Chapter 32: Encrypted Atrocity
Rebel Gage’s loft was a tomb of failure.
The ambient hum of his server bank was the only sound. It was the wrong sound. For a month, it should have been the soft, rhythmic ping of a location tracker, the faint digital heartbeat of the GPS anklet he’d secretly fitted to Sammy’s car over a year ago. A ghost signal. A phantom pulse he’d followed across three states before it died in a warehouse district in Nevada. A decoy. He’d ripped the server rack half off the wall that night.
Now, the servers just hummed, useless. Screens glowed with maps covered in digital red X’s, police bulletins with her face—the blonde version, from before the black dye—and encrypted chat windows with contacts who knew nothing. Caleb called every day. The calls were shorter now. Less “anything?” and more a strained silence that said everything. The Jade family wasn’t just freaking out. They were crumbling. Their money meant nothing. Their gated mansion was just a pretty cage for their panic. Rebel had stopped going over. He couldn’t stand the polished marble, the taste of their fear in the air, the way Mrs. Jade’s eyes accused him without saying a word. He was the security guy. The shadow. He’d failed.
He was so fucking pissed. At himself. At the empty city outside his frosted windows. At the silence.
He scrolled through a feed now, not one of his hidden ones—those had gone dark the night she vanished—but a traffic camera loop near her tattoo shop. He’d watched it nine hundred times.
His fist, coiled tight, trembled on the desk. He was a wire pulled taut, ready to snap and slash anything near. He hadn’t slept in days. He’d find a lead, chase it into a wall. Every dead end was another brick in the wall around his sanity. He was freaking out. A controlled, icy, and profoundly violent freak-out. He’d taken apart his entire network, looking for a breach, a hint. He found only his own arrogance staring back.
Ping.
A soft, high-tone alert from the darkest corner of his encrypted desktop. Not an email. A direct data stream. Untraceable by normal means. His heart, a sluggish, exhausted thing, gave a single hard thud.
He stared at the notification. It was routed through a ghost protocol he’d written himself. One he’d only ever theorized could be hacked. The sender field was blank. The file size was large. Video large.
A cold sweat, sharp and sudden, broke across his shoulders. He clicked.
A video player window bloomed on the center screen. For a second, it was black. Then, grainy, low-light footage resolved.
It was a concrete floor. A rusty drain grate.
Sammy’s face, pressed against it. Buzzed blonde hair, skinny as a plague patient.
Rebel stopped breathing.
The video was silent for a heartbeat, then her whimper filtered through his studio-grade speakers. It was a small, broken sound. It unmanned him. Her face was tear-streaked, eyes were wide, unseeing with terror, fixed on the lens. No. Not at the lens. Through it.
He was behind the camera.
The angle shifted. A gloved hand came into frame, adjusting something. The view widened.
She was on her stomach, a thin white nightgown shoved up around her waist. Her pale skin was marked with angry, fresh burns. One along her lower back, huge and blistered. Newer, redder lines scored her shoulders. Her body was splayed, helpless.
The metallic click-click-clink of a belt buckle. Unmistakable.
“No,” Rebel whispered to the screen, his voice a dry crack. “No, no, no, no.”
Sammy’s mouth moved. Please. Don’t. The audio picked up her ragged sob. “Don’t touch me.”
The frame jostled. The camera was fixed now. A shadow fell over her. A figure in dark clothes, a black ski mask, knelt behind her. Rebel saw his own reflection, ghastly and pale, in the dark monitor glass, superimposed over the horror.
The first brutal thrust was not visible, but it was horrifically auditory. A wet, tearing impact. A scream, ripped from her, raw and piercing, that filled his studio, that was his studio, that was the only thing in the world. Rebel gagged, a full-body convulsion. He tasted bile.
The masked man’s hips drove forward. Again. Again. A savage, rhythmic violence. Sammy’s screams dissolved into choked, wet gags. Her fingers clawed at the grate, scrabbling for purchase that wasn’t there. The man’s gloved hand fisted in her short blonde, holding her head down for the camera. For him. For Rebel.
He knows. The thought was an ice pick through his skull. He knows I watch.
The attacker leaned forward, his masked face almost beside hers, as if sharing a secret. The video was grainy, but the message scrawled on the floor just beside her face, in a dark, wet substance, was crystal clear.
HER PAIN IS YOUR FAILURE.
The words were written in her blood.
Rebel’s vision tunneled. The world soundproofed itself, muffled by the roaring in his ears. He watched, utterly paralyzed, as the violation continued. He saw the moment her spirit broke. The light in her hazel eyes, the fire he’d watched for years, guttered and went out. She went limp, her face slack against the metal grate, staring into the lens with dead vacancy as her body was used.
The assailant finished with a final, shuddering thrust. He withdrew. He adjusted the camera again, ensuring the blood message was in frame, ensuring Sammy’s ruined, vacant expression was captured. Then, a gloved hand reached out and the screen fractured into cascading, violent static.
Silence.
The hum of the servers rushed back in, a deafening roar.
Rebel Gage did not move. He sat frozen before the screen, the static casting a sick, dancing blue light over his face. The bile he’d tasted was now a solid knot in his throat. His hands were flat on the desk, palms down, fingers splayed. He looked at them. They were not his hands. They were the hands of a man who had just witnessed a murder of a soul.
A low sound started in his chest. It wasn't a groan or a curse. It was the visceral, animal sound of something breaking inside its cage. It built, rattling his ribs, tearing up through his throat.
He erupted.
His hand swept across the desk, sending monitors, keyboards, coffee cups, a .9mm Glock, all flying in a crashing cacophony. He stood, the chair shooting back and slamming into the server rack. He grabbed the edge of the heavy steel desk and, with a roar that tore his throat raw, he flipped it. It crashed onto its side with a sound like a car wreck.
He stood panting in the center of the wreckage, the static from the one remaining monitor painting the chaos in cold light.
Her pain is your failure.
The words burned behind his eyes. They were right. His protection was a lie. His devotion was a curse. His watching was the invitation. He had drawn this to her by seeing her as his. He had failed her in every way a man could fail a woman.
The rage curdled, instantly, into something colder, sharper, and infinitely more dangerous. It settled in his veins like frozen mercury.
He righted a single monitor. He knelt amidst the wreckage, cables snaking around his boots, and dragged the keyboard to him. His fingers, steady now, flew over the keys. He pulled up the raw video file. He bypassed the encryption that had delivered it. He began to strip it, layer by layer, searching for the ghost in the machine. Metadata. Compression artifacts. The faint digital whisper of the editing software used.
He wasn’t looking for her anymore.
He was looking for him.
And when he found him—and he would find him—he would deliver a message of his own. Not written in blood. Carved in bone.