellevue uses the same test."
I close the laptop. Turn around. "DNS redirect, VPN tunnel, proxy cascade, and a guest network spoof. All of it I learned from a seventeen-year-old patient who hacked his own hospital records to change his diet restrictions."
The room goes quiet.
Then Luca laughs.
Short.Surprised out of him, like he didn't see it coming and couldn't stop it fast enough. Low and genuine and completely unguarded for exactly two seconds before he shuts it down.
He looks almost annoyed at himself for it — like an involuntary reaction he's filing underweaknessand burying.
I stare at him.
That sound. That's what Luca Moretti sounds like when he isn't performing.
Something in my stomach turns over and doesn't turn back, and I am in so much trouble it isn't funny.
"None of them worked," he says. Whatever cracked a moment ago seals shut. He's flat again. Back in control.
