Three years of intelligence gathering, gone.
Selin is simply the latest loss in a pattern I’ve been circling for weeks. Three operations in different sectors. Three compromises tailored to their targets.
“Do we know who’s responsible?”
Resh shakes his head.
“Only that they’re pulling information from cells that should be sealed off from each other. No compromised passwords. No careless courier. Whoever this is understands the architecture well enough to move through it without triggering a single safeguard.”
“Who benefits?”
Resh leans back from the display.
“If your intelligence arm keeps taking losses, your value to House Sethrak drops.” He chooses his next words carefully. “A second son without a network is a second son without leverage.”
The list of people who benefit from my weakness is considerably longer than the list of people I trust.
We both understand this family well enough to map the beneficiaries without drawing them on the display. Kazren, who’d consolidate power the moment my network goes dark. My father, who measures his sons by their usefulness and has never hesitated to discard the one that falls short. Or someone outside the bloodline entirely, a faction within the House positioning itself for whatever comes next.
“This isn’t an outsider.” My finger traces the connections between the red nodes. “Whoever is doing this has had access to the inside, either now or before.”
“Which narrows the field.”
“And makes every accusation dangerous.” I meet Resh’s gaze. “If I’m wrong, I declare war against an ally within the House. If I’m right, I show my cards before I have the proof to survive the consequences. Either way, I don’t get to make accusations without evidence that can’t be dismissed.”
The muscle in Resh’s jaw works, the only breach in his composure. He wants a target. He wants to move against whoever killed Selin and burned our operations and left us blind in three sectors.
“So we find the proof,” he says.
Any killing requires absolute proof.
“Quietly. No one outside this room hears a word of it until we have proof. Short of killing every suspect in the House, and I can think of several I’d happily start with, we need to trace the lateral access back to its source.”
I force the loss down where it belongs.
“We find who’s using the network. We find who they’re passing information to. Then we build a case that survives scrutiny from anyone who tries to bury it.”
“How fast?”
“Slower than I’d like.” The timeline opens on the display, and I study the shrinking gaps between incidents. “The first compromise was months ago. The second came weeks later. Selin was killed nine days ago.”
My finger traces the line connecting the three points.
“The first breach was careful. The second was faster. By the time they reached Selin, they weren’t testing anymore. They already knew it worked.”
The old ache stirs again, keen enough that I have to force my focus back to the display.
“The first two operatives survived. Their covers were burned and their intelligence streams were lost, but whoever was behind this left them breathing. Selin got a blade through the throat. That changes things.”
I meet Resh’s gaze. “Someone stealing information wants access. Someone willing to kill for it is protecting something. Either they’re preparing for a larger move, or Selin got close enough to the truth that they couldn’t risk leaving her alive.”
The dead are owed action, not mourning. The weight of it sits compressed in my chest. Beneath my own adrenaline, the residual trace of the human female from two floors above registers along my jaw. Cheap tea and clean skin, a persistent thread my biology refuses to discard.
She carved through eight layers of our encryption on borrowed bandwidth. In minutes, she demonstrated exactly the capability I need to trace whatever is bleeding my network from the inside.
The breach itself was loud. Exactly the kind of noise a rival house makes when it throws an ambitious operative at our walls and loses him. Anyone reviewing the logs afterward would see the same thing: a failed intrusion out of the Splits, caught and contained before any real damage was done. We log a dozen attempts like that every quarter.
Whoever has been bleeding my network doesn’t work that way.
