No, Reagan's not paranoid — she really did notice the lamp was off by five degrees. That's not crazy. That's trauma with built-in measurement tools.
This chapter includes: Onee thoroughly violated apartment, two duffel bags full of tech nightmares, and a duo of emotionally stunted geniuses with about zero social skills solving problems the only way they know how — with code, finesse, and casual violence.
Warning: Contains motion-triggered traps, thermal paranoia, and absolutely no patience for stalker exes.
She knew it the second she walked in. The lamp was off. Just slightly. Four degrees, maybe five.
The rug had shifted. Six centimeters forward. The mug by the sink—moved. One centimeter to the right. Her brain didn't question it. It registered everything at once. Someone had been here. Her stomach flipped. She stepped back, closed the door slowly, locked it.
Her hands were shaking. She opened the bookshelf. The hair she'd hidden behind the spine was gone. Router panel slightly lifted. Not by accident. Her throat tightened. Her chest burned. She grabbed her phone, heart hammering.
Called Skylar. It rang once. Twice. Then—"Reagan?" She couldn't breathe. "It's—They were here. My lamp's moved. The hair. The fucking hair is gone—"
"Okay," Skylar cut in. "Listen to me. Don't touch anything. Turn off your phone. Sit near the door but don't open it. I'm coming."
Reagan dropped the phone. Sank to the floor. She stared at the ceiling for what felt like an hour. Her body didn't stop trembling. Her skin felt too tight. Her chest couldn't open. Every sound in the building felt like footsteps outside her door.
She didn't even hear them knock. The door just opened, fast but silent. Skylar came in first, hoodie half zipped, eyes scanning everything. Taz followed behind her, calm and unreadable, a duffel over each shoulder. They moved like they'd rehearsed it. No questions. No hesitation. They dropped the bags on the floor and unzipped them. Laptops. Motion sensors. Drones. Fiber-optic scopes. Heat scanners. Trip lasers.
Skylar was already sweeping the room with a signal detector. Taz knelt by the wall, pulled out a drill. Reagan stared at them. No one said anything for a moment. Then Skylar looked at her. "You okay?" Reagan couldn't answer. Her voice was gone. She just nodded. Barely.
Taz didn't look up. "Three bugs. One in the smoke alarm. One in the wall outlet. One under your coffee table."
Reagan blinked. "Under—how the hell—"
"They were in here more than once," Skylar said. "They knew your patterns. Your timing. They didn't rush."
Reagan felt her knees give and sat down hard. "I don't even—how long has this been happening?" Skylar looked at Taz.
He tapped a few keys on his laptop. "Two weeks. Maybe three." Reagan's vision blurred. "They listened to me." Taz didn't speak. He just pulled another device from the bag. A flat panel with micro-emitters. He started mounting it to the wall. Skylar laid out a strip of sensors like she was setting a table. "We'll rebuild it," she said. "From scratch. Thermal recognition. EMF shielding. Adaptive gait analysis. It'll know you by your walk, your heartbeat, your damn blood sugar if we want it to." Taz added, without looking up, "We'll mirror-feed fake data to the old receivers. Let them think they still have access." Skylar nodded. "Then when they show up to check—" Taz: "We trap them." Reagan sat frozen. Two duffel bags had turned her apartment into a command center. She hadn't asked for any of this. But they were already building her a warzone.
The table was covered in wires, processors, thermal sensors, and four different types of custom mounts. Skylar was crouched under Reagan's window, connecting the heat signature scanner to the neural interface, her sleeves pushed up, a smudge of dust on her cheek. Taz knelt beside the router, hands steady, movements exact. He wasn't speaking. He rarely did while calibrating. Reagan stood in the doorway, barefoot and silent, arms crossed but mostly for show. She didn't understand half of what they were doing — some mix of engineering, black-market tech, and whatever else Taz had pulled from god-knows-where — but she understood this: They were building her a fortress. Skylar crawled out from under the window and tapped her laptop. "Thermal sensors are live. We're synced to the adaptive core. That means it knows when you're cold, when you're sweating, when your heart rate spikes." She looked up. "It won't stop anyone from coming in, but it'll know who it is — and how scared you are when they do."
Reagan blinked. "That's both comforting and deeply fucked up."
Skylar smirked. "Yeah." Taz adjusted the motion grid in the hallway. "Footfall recognition active. It's mapping the pattern of your walk. Length. Weight distribution. Ankle flex." He looked up, briefly. "If someone else tries to imitate it, the system locks down." Reagan stared at him. "I have no idea what you just said, but I trust you." He nodded once and returned to his work. Skylar hooked a small device to the power outlet — a signal monitor. "This little thing? Picks up on electromagnetic anomalies. If someone tries to plant another bug or transmitter, we'll know before they finish syncing it."
Reagan exhaled slowly. For the first time since she walked into her apartment and felt that cold wrongness in the air, she could breathe. Almost. Then came the knock. Not urgent. Not aggressive. Just one-knuckle, deliberate. Skylar looked up. "That him?"
Reagan didn't answer. She didn't have to. She opened the door and Rocco stepped in, tall and composed in a black coat, eyes scanning the room before they landed on the mess of gear sprawled across the table.
His gaze moved to Reagan. "You alright?" She nodded, but not convincingly.
Skylar stood. "She was bugged. Three devices. One in the smoke alarm, one under the coffee table, and one in the wall outlet. Whoever did it knew her layout. Her patterns. They weren't in a rush." Taz didn't look up. "They were good."
