Marked By The Syndicate

#3

{Hazel's P.O.V}

The stark red and blue lights of the police cruisers strobed rhythmically against the dull siding of our house.

I stood on the damp grass, wrapped in a coarse, scratchy yellow emergency blanket that an officer had draped over my shoulders twenty minutes ago.

A pair of paramedics emerged from the open front door, carrying a long, black zippered bag on a metal gurney.

My chest caved in, but no sound escaped my throat. I just stared, completely hollowed out, as they wheeled Dad’s body toward the back of the white van.

"Miss Hazel?" A tall detective with a tired face and a faded trench coat stepped into my line of sight, blocking the view of the van's doors slamming shut. He held a small notepad, his pen hovering over the paper.

"We’ve finished securing the perimeter," the detective said gently. "You can't stay here tonight. It's an active crime scene, and frankly, given the nature of the execution, it isn't safe. Do you have a friend or a relative you can call?"

I blinked slowly, looking right through him.

A relative? It had always just been Dad and me. There was no one else.

"No," I whispered.

The detective sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Alright. Look, we’re going to have an unmarked car stationed down the block. We'll be monitoring the street closely while the forensics team wraps up the preliminary report. I strongly suggest you grab an overnight bag, head to a hotel downtown, and lock the door. We’ll call you as soon as we have a lead."

He handed me a small paper card with his number scribbled on it.

"Go on inside and get a few clothes," he added softly, stepping aside. "The officers inside are just finishing up."

I turned and dragged my feet toward the front porch, each step feeling as if I were wading through wet cement.

The living room was stripped of its life now, save for two uniformed officers taking last-minute photos. The yellow evidence tape was strung across the doorway, but I ducked right under it, my boots heavy against the floorboards.

My eyes dropped to the middle of the threadbare rug. The dark pool of crimson was still there, drying into a shadowy stain. Sitting right at the edge of that blood, soaked and ruined, were the almond croissants from the bakery. The paper bag had torn open, leaving the pastries half-submerged in my father's blood.

A violent wave of nausea hit my throat, but I forced my gaze away, taking a ragged breath as I turned toward my bedroom to pack a bag.

Before I could reach my doorway, a forensic technician in a white hazmat suit stepped out from the hallway, holding a small silver tray. Sitting on top of the metal surface was a flash drive—one that definitely didn't belong in this house.

The technician was making his way toward the front door, clearly intent on logging it into the department's evidence locker.

"Stop," I said, my voice cutting sharply through the quiet room.

The technician paused, turning to look at me with an eyebrow raised behind his plastic visor. "Miss?"

"Where did you find that?" I asked, stepping closer to the tray, my gaze locked onto the metallic surface of the drive.

"It was found beneath the couch," the technician explained, holding the tray slightly higher. "It's evidence from the crime scene. We're taking it in to run a full sweep."

"Wait, that's mine," I said smoothly, forcing every ounce of panic out of my voice and replacing it with flat indifference. "I dropped it off right before I left for work."

The officer looked at me suspiciously, his eyes narrowing as he glanced between my face and the drive on his tray.

"I code," I told him, leaning into the lie with total composure. "It's for a client. I do freelance cybersecurity work, and that drive contains an encryption script I was working on last night."

He hesitated, studying my expression for a second. Finally, he gave a slow nod, picking up the drive and handing it to me. "Alright. Just make sure you keep track of your property."

"Thank you. I will."

I clutched the drive tightly in my palm, my knuckles turning white, and walked straight into my bedroom, locking the door behind me.

I threw my overnight bag onto the unmade bed, pulled out my laptop, and flipped open the screen. My hands were trembling slightly, but the moment I sat down, my instincts as a hacker completely took over.

I plugged the drive into the side port of my laptop.

Instantly, my screen went pitch black. Then, line after line of crimson text began cascading down the monitor at a dizzying speed.

[ALERT: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED]

[INITIALIZING 4096-BIT RSA DECRYPTION BLOCK]

[AUTODESTRUCT PROTOCOL ENGAGED: 03:00 MINUTES]

My hands flew over the mechanical keyboard without a moment's hesitation.

"Not today," I muttered under my breath, my fingers moving in a frantic, rhythmic blur.

The drive was protected by a self-modifying firewall—a dark-web encryption method designed to wipe the internal memory if a single incorrect key was entered.

The countdown timer on the screen ticked down mercilessly: 02:14... 02:13...

I opened a terminal window, bypassing the standard OS interface, and launched a custom brute-force script I’d written months ago.

I tapped directly into the laptop’s kernel to override the drive’s security handshake, forcing a local loopback to deceive the flash drive into thinking it was communicating with its home server.

[FIREWALL LAYER 1: BYPASSED]

[ENTER MASTER AUTHENTICATION CREDS]

A second wall immediately slammed up—a complex grid of shifting hex codes that randomized every three seconds. It was a labyrinth designed to fry any standard decoding software.

I spotted the static variable hiding behind the changing hex values, wrote a quick three-line patch, injected the payload, and slammed the enter key.

00:42...

00:41...

The fans on my laptop screamed, straining under the processing load. The screen flickered violently before washing over into a solid, soothing green.

[DECRYPTION SUCCESSFUL]

[MOUNTING SECURE DIRECTORY...]

The countdown vanished. A single, unlabelled folder appeared on my desktop.

My heart was hammering against my ribs so hard it felt like it would crack them open. I grabbed my mouse and double-clicked the folder.

It contained an unformatted text log with timestamped entries spanning back over fifteen years. I scrolled down past endless strings of encrypted bank routing numbers, offshore accounts, and shipping manifest coordinates.

Right at the very bottom of the document, highlighted in bold red font beside a fresh timestamp dated just three hours ago, were two words: The Vultures.

Before my mind could even process what that meant, my thoughts flashed back to the towering silhouette standing in the dark on my porch—the masked presence with the suffocating energy who had vanished into thin air the moment the police pulled up.

My stalker.

My stomach dropped into a sickening void as the pieces began to link together. What if he wasn't just watching me from afar?

What if he was connected to the murder—watching the house to see who came home, or waiting for the right moment to finish me off too?