Reformed Villain’s Ex: Don’t Love Me, It’s Futile

Chapter 21 — Two Beeps and a Very Bad Idea

The tablet’s little red dot blinked like a mocking eye.

Two signals. One in Rowan’s pocket—safe, human, warm. The other somewhere else in the building—cold, mechanical, and apparently staffed by people who enjoy dramatic punctuation.

Oliver swore into his headset in a way that was half-comedic, half-priestly. “Project Sparrow,” he said, reading the label like it was a menu item he didn’t want to order. “It’s pinging from the annex vault. Basement level B2.”

Mason’s face lost its comic timing. “Basement. Figures. Where they put all the things they don’t want people to see.”

“Great,” I said. “Basements are where skeletons go to feel classy.”

Damien was already three steps ahead, his face a map of decisions. “We move now,” he said. “We don’t wait. If that’s a tracker in a decoy, we need to know who’s being framed.”

Elliot snapped his fingers and barked instructions like a man trying hard not to show his nerves. “Legal, you secure evidence custody. Oliver, pull the feed and isolate the signal. Mason, get me a list of cameras that cover the B2 corridor. Maya—stay with Rowan.”

She nodded once, face tight. “I’m not leaving him.”

I wanted to hug her for it and also smack her for involving herself, but the hug would be three seconds later and the smack would be rhetorical. We moved like a small army whose weapons were competence and complaints.

The annex basement smelled like files—old paper, cold laminate, and things people kept out of shame. The fluorescent lights hummed the sort of song that makes your knees ache if you listen too long. We took the stairs, not the elevator; because when you go deep into foundations, the elevator is usually where surprises get rehearsal time.

The security door leading to the vault accepted Damien’s legal badge like a reluctant cat. It clicked, and the air changed. The vault area was a small maze of labeled boxes, climate controls, and a guard who looked like he’d been told training day would be a laugh.

“Sir,” he said politely, which is a weirdly formal way to say *you are in trouble*.

“That’s Mr. Hartwell detained at reception,” Elliot said. “You have your orders.”

The guard paled as if he’d been asked to recite something in a language he’d only faked understanding earlier that morning. “I—yes. We were told to protect archives, not… this.”

Protect archives indeed. Someone had protected them with the kind of vigor usually reserved for people with a secret they’d paid a lot to keep.

Oliver’s tablet vibrated. “Signal is moving,” he said. “It’s static in the vault but ping strength is shifting toward… the records locker.”

We moved between rows like ghosts who’d learned to be loud at the precise moments drama required. Mason mouthed discipline to the camera feed team. Elliot set up a legal perimeter like someone folding a blanket over the truth and expecting it to stop shivering.

“Where would someone hide a device that broadcasts a child’s tracker?” I asked, more rhetorically than for real information.

Damien’s gaze skimmed the labels. “In a box labeled ‘Donor Relations’ maybe,” he said. “Or ‘Media Assets.’ They like ironic names.”

“Or under a nice, pious painting,” Mason added. “People keep the ugliest things under the prettiest names.”

Roast line one slipped out without permission: “They curate their conscience like an i********: feed—selective, staged, and paid for by someone else’s guilt.” The group chuckled despite the situation; humor, God bless it, is an emergency blanket.

We reached the locker Oliver’s map pointed to. It was a steel door with a code panel; someone had tried to be very serious about secrecy and had picked hardware that suggested guilt had its own hobbies.

Elliot placed a legal hold on the locker. “We do this clean. Lawyers need physical custody, not narrative custody.”

I hummed like a kettle. “Fine. But if the narrative smells like soup, I’m stirring it.”

Oliver started running diagnostics, fingers dancing across the screen. The pings synchronized like a wicked metronome.

“Signal’s emanating from inside the box,” he said. “There’s a transmitter. Low power, high encryption. Whoever set this up knew their way around secure comms.”

“Whoever they are, they deserve a monument of shame,” I said. “A statue where the plaque reads: *We would've gotten away with it if not for the inconvenient end of humanity.*”

The locker clicked open like the gate to a pasture of secrets. Inside: folders, neatly labeled, and—tucked behind an innocuous box of press releases—a small, child-sized tracking beacon connected to a battery pack and a SIM that looked very nervous.

“Project Sparrow,” Mason breathed. “It’s a decoy. They wanted a second ping that would pull us into a trap while they… did whatever it is they do.”

“Or,” Elliot countered, voice small and precise, “they wanted us to find it. A trail marked by confidence. The question is who planted it and why.”

