Danny’s POV
Raf's garage smells like engine grease and the burnt coffee he brews in a machine that should've been condemned during the Clinton administration.
I find him underneath a Sportster with a wrench in his teeth and music blasting from a speaker held together with electrical tape.
"Need your eyes on something," I say.
"Good morning to you too." He rolls out on the creeper, wiping his hands on a rag that's already more grease than fabric.
"What's—" He stops and studies my face. The rag goes still. "Okay. That's not your normal amount of dark circles. That's a new personal record."
"Didn't sleep."
"I can see that. You look like a corpse that got rejected by the morgue." He sits up, tossing the rag aside. "What's going on?"
I pull the notebook from inside my jacket and hand it to him without ceremony. He takes it, flips it open, and I watch his eyes move down the first page.
The amusement drains from his face one line at a time, like watching a faucet run cold.
"Encrypted outbound packets every thirty-eight seconds," he reads. "Unregistered server. Background camera activation in synchronized intervals."
He flips the page and reads faster. His jaw does something I've never seen it do — it locks, the tendons standing out in his neck, and he goes pale under the garage fluorescents.
Actually pale. Raf, who once pulled a nail out of his own foot with pliers and cracked a joke about it, looks like he's about to be sick.
"Where did you get this data?" he asks, his voice suddenly different—devoid of jokes and stripped of any deflection. The voice of someone who grew up building PCs in his bedroom, cracking software before the club gave him a different kind of purpose.
"Echo Link. The companion app we downloaded last week."
"The mandatory firmware update."
"Yeah."
He sets the notebook on the workbench and pulls out his own laptop — a battered ThinkPad covered in stickers that looks like it survived a war.
His fingers move across the keyboard with a speed that makes my own technical skills feel like finger painting.
"Give me your phone."
I hesitate for exactly one second. Then I hand it over, because whatever's on that phone, Raf is the only person I trust to tell me the truth about it.
He connects it to the laptop, runs something I don't recognize — command line interface, green text scrolling faster than I can read.
Three minutes of silence broken only by his keyboard and the distant sound of traffic outside. Then he exhales through his teeth.
"Danny." He turns the laptop toward me. "This is a rootkit."
"In English."
"Your phone is a surveillance node." He points at the screen, tracing the data architecture with his finger. "The app installed itself at the system level during the firmware update. It's running below the OS — you can't see it in your normal settings, can't force-stop it, can't uninstall it without bricking the phone entirely. It has root access to everything."
"Define everything."
"Everything." He holds my gaze. "Mic — live feed, always on, even when the screen is dark. Camera — activating in intervals, probably capturing stills, maybe short video bursts. GPS — high-precision tracking every four minutes. Accelerometer data, ambient light sensors, proximity sensors."
He pauses. "Health data — heart rate patterns, sleep cycles, stress indicators. Everything you gave it permission to access, it's feeding somewhere in real time."
The garage is cold. I didn't notice until now. The air conditioning vent above the workbench is blowing directly onto the back of my neck, and I can feel each individual hair standing up.
"The camera flickers," I say. "I timed them. They match the data packet transmissions almost exactly."
"Because they're paired. Camera captures, mic captures, biometric captures — all bundled into those packets and shipped to wherever that unregistered server lives."
He scrolls through more code. "This isn't some amateur data harvest, Danny. This is professional-grade surveillance infrastructure. Military-adjacent. The kind of thing that costs serious money to develop and deploy."
I think about the apartment. Our apartment — four hundred square feet of walls and windows and a mattress on the floor. The phones sitting on the nightstand every night, every morning, every moment we exist in that space.
Every whispered conversation. The 3 AM talks where Nora curls against my chest and says the things she's never said to anyone — about her father, her mother, the childhood that left marks nobody can see.
Every argument. The nights we fought in the kitchen over money and stress and the weight of building a life from nothing, our voices rising, cracking, saying things we meant and things we didn't.
Every time Nora undressed with the phone three feet away. Pulling off her work shirt and stepping out of the shower. Standing in front of the window in the morning light, thinking she was alone, thinking the only eyes in the room were mine.
My stomach folds in half.
"The Love Room," I say.
Raf looks up. "What?"
"Friday night. The upgraded session." My voice sounds like it's coming from somewhere outside my body. "The biometric enhancement — the reason everything felt so intense, so responsive, so perfectly calibrated to what we were feeling. It wasn't just enhancing the experience. It was reading us. Heart rate, arousal levels, vocal patterns — feeding it all back into the system while simultaneously recording every second."
Raf is quiet. The kind of quiet that means he's already arrived at the same conclusion and was hoping I wouldn't get there.
"Every sound she made," I continue, and my hands are gripping the edge of the workbench so hard the metal bites into my palms.
"Every sound I made. The headsets captured the VR audio. The phones captured the real audio. The biometric sync captured everything our bodies were doing. All of it — packaged, encrypted, transmitted to a server we can't identify, run by a company that doesn't exist."
"Meridian Digital Solutions," Raf says, reading from the notebook.
"Shell company. P.O. box in Delaware. No employees, no website, no trace."
"I can dig deeper on that. Financial filings, incorporation records — shell companies still leave paper trails." He closes the laptop, and the click sounds final. "Danny. Have you told Nora?"
"Not yet."
"Why?"
Because telling her means watching the one place she felt safe become a stage.
Because telling her means the Love Room — the space where she first let herself want something, where she trusted me with the most vulnerable version of herself — was never private.
Because she spent twenty-one years being watched by her father, performing for an audience she couldn't escape, and I'm about to tell her the escape was just another cage.
"Because I need to be sure before I break her world," I say.
Raf studies me for a long moment. Then he nods.
"Give me twenty-four hours. I'll trace Meridian's financials and see if the server IP resolves to anything identifiable."
He picks up the notebook and holds it like it weighs more than paper. "And Danny? Keep the phones where they are. Don't change your behavior. If whoever's on the other end realizes you know—"
"They'll cover their tracks."
"Or worse," he says, and he doesn't elaborate, because he doesn't need to.
I ride home with the notebook tucked inside my jacket and the wind cutting through my helmet.
Nora will be asleep when I get back. The phones will be on the nightstand, glowing softly, doing what they've been doing since we invited them in.
And I'll lie down beside the woman I love and pretend I don't know that every breath she takes is being cataloged by someone I can't see.
he phones will sit on the nightstand the way they always do — listening, watching, recording — and I'll close my eyes and match my breathing to hers and count the hours until the pretending stops.