He turned back to the suburban searches, mechanically deleting files as they appeared. A court transcript vanished. A DEA report disappeared. A scanned document about witness protection flickered and went dark.
Somewhere out there, someone was watching their research evaporate, wondering who was watching them.
Wyatt couldn’t think about that. Couldn’t afford to.
He had to protect his mother. Had to keep the team safe. Had to find a way out of this that didn’t end with everyone he cared about dead.
The Motel 8 searches continued in a separate window—patient, methodical, mapping every corner of the database. Whoever was there, they were thorough. Professional.
His father’s people, preparing for whatever came next.
Wyatt closed the laptop and sat in the darkness, the weight of it all pressing down on him like a physical thing.
He was running out of time.
And the walls were closing in from every side.
Across town,Kevin sat in the dark of his kitchen, the only light coming from his laptop screen.
He'd set up the way he always did when he wanted to stay invisible—VPN routed through three different servers, private browser, no cookies, no history. Old habits from a time he didn'ttalk about. Skills he'd picked up working undercover, back when staying hidden meant staying alive.
The Binding Chain.
He'd started with basic searches and gotten nowhere. Whatever this organization was, they didn't have a website or a Wikipedia page. But Kevin knew how to dig deeper than surface-level searches. He knew where the information lived when people didn't want it found.
An hour in, he started finding fragments.
A court transcript from a RICO case in Massachusetts—witness testimony redacted, but the phrase "binding chain" appeared twice in the margins. A DEA report from Rhode Island referencing an "organized crime signature" involving a broken chain symbol. A ten-year-old news article about a witness who'd agreed to testify against a regional syndicate, then recanted two days before trial.
Kevin bookmarked each source, saving copies to his local drive. The picture emerging was ugly. Multi-state operation. Deep roots. The kind of organization that didn't leave loose ends.
He found another article—a follow-up on the witness who'd recanted. Six months after the trial collapsed, she'd disappeared. Listed as a missing person for three years before the case went cold.
Kevin sat back, rubbing his eyes. This was bigger than he'd expected. Way bigger. If Bridget had been connected to these people, even peripherally...
He clicked on another saved file—a scanned document from an old federal database, some kind of internal memo about witness protection protocols for organized crime cases.
The file opened.
Then it closed.
Kevin frowned, clicking again. The document flickered on screen for half a second—long enough to glimpse redactedparagraphs and the phrase "disposal procedures"—before the window vanished.
His desktop was empty where the file had been.
Kevin's pulse spiked. He clicked on another saved document—a PDF of the court transcript he'd downloaded minutes ago.
Gone.
He watched, frozen, as a third file icon blinked once and disappeared from his screen.
Someone was deleting his research. In real time. While he watched.
Kevin yanked the ethernet cable from his laptop, killing the connection. His hands were trembling as he slammed the lid shut and sat in the sudden silence, heart hammering against his ribs.
Someone was watching.
Someone with access. Someone good enough to track him through a VPN, find his local files, and delete them remotely.