I opened the folder on top. It was labeled *Community Outreach — Children Initiative.* Inside were donor names, wire transfers, and notes. A lot of notes. Names repeated. Some of them matched Hartwell’s roster; others were small, unexpected businesses with shell accounts.

Hartwell’s grin flashed in my memory, all philanthropy and poor taste. But as my finger traced a name that wasn’t supposed to be there—a local contractor, a woman’s name that had once been close to me—the room went very, very quiet.

“Maya,” I said. “Who is this?”

She looked away, jaw tightening. “It’s an alias,” she said. “A laundering line. He used local names to make transfers look small. A lot of them are red herrings.” Her voice had the taste of someone who’d known ledger lines like lullabies.

Oliver amplified a frame and pointed. “Look at the timestamp,” he said. “This entry was created an hour before the tracker was turned on.”

“Which suggests,” Elliot finished, “someone in the annex logged it as if to say ‘we did it.’ Or to cover their tracks.”

“You mean they made it *look* like the annex did it,” Mason said. “So the world blames the foundation, not the sponsor.”

I rubbed my temples. “We’ve been playing whack-a-mole with ghosts. The dolls keep changing hands.”

“Or someone wants the foundation to go down while they walk away,” Damon muttered. His voice was dark and efficient. “Who benefits when Hartwell topples?”

“Everyone with a book to sell,” I said. “And the people who call themselves ‘ethical investors’ before cocktails.”

Roast line two: “They confuse philanthropy with pressure washing—cleaning a reputation without fixing what’s rotten underneath.” The line got a few teeth-smiles. It felt satisfying and possibly legally dangerous.

Mason zipped through the rest of the folders. “There’s a sealed subfolder,” he said. “Marked ‘Sparrow Protocol.’”

“Which we are absolutely not opening without legal,” Elliot said.

“Which we will open,” I said.

Legal lessened the frown and opened their mouths to protest. Then the sirens came.

Every head snapped toward the corridor. Through the vents, through the thin glass, the building’s security system began to sing in a way that made your bones pre-announce panic. Someone upstairs had called a full code, probably because Hartwell’s arrest had made the front desk a very conversational place.

Oliver’s tablet lit up with feeds—external police closing in, internal doors locking. The Annex now had the attention of people who liked rules and uniforms, and nothing pleases a system of control more than paperwork.

“Police are on-site,” Elliot said. “We have units moving in. If anyone’s trying to remove evidence, they’ll find themselves surrounded.”

We all breathed a small, grateful inhale. For twenty glorious seconds, bureaucracy was our friend.

Then a new ping: Project Sparrow’s countdown had restarted. The tablet showed a timer—01:48 and counting.

“What happens when it hits zero?” Mason asked.

Oliver’s face was a map of code. “It triggers a broadcast,” he said. “If it’s wired to their servers, it drops the whole archive online. If it’s set to the network, it uploads footage to a cluster that… distributes fast. This thing is a detonator for content.”

“Content as weapon,” I said. “They weaponize the internet and call it market efficiency.”

“What’s more,” Oliver added, “there’s a remote kill switch. Someone can activate other beacons from anywhere. This is distributed theater.”

My hands went cold. “So even if we have custody of this unit, they could have copies.”

“Yes,” he said. “They always have copies. That’s the point.”

A thousand scenarios sprinted through my head like small, panicked animals. We were winning battle after battle, but the war had an army of backups. The enemy had loved redundancy the way other people love hobbies.

Elliot looked up at me with an expression that mixed guilt with strategy. “We need to decide: do we broadcast now and negate the threat, or do we control the release and force legal procedures that take time?”

“Time,” I said, “is what they bet on.”

“Then we don’t give them time,” Damien said.

“But we need to make sure the information is contextualized,” Elliot countered. “Release without context could hurt us.”

“Context is in the folder,” I said. “We send it to secure channels and the public simultaneously. Flood the system so there’s no single controllable file.”

Oliver’s hands flew. Mason keyed in the upload sequence. Elliot drafted the legal notice even as he argued for restraint.

The countdown ticked: 01:00… 00:45…

My phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

*Good luck,* it said. *We’re entertained.*

Under it, an attachment. A still frame from an angle we hadn’t seen before: the vault, but behind us—someone stood there in the reflection of the file cabinet, hands in pockets, silhouette casual.

I looked up.

The vault door that had stood open a minute ago was now closed.

And from the other side of the thick steel, a voice said, quiet as a threat and polite as a coup:

“Tick tock, Ava.”

The countdown reached ten seconds—and the vault’s steel began to hum with a secondary device we hadn’t noticed: a small panel glowing an eerie red, initiating a silent, irreversible ping to a cluster outside our jurisdiction.