Page 136 of Scaled Daddy's Secret Heir
They think I’m coming at them like a soldier.
That’s their mistake.
This isn’t a battlefield.
It’s a hunt.
And I’ve been patient for years.
Now I don’t have to be.
I start with the last confirmed ping off the handler’s escort unit. Not the decoy signals—they always build those in—but the glitch they never fixed in their data rotator. A time signature that’s half a second out of sync. It’s the kind of flaw only someone who built the system from the inside would recognize.
That someone is me.
Senta watches me work without asking questions. She knows what this is. Not mission work. Not vengeance.
Reclamation.
The handler took Leah.
Took Clancy.
Tookus.
So I take back the silence. The power. The rules.
By the time we trace the signal chain through three black-market relays and a ghost port off the Eshkar Strip, I’m already arming my next move.
“We have a location?” Senta asks, pulling on her vest.
I nod. “Abatis Basin. Remote outpost. No public manifests.”
“Who’s watching it?”
I load the last clip into my sidearm. “No one now.”
She grins. “Let’s go be ghosts.”
The transport we take isn’t tracked. I pay for it with a chip carved out of an old black-level clearance file. The currency’s data. History. Leverage. Out here, it spends better than gold.
We reach the basin at dusk.
Heat shimmers off the cracked stone ground. The air tastes like copper and burned oil. There’s no official signal coming out of the comm tower, but that just tells me it’s operational. No outpost runs cold unless they’re hiding something.
I go in alone.
Senta stays in the outer ring, surveillance scope active, rifle balanced on her shoulder.
“Whistle if you die,” she murmurs over comms.
“Whistle twice if I don’t.”
The compound isn’t large. Half-buried prefab structures, camouflaged with faux erosion patterns. But I know the silhouette.
It’s a Coalition holdover—a site once used for “reeducation transfers.” They thought no one remembered. That no onesurvived.
They were wrong.