Rocco's jaw clenched. Just a fraction. "How long?"
Taz tapped a key on his laptop. "Two to three weeks. Maybe longer."
That silence that followed felt like pressure building in a sealed room. Rocco walked slowly to the table. Picked up one of the bugs in a plastic evidence bag. Turned it in his fingers. "This was in your space."
Reagan said nothing. There was nothing left to say. He turned to Skylar. "Will it hold?"
Skylar tilted her head, insulted. "It'll hold better than a fucking bank vault."
Rocco looked at her. "Then make it bite too. I want whoever comes near this place to leave with broken ribs."
Taz finally glanced up. "Already done." Rocco stepped closer to Reagan. His voice dropped. "Next time you notice something off, call me first." She gave him a long, tired look. "You'd have burned the building down." He didn't deny it. Skylar sat back on the couch and pulled out her interface again. "Three more calibrations and we're done. The apartment won't just be safe. It'll learn how to protect her." Taz, without looking away from the screen, added: "And trap anyone stupid enough to try again."
Rocco watched them work for a few seconds longer. Then he sat down beside Reagan, not touching her, just anchoring her by being still. And for the first time in weeks, she didn't feel watched. She felt guarded.
The room was dark, lit only by the blue glow of Skylar's laptop and the soft red pulse of the motion grid active on the hallway wall.
Reagan stood barefoot against the wall, arms crossed, watching like she wasn't sure if she was nervous or impressed. Taz was moving across the apartment like a stranger — posture loose, gait slightly uneven, simulating an intruder. He didn't say anything as he stepped over the sensor threshold. The system reacted instantly. A soft chime. A blink. Then silence. Skylar's voice was calm. "Analyzing." The hallway lights flickered once. The temperature dropped by two degrees.
Then a subtle hiss — pressure shifting beneath the floorboards. A low mechanical click came from the far wall.
Reagan's eyes tracked it. "Is that—" "A kinetic anchor," Skylar said without looking up. "Triggered only if the system doesn't recognize the person walking through." Taz took another step. A sharp pop sounded beneath his foot. Nothing visible happened. Then a steel rod snapped out of the wall beside his ankle — fast. Too fast for most people to dodge. It halted just short of impact.
"Safety threshold engaged," Skylar said. "Would've shattered his fibula if it hit." Taz nodded slightly. "Good timing. Reaction window's under a second." He moved again, this time more confidently, as if testing boundaries. The lights didn't flicker. No clicks. No hiss. The system recognized him.
Skylar tapped a few keys. "Now I'll spoof a false profile. Make the system think he's someone else again." Taz took two steps. The moment his foot landed on the rug, a blast of compressed air shot up from the baseboard — hard enough to throw a man off balance. Reagan jumped. "Jesus—" Skylar didn't flinch. "That one's non-lethal. But it buys you three seconds." Taz adjusted his stance. "Add a tripwire sequence after. If they fall, break a wrist on the way down." "Already in," Skylar muttered. "Also rigged to alert us if someone fakes body heat or breath patterns." Reagan blinked. "You're expecting someone to fake my breathing?" "You'd be surprised," Taz said. He stepped back toward the couch and sat, calm as ever. "System's aggressive. But smart." Skylar closed the laptop lid. "It's done. You're safe now." Reagan looked at the hallway, at the wall that had tried to break Taz's leg, at the place where compressed air had almost dropped him. Then she looked at the two of them. "This place is a damn trap house." Taz glanced at her. "That's the point."
The feed died. No warning. No glitch. Just static. Then black. Travis stared at the screen like it had betrayed him. He tried the backup relay. Nothing. The third. Dead. Every camera, every mic, every access point—gone.
"No," he muttered.
His fingers moved faster, tapping out override commands, scraping logs, tracing shadows of a signal that no longer existed. The interface didn't even blink.
"No, no, no—"
He slammed the side of the laptop with his fist. The screen flickered, but the blackout held. His network had been sliced clean. Not jammed. Not disrupted. Erased. Someone had reached into his system and amputated it.
She hadn't done this. Reagan didn't even know how to check for a bug. She wasn't capable of this kind of countermeasure.
But someone else was.
Skylar.
That smug little freak in the hoodie. Always close. Always watching. Always interfering.
He clenched his jaw so tight his ears rang. She hadn't just blocked him. She'd humiliated him. Took what was his, deleted his access, rewrote the rules of the game.
He'd been generous. Patient. Let her hover on the sidelines. But now she'd made herself part of the story.
He opened his burner phone. Typed two words.
You shouldn't have touched my things.
Sent. He didn't expect a reply. He got a text back anyway.
He stared at the message. No punctuation. No hesitation. Just defiance.
Your move, asshole.
The words burned. Not because they threatened him. But because they mocked him. She didn't flinch. She didn't fold. She laughed. He felt it in his chest — the tight, acidic twist of something turning inside him.
She wasn't scared. She should be scared. He'd taken everything from Reagan — her voice, her body, her goddamn reality — and Skylar thought she was immune?
He stood slowly, the phone still in his hand. Moved to the window. Looked across the street. He couldn't see her. But he could feel her. Like static under his skin.
She wanted a move?
She wanted to poke the animal and smile?
Fine. No more warnings.
His smile faded as he closed the laptop. Picked up the second one. Plugged in a new drive. The feed was gone. The apartment was locked down. But Skylar?
She was fair game.. That crazy bitch is gonna pay