Lonely Castle

One Year Prior - Pt 2

Three months.

Three months of following shell companies through half a dozen countries.

Three months of tracing encrypted communications, private flights and offshore trusts.

Three months of watching the James Group bury every answer beneath another layer of bureaucracy.

The case had become their obsession. The steady rhythm of keyboards echoed around the apartment.

Bran rubbed tired eyes as another script finished running. “Nothing.”

Yuri glanced across from his workstation. “The Cayman subsidiaries?”

“Dead,” huffed Bran.

Yuri frowned. “The Swiss accounts?”

“Legitimate.” Alec groaned dramatically.

Yuri sighed. “I never thought I’d complain about rich people paying their taxes.”

“They’re not,” Bran replied. “They’re avoiding them legally, which is somehow even more irritating.”

Yuri closed another terminal window. “I’ve mapped every server Zara has legitimate access to.”

“And?”

“Nothing.”

“No hidden directories. Not a single forgotten user account. No archived backups?”

Alec leaned back, stretching his arms above his head. “I’ve stripped deleted files. Recovered snapshots. Pulled old certificates. I even rebuilt an email server from corrupted sectors.” He sighed.

“For the first time in my life…I’m officially out of ideas.”

Silence settled across the apartment.

Melodie stared at the largest whiteboard. Hundreds of names. Thousands of connections. Yet every trail eventually disappeared, not erased. Redirected.

Almost as though someone wanted investigators to waste their time following the obvious clues.

She frowned. “Show me.”

Three heads turned. Alec slid sideways without question, leaving his chair.

Melodie sat down. She didn’t speak again. Her fingers settled on the keyboard. The apartment fell almost unnaturally quiet.

Bran folded his arms. “She sees something.”

Alec glanced at Yuri. “She’s doing the thing.”

Bran looked between them. “What thing?”

Yuri smiled faintly. “She disappears.”

For several minutes, the only sound was the rapid rhythm of mechanical keys.

Unlike Alec, who attacked a keyboard with restless energy, Melodie barely seemed to move.

Every command was deliberate. Every search refined the last. She ignored the financial databases completely; the email archives and the shell companies they’d spent weeks untangling.

Instead, she opened something Alec had dismissed on the first day. System metadata.

Bran frowned. “Metadata?”

Alec leaned closer. “Why?”

Melodie didn’t answer. She was already comparing document headers from flight manifests spanning over twenty years. Different assistants, departments, executives and offices.

Yet every itinerary carried the same digital fingerprint. Not the same author.

The same issuing certificate.

Her eyes narrowed. “That’s odd.”

Yuri wheeled his chair beside her. “What?” She pointed at a hexadecimal string buried inside the document properties. “This certificate.”

Yuri frowned. “It shouldn’t exist.”

“It doesn’t.” She opened another terminal. “The James Group migrated to a new document management system roughly four years ago.”

Alec nodded. “I know. I checked.”

She smiled without looking away from the screen. “So then why are there documents created this morning still carrying a certificate retired four years ago?”

Nobody answered. Because they couldn’t. Melodie opened another terminal. A few more commands.

A forgotten authentication request appeared. Then another.

Bran watched over her shoulder. “What are you looking for?”

“The old server.”

Alec frowned. “They decommissioned it.”

“No…They wanted everyone to think they did.” She followed the certificate chain instead of the server addresses.

One hop. Two. Then three. Until—

A hidden hostname appeared. ARCHIVE-DM04

Nothing... Just silence.

Yuri blinked. “…How?”

Melodie shrugged. “People remember to lock up the house, check the doors, windows. But they forget to check the back gate.”

Alec stared at the screen. “But I searched every live server.”

“I know. You never search where something is.” She glanced at him with a small smile. “You search where it isn’t.”

Bran laughed quietly. “There she is, riddles and all.”

Pausing, she arched a brow. “What?”

“The woman who found the Demon Twins.”

Alec rolled his eyes. “She still won’t let us forget that.”

“You’d probably still be living in that warehouse if she hadn’t,” laughed Bran.

Alec scoffed. “We liked the warehouse.”

“There were rats. Big ones.” Exclaimed Bran.

“And they paid rent.” Snarked Alex.

Melodie shook her head, still typing. “I found you because your malware was too elegant.”

Alec grinned. “You noticed.” He said with an air of pride.

“I noticed nobody writes encryption that clean unless they want someone of equal standing to find them.”

Yuri smiled. “And she was.”

Bran chuckled. “I always wondered why you answered her message.”

Alec looked across at Melodie. “Because…” He shrugged. “…she was the first person who hacked us.”

Melodie looked offended. “I did not hack you.”

“You broke into our command server.” Replied Yuri.

“You left SSH open.”

Alecs’ eyes widened. “For eleven seconds.”

“You left it open.”

Yuri laughed. “You also rewrote our login banner.”

Melodie finally smiled. “It was grammatically incorrect.”

Bran shook his head. “I’ve known the three of you for years. And I still can’t tell whether that’s terrifying or adorable.”

“It’s both,” Alec replied.

The terminal chimed. Everyone stopped talking.

Melodie leaned forward. “There you are.” A forgotten directory slowly populated the screen. ARCHIVE_2004 Protected. Hidden. Never indexed, migrated. Nor deleted.

Simply… Forgotten. Melodie slid the keyboard towards Alec. “Your turn.”

He looked at her. “You’re giving it to me?”

“I found the door.” A smile spread across his face. “You kick it in”

His fingers were already moving before she finished speaking. Encryption keys scrolled past the screen. Security layers disappeared one by one.

Bran watched with quiet admiration. “They’re impossible.”

“No.” Yuri smiled. “They’re just showing off.”

The archive opened. There were thousands of untouched files. Travel manifests. Private medical referrals. Board correspondence. Redacted psychological evaluations. Invoices.

One file immediately caught Melodie’s attention. Dr Daniel Barrett. Consultant Psychiatrist. Harley Medical. The apartment fell silent.

“A psychiatrist?” Bran frowned. “Why him?”

Melodie didn’t answer. She opened the referral history. The same name appeared again. And again.

Different executives in different years. But always the same doctor. Always arranged through private travel and paid by shell companies.

Her heartbeat quickened. Without taking her eyes off the screen, she reached for a marker and walked to the whiteboard.

Beneath Dr Daniel Barrett, she wrote a single name. Gang-Seong.

Nobody spoke. Not because they agreed. But because they’d learnt over the years that Melodie never drew a line unless she could already see where it ended.

Outside, rain continued to fall against the windows.

Inside, four hackers stared at a single name. None of them realised they had just uncovered the first thread of a secret that had remained buried for more than twenty years.