She grabbed the key to her sleek black Rolls Royce and left the compound shortly after Cyrus, the city's usual vibrant chaos was now a muted blur outside the tinted windows. She told her personal driver to drive after her with the security guards. She just wanted to be. She felt stiff from within.Her mind reeled from Theo's words, the chilling revelation of a stolen past.
Hospital surveillance. Sixteen years ago.
They were now heading into the city's industrial outskirts, a labyrinth of abandoned factories and decaying warehouses. The air grew heavy with the scent of stale concrete and distant pollution. The streetlights thinned, casting long, fractured shadows that danced like nervous ghosts. The cars pulled to a stop before a hulking, dilapidated structure, its windows boarded up, its brick façade crumbling. Juliet stepped out, followed by her two security men, Nelson and Marcus. Nelson, a burly man with a distinctive, rasping cough, took up position by the car. Marcus moved to flank the service door, his hand already on the butt of his sidearm. Theo Cross stood by the partially opened service door, his silhouette against the faint glow emanating from within. He wore a red t-shirt and a brown denim jeans making him look less like a corporate security chief and more like a ghost hunter. As she walked towards him even when it was past midnight,, she noticed the faint gleam of metal around his wrist. It was a bold piece, distinctive, a detail she filed away without conscious thought.
Inside the abandoned data center was an archive of the forgotten.Towering server racks stripped bare of their valuable components.The air was cold and thick with the smell of dust and disuse. Faint emergency lights, spaced far apart, cast long, distorted shadows that writhed with every movement. The only sound was the low and almost imperceptible hum of the ancient building itself.
Theo led her deeper into the labyrinth, past rows of dead machines. He moved with purpose, his flashlight beam cutting through the gloom. "He's been here," Theo murmured, gesturing to faint tracks in the dust. "He rigged this place up to play a show."
He stopped before a makeshift command center: a single folding table laden with a laptop, a portable monitor, and a tangle of wires connected to the building's ancient network. The screen glowed, flickering with lines of code. He gestured for her to look.
"I found the access point he used to hack GreyHelix's secure lab network, Juliet. It was a backdoor left open in the archived Aegis files, and he used it to plant a trigger. When I found the coordinates and the timer, I knew this was where he wanted us." Theo pulled up a timestamped video file. His fingers, usually so sure, seemed to tremble slightly as he navigated the interface.
The Almighty Theo! This was the first time Juliet had ever seen him display a hint of vulnerability.
The small monitor flickered to life, showing a grainy, monochrome view of a hospital hallway. The quality was poor, but the details were undeniable. A maternity ward. Theo zoomed in on a specific door, the room number slightly out of focus
Boom! He wasn't lying afterall.It was truly hers.
Juliet's breath hitched. She saw a nurse pass, then the door swung open, and a figure emerged. A figure in a doctor's coat, carrying a medical file. The face was deliberately angled away from the camera. But why? How? She had so many questions but there was noone to answer them.
The thought of it all made her stomach clench. But the figure's left wrist was clearly visible as it adjusted the file in its hand. On it, glinting even in the poor light, was a large, distinctively carved watch.Theo's finger hovered over the zoom button, inching closer, closer to the watch.
Just as the image filled the screen, freezing on the distinctive timepiece, the building plunged into absolute darkness. The hum of the ancient machinery died. The emergency lights vanished. The silence was deafening, suffocating.
Juliet gasped, a raw sound torn from her throat. "You set this up!" she accused, her voice tight with fury and terror.
A moment later, Theo's silhouette appeared against the faint green glow of a distant emergency exit sign, his form outlined by the dim light. His voice, low and grim, cutting through the oppressive darkness.
"Wrong. They set this…..They set you up. Sixteen years ago."
The implications were chilling. It was a long-game, meticulously planned trap, waiting for the perfect moment to spring. And they had just walked into it.
Chapter 14
The silence after the power cut was heavy, broken only by their ragged breathing. Then, the hacker's voice returned, distorted and amplified, echoing from unseen speakers that now seemed to surround them.
"You always were so predictable, Juliet. So desperate to control the narrative. To bury the inconvenient truths under layers of GreyHelix patents." The voice sneered, laced with a familiar, bitter contempt that sent a shiver down Juliet's spine. "But some secrets... some lives... refuse to stay buried."
A sudden, jarring CLANG! echoed from above, followed by the screech of metal on metal. The air conditioning units, long dead, suddenly roared to life with a blasting freezing air into the central chamber. Then they cut out, plunging the area back into humidity.
This was not just a recording; this was direct manipulation, an entire terror.
"He's trying to disorient us," Theo's voice cut through the darkness, already moving. "He's mapping this building's old schematics. Come on, we need to get to the basement. It's the only place with a robust enough power supply to hold his direct connection."
He pulled her through the pitch black, his hand firm on her arm, guiding her through the towering racks.
The air grew thicker, dustier the smell of damp concrete and something metallic perhaps rusting water pipes permeating the space.
They found the access hatch to the basement hidden beneath a dismantled server bank. Theo ripped it open, dropping into the deeper darkness below. "Jump!" he ordered, and Juliet, without hesitation, dropped, landing roughly beside him on cold concrete.
The basement was tighter, more claustrophobic. A single, bare bulb flickered erratically from the ceiling, casting dancing shadows. The hum of latent power was stronger here. Theo immediately went to work, hooking his laptop into a thick cable protruding from a rusted panel.
His screen flickered to life. "He wants us to find something here," Theo muttered, his fingers flying across the keyboard. "He's designed this whole path."
And then, she saw it. Left conspicuously on a defunct server rack, gleaming under the flickering light, was a thick, aged file folder.
It looked too clean, too deliberately placed.
"That's too obvious," Juliet whispered, but she reached for it anyway in an irresistible pull.
Inside, nestled amongst yellowed medical reports and what looked like a faded birth certificate, were baby photos. Not just one, but several. Sophia. Her daughter. Tiny, innocent, wrapped in a blanket with a distinct, star-and-moon patterned border. The photos were clear, vibrant, obviously professional. But the timestamps on the back were brutal: after the adoption papers had been signed.
They weren't from the hospital. Someone had tracked her baby. Someone had documented Sophia's early days.
A sudden sharp CLANG! echoed from the far end of the warehouse. A heavy, rusted metal door slammed shut, plunging that section into absolute darkness.
They were in a trap.