The moment her comm went dead, something inside me broke — clean, sharp, irreversible.
I’d been tracking her signal from the Ghost Circuit for forty-seven minutes, pulse stable, vitals fluctuating the way they always did when she was racing. But then came the spike — heart rate off the charts, then flatlined into static. A single red notification blinked on my screen. Signal lost.
For a man like me, that meant one thing.
They’d found her.
“Patch into city surveillance,” I barked.
My assistant froze mid-sentence. “Sir, the area she’s in— that’s off-grid. There’s no—”
“Then make one.”
My hand slammed the console harder than I meant to. The room fell silent except for the hum of Cross Tech’s servers spinning into overdrive. On the glass wall, hundreds of screens burst into life — heat
