Chapter 114

**Calum POV**

“You said, you had this,” Torin utters with a critical tone. “Why’s it taking so long?”
“It won’t go any faster with you breathing down my neck,” I retort.
I stare at the flickering lines of code on my screen, each one a gateway into the private network of a foreign air traffic control system. I’m deep in the heart of the system now, masquerading as a benign admin process—just another routine security check running on autopilot. My fingers dance across the keys as I send out my payload, designed to latch onto the communications link between the plane’s transponder and the radar systems.
The connection flickers to life. I slap a triumphant hand on the surface of the table.
A thin green line stretches across my screen, a perfect data stream feeding me the altitude, speed, and coordinates of the ghost aircraft. cruising at 38,000 feet over the Aegean. I sit back, exhaling, watching the telemetry data refresh in real-time. The packet sniffers I deployed along the way are invisible, siphoning off the information and relaying it back to my terminal.
“Got them,” I inform. “And they’re close to reaching the Turkish peninsula.”
I catch Torin’s reflection in one of the monitors as he relieves himself with a long breath that makes him visibly deflate. Anna, next to him, catches me glancing at him and she shoots me a wink and I immediately look away with a deliberately disgusted face because I don’t know how to make it even more clear.
Everything is smooth. Seamless.
Until it isn’t.
I perk up, lifting myself straight and that alarms Torin.
“What?” he says quickly.
The green line glitches. Just for a second. Barely noticeable. I frown, my eyes narrowing as I dive into the network traffic logs. Something isn’t right. There’s an anomaly—a tiny signature buried deep within the data packets. A secondary signal. My pulse quickens, fingers flying over the keys, decrypting the logs with a new level of urgency.
“Someone else is in the system.”
Torin waves me off like I’m a kid crying wolf. “It’s likely another layer of their security protocol to monitor the craft’s movements. They are just safeguarding their investment. Each girl in that plan is worth a quarter million.”
“And yet Hadassah is worth more than all of them combined,” Anna says as she struts closer to stand behind my chair and leans over to fold her arms on the head. “Let’s hope Gojak doesn’t betray us and hands her to Santos himself or worse…”
She takes her hand and drags it through my hair and I whip my head away.
“Never touch me.”
The demand is met with an irksome giggle.
“Stop playing with Hadassah’s toy,” Torin orders before he makes his start for the door and flags over the stone-faced guard, beckoning him to follow.
“I’ll remain here,” he suggests. “I’ll oversee his progress and notify you of any changes.”
Torin concedes a nod and leaves with Anna in tow.
I focus back on this intrusion. Torin insists that it’s likely nothing major, but my intuition has rarely led me astray when it comes to two things—hacks and Hadassah. Although when it comes to her, my judgment is askew. However, this third-party watch feels strange, because if it was their clientele or the enforcers’ tech team—they would’ve already been in the system already. But they weren’t. They appeared around the same time I did.
I cast a careful glance back at the guard.
“Ain’t nothing that concerns you is back here.”
My eyes nearly fall out of their sockets from how fast they flit back in front of me.
An idea sprouts in my mind, and I cackle inwardly at the audacity. Without him knowing what I’m doing—I mess with the interphase and I make it like I just lost the aircraft’s signal.
“Oh shit!” I exclaim as I slant closer to the monitors, looking frantically at the multitude, trying to fake figure out what happened.
The stoic sentry breaks away from his post as he stomps towards me, making the room shake. Silent yet lethal as he slams one hand on the surface of the table and grips the head of the chair as if to steady himself. A tremor of pain makes him recoil as he raises both bandaged hands like he touched fire.
“I lost visual,” I say to add fuel to the fear. “The aircraft is gone.”
“What the fuck do you mean it’s gone—bring her back!”
I turn my head slowly to look back up at him and he doesn’t even notice me smiling up at him victoriously. Intrigued, I examine the sheer force of frenzy that shatters his stoic mask and that he can longer conceal the care that a man of his position should never have in his possession. Eventually, his eyes dart to me then they focus on me and the frenzy morphs into fury as he burns me with a wrathful glower.
“What the fuck you looking at me for?” he roars with the chords of veins in his throat prominent. “Find the fucking plane!”
I nod casually before I press all of two keys to bring it all back up.
He edges back and glares back at me as he quickly realizes what I did.
“Why?” he asks. A simple and scary man.
“I needed to see your reaction to confirm my theories.”
He crosses his arms and thick muscles bulge through his sleeves. “Theories about?”
“You and Hadassah.”
“There is no me and Hadassah. And if you ever pull that fuckery again, I’ll tear out your entrails.”
He recedes and moves back to assume his former stead.
I roll closer to the station with fish eyes. And I resume what I was doing even though Torin said it wasn’t necessary. My women are on that aircraft and anything relating to their safety or a threat to it is very necessary to me.
I route through my proxies, scanning the digital landscape for traces of interference. Sure enough, there it is: an unknown IP, running a separate script parallel to mine. I trace the signal, bouncing across multiple nodes from seemingly random locations, masking its origin. Classic obfuscation techniques—VPN tunnels, onion routing—someone knows what they’re doing.
They’re tracking the plane, just like me. But for what?
I deploy a reverse shell, embedding it into the residual memory of a dormant node on the network. If they’re sloppy, I’ll catch a ping. I keep monitoring, trying to stay one step ahead, carefully parsing each byte of data. My heart pounds. Seconds crawl by. Then, a ping.
Gotcha motherf—
Their script starts feeding me glimpses—random packets of encrypted metadata, unintelligible at first. But then it hits me: this isn’t just another hacker tracking the same plane. They’re tracing my signal, too.
I quickly isolate my access point, shutting down any chance of a counter-hack. This third party isn’t just curious—they’re hunting. The tension in my shoulders knots as I scramble to reroute my traffic through a secure subnet, clearing my digital fingerprints from the control system as I go.
But as I sever my last connection, I catch one final packet from their end, hanging in the air like a taunt: a cryptic line of hexadecimal code, followed by a single word—"Found."
“Shit!” I scream as I launch up to my feet and the chair glides away.
The sentinel instantly knows I’m not dicking around and hurries to my side to peer over at the monitors with an indecipherable expression, concentrated but confused.
“What the fuck am I looking at?”
I lean closer to point at the embedded message.
His eyes follow, and then they flare wide.
And he says the words I’m too afraid to utter. “They’re compromised.”