The paranoia spread like cancer through the penthouse. Every meal turned into a silent interrogation. Every kind word from Elara felt like a possible lie. Aria became withdrawn. Her cheerful spirit crumbled under the weight of tension she couldn't grasp. We were no longer a united front against an outside threat. We had become a fractured, suspicious group, slowly destroying ourselves from within.
I couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't watch Dante suffer, and I couldn't stand the unfair suspicion hanging over the kind old woman who had only shown me warmth. One evening, after another painfully tense dinner, I found Dante in the war room. He stared at the evidence board, as if answers would appear through sheer will.
"This is going to destroy us," I said, breaking the silence. "This suspicion. We need proof, Dante. One way or the other."
"My team has tried," he replied curtly, still not looking at me. "Her phone is clean. The calls go through a chain of encrypted proxies. It's a digital ghost."
"Then we need to track down that ghost," I answered, pulling up a chair to the main terminal. My mind started working on a new plan. "We've been trying to catch the signal mid-flight. That's the wrong way. We need to discover where the call originates before it gets scrambled. We need access to her phone."
"Planting a physical bug is too risky. She'd find it."
"I'm not talking about a physical bug," I said, my fingers already moving fast across the keyboard. "I'm referring to a phantom. A piece of code I can embed in the estate's Wi-Fi network. The next time her phone connects, the phantom will attach to her operating system. It won't be invasive; it will lie dormant until she makes her next call. When she dials, before her phone's encryption kicks in, the phantom will activate, copy the true, unscrambled number, and send it to us on a secure channel. It's sleek, invisible, and our only chance."
He finally turned to me, his gaze filled with new intensity. The haunted look was gone, replaced by a strategist. He recognized the logic and the cold efficiency of the plan. "Can you do it?"
"I can," I said, feeling confident deep inside.
I spent six hours coding the phantom. Dante stayed beside me the whole time, silently supporting me. He refilled my coffee and watched the lines of code move across the screen with quiet respect. When I finished, I uploaded the program into the household network. The trap was set.
Now, all we could do was wait.
The next forty-eight hours felt like the longest of my life. Elara's next call was expected the following evening. I tried to maintain a façade of normalcy. Aria, sensing a change in the atmosphere, engaged Elara in a conversation about old family recipes. Dante and I exchanged loaded glances over her head. We were co-conspirators in a scheme that could either clear a woman we loved or bring her downfall.
That night, we sat in the dim security hub, the wall of monitors providing our only light. We watched the kitchen feed. At exactly 9:15 PM, Elara pulled out her phone. She glanced around nervously and dialed.
On my terminal, a notification popped up. PHANTOM AWAKE.
A stream of data scrolled across the screen. My program was working, intercepting the number. A moment later, the true number appeared. It wasn't a burner phone. It was a landline. My program cross-referenced it with a city directory. The result flashed on the screen, and I stared, struggling to understand what I was seeing.
St. Jude's Hospice for Long-Term Care.
I looked at Dante. His face transformed into a pale mask of confusion. A hospice? Why was Elara secretly calling a hospice? Was she sick? Was she visiting someone? It made no sense. This wasn't the proof of betrayal we expected. It was a complete mystery.
"St. Jude's…" Dante whispered, his voice hoarse. He pushed away from the console and walked to the large window, looking out at the city lights as if seeing them for the first time.
"What is it?" I asked, joining him. "Do you know it?"
He didn't respond, his gaze lost in the past.
"It was my mother's favorite charity," he said, his voice a hollow echo of memory. "After she died, my father kept funding it. He set up a private wing there. A place for people needing… discreet, long-term care."
He finally turned to face me. The look in his eyes was more terrifying than rage. It was the look of a man staring into an open grave, seeing his own history crawling out.
"Valerius's note," he said, piecing it together with a sickening clarity. "'Payment E. Honorarium.' An honorarium isn't payment for a service. It's a gift. A donation."
He took a sharp breath, the terrible truth finally forming. "The money wasn't a payment to a killer. It was a donation to a hospice. It was the cost of a lifetime of silence for the one person who saw what really happened."
My heart stopped. "Dante… what are you saying?"
"I'm saying the 'E' doesn't stand for Elara," he said, his voice cracking under the weight of a nineteen-year-old lie. "It stands for 'Eyewitness.'"