Jomiloju's POV
Pain doesn't always come with blood.
Sometimes, it comes in whispers. In the quiet tremble of your own name. In the slow realization that something foreign—something wrong—has been living inside you all along.
I couldn't sleep.
Even in Steve's arms, I felt it beneath my skin.
The chip. The tracker. The poison my father's enemies had buried inside my body when I was still a child with ribbons in her hair.
"Don't let me die a pawn," I whispered in the dark.
Steve kissed my forehead, voice like flint.
"You won't. You'll burn the board down."
Steve's POV
We drove through dawn, windows down, no music.
Only wind.
Only the weight of what we had to do.
The man I was taking her to wasn't on any map.
His name was Doctor Deji—an ex-military surgeon turned ghost after a war scandal in Maiduguri. Now, he patched up criminals, revolutionaries, and people like me.
People with sins too deep for stitches.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked as we neared the clinic.
Jomi didn't blink.
"I want it out."
Jomiloju's POV
The clinic was hidden in a scrapyard, masked by rusted car parts and the buzz of electric fences.
Inside, the lights were dim, the air reeked of antiseptic and secrets.
Deji looked at me the way doctors look at patients they're afraid to touch.
"You understand the risk?" he asked.
"I do."
He turned to Steve. "If the chip's fused to any nerve clusters, I could paralyze her. If it's near a vital artery—"
"Do it," I interrupted. "Just tell me it'll be gone."
He nodded. "Then strip down. Let's begin."
Steve's POV
I watched her remove her shirt slowly, revealing the pale curve of her spine, the soft strength of her arms.
She wasn't fragile.
She was fire wrapped in silk.
When she lay on the metal table, I held her hand until the sedative kicked in.
"Stay with me," she murmured.
"I'm not going anywhere."
And I meant it.
Even if it meant holding her through hell.
Jomiloju's POV (under sedation)
Voices echoed like thunder through water.
Hands on my skin. Cold metal. A slicing heat that didn't quite hurt—but burned in a way I couldn't name.
And then… something darker.
A memory.
Not mine. His.
A girl in a red dress, bleeding in a hallway. A boy screaming. A man laughing.
Steve's memory.
How was I seeing this?
Was it the sedative? Or was I already slipping somewhere deeper?
I saw Steve as a child.
Alone.
Abandoned.
I saw my father, too—his voice distant, sharp.
"One day, the sins of the father will beg forgiveness from the child."
Then everything turned white.
Steve's POV
The surgery lasted three hours.
Three.
Fucking.
Hours.
I paced the clinic like a man on the edge of something terrible.
Korede called once. I didn't pick up.
Deji finally emerged, his gloves soaked in red.
"She'll live."
My knees almost buckled.
"But the chip wasn't new," he added.
"What do you mean?"
He handed me a tray with the tiny silver piece, stained with blood.
"Someone tried to deactivate it… years ago."
My breath caught.
"Who?"
He shrugged. "Can't say. But whoever did it was inside her father's household."
My blood went cold.
That meant one of her own had sold her out—and tried to undo it later.
But why?
Jomiloju's POV
I woke with my wrist bandaged and Steve's voice calling my name over and over.
"Jomi. Rose. Look at me."
I blinked through the haze.
"Is it gone?"
He nodded.
"It's over."
But the look in his eyes said it wasn't.
Not really.
Because something else had been uncovered in that operating room.
A secret even deeper than the chip.
Steve's POV
I didn't tell her what Deji said.
Not yet.
Not when she was still groggy. Still bleeding. Still trusting me to be her calm in the storm.
But in my gut, I knew who it had to be.
One of the Dorotoye staff.
Maybe even someone in her immediate family.
And I would find them.
Because if there's one thing I learned from Koleosho…
It's that the past never dies quietly.
Korede's POV
When I opened the Dorotoye file archive, I wasn't surprised to find redacted pages.
But I was surprised to find one name listed in both Koleosho's target files and Steve's surgical logs.
Auntie Rachel.
Jomi's childhood nanny.
The woman who braided her hair and sang her to sleep.
She'd worked in the Dorotoye household for eighteen years.
And vanished six months before the kidnapping.
Gone.
Without a trace.
I called Steve immediately.
"I found your ghost."
Jomiloju's POV
Steve didn't come back to the hotel that night.
I didn't panic.
I didn't cry.
I simply waited—with my hand pressed to the fresh bandage over my wrist and a single thought whispering over and over in my mind:
"What else did they put inside me?"
It wasn't just the chip.
It was the lies.
The silence.
The betrayal that shaped my whole life.
I wasn't just someone's daughter anymore.
I was a weapon.
And now…
I wanted to know who built me.