Danny’s POV
The field bought us one night. The investigation doesn't give us another.
Raf calls at six in the morning. Not texts — calls, which in Raf language means either someone is dead or he's found something that makes him wish they were. I answer in the hallway outside the apartment, door closed, phone pressed tight against my ear.
"Get to the garage," he says. "Now. Don't bring Nora."
"Why?"
"Because what I found is going to make you want to break something, and she doesn't need to watch that happen."
I leave Nora asleep on the mattress. Write a note — Gone to help Raf with a rebuild. Back by noon. Coffee's made. — and stick it to the fridge next to her latest addition to the note war: You snored last night. I'm filing a noise complaint with Mrs. Delgado. The normalcy of it makes my chest ache in a way I don't have time to examine.
The garage is cold. Raf hasn't slept — I can tell by the shade of gray his skin has turned and the three empty energy drink cans lined up on the workbench like a sad little army. His laptop is open, connected to a borrowed monitor, both screens filled with code and data architecture diagrams that look like conspiracy theory maps.
"Sit down," he says.
"I'm fine standing."
"Danny. Sit down."
I sit on the workbench stool. Raf turns the monitor toward me and points.
"The IP addresses I traced from the data packets — they bounce. Proxies in Romania, then Singapore, then a relay in Brazil, then back through a VPN node in Iceland." He drags his finger across the screen. "Standard obfuscation. Expensive obfuscation. The kind of routing designed to make exactly this kind of tracing impossible."
"But you traced it."
"I traced it because whoever set it up made one mistake. The final hop routes through a domestic CDN that logs source IPs for billing purposes. They forgot to scrub the billing logs." He pulls up a new window. "The destination server is registered to Meridian Digital Solutions. Same shell company from the network certificate."
"The P.O. box in Delaware."
"Right. So I dug into Meridian's incorporation documents. Shell company, no employees, no physical office — but Delaware requires a registered agent for all LLCs. Theirs is a law firm called Hargrove & Associates." He opens another tab. "They specialize in corporate formation for high-net-worth individuals. Translation: they build shell companies for rich people who don't want their names on things."
"How does that help us?"
"It doesn't. But this does." He clicks once more. A financial filing fills the screen — dense, formal, the kind of document that exists at the intersection of money and secrecy. "Meridian filed a Form D with the SEC eighteen months ago. Regulation D exemption — private placement, limited investors. But the form still lists the lead investor."
He scrolls to a field near the bottom. A single name.
Lead Investor: Ashford Capital Partners, LLC.
The words sit on the screen. My vision narrows to a point.
Ashford. The name carved into the stone above the gate of the Wilson family estate. The name on the endowment that funds half the university's business school. The name that Arthur Wilson carries like a weapon and wields like a divine right.
"Ashford Capital Partners," Raf says quietly. "Sole investor. Seed round funding of four point two million dollars, disbursed six months before the Echo Link update was pushed to users."
Six months. He planned this six months ago. Before the bribe. Before the confrontation. Before Nora cut contact. Arthur Wilson looked at the game his daughter loved, the one space where she existed outside his control, and he bought it. Not the company — just the infrastructure. Just the surveillance apparatus. Just the piece that would let him reach inside and take whatever he wanted.
"The bribe was a test," I say. My voice sounds like it's coming through water. "He offered me money to leave Nora. When I refused, he already had the backup plan in place."
"It gets worse." Raf pulls up another document. "Ashford Capital's investment agreement includes a data access clause. Section 7.3 — the lead investor retains perpetual, unrestricted access to all data products generated by Meridian's technology platforms. Including but not limited to biometric data, behavioral analytics, location tracking, and user interaction logs."
Every conversation. Every quest. Every argument we had near the phones. Every whispered 3 AM confession on the mattress. Her father didn't need to be in the room. He had a transcript.
My hands grip the edge of the workbench. The metal bites into my palms and I let it, because the pain is the only thing keeping me in this chair instead of through the wall.
"What about the Love Room?" The question tastes like acid. "The biometric harvesting — the audio—"
"I don't know yet." Raf's voice is careful. "The clause covers 'data products.' Whether that includes raw audio from specific sessions or just processed analytics depends on how the system categorizes it and who has backend access to what tier."
"So he might not have the actual recordings."
"He might not. But the data exists on that server regardless. And anyone with access to Meridian's backend could find it."
The thought sits between us like something with a timer. Someone. Anyone with access. A name I don't have yet, attached to a face I can't see.
"He didn't just try to buy me off." The words come through my teeth. "He bought the game. He's been inside Echo the whole time. Watching. Listening. Cataloging every moment she thought she was free."
"Danny—"
"She escaped him." My voice cracks on something I refuse to let surface. "She walked away from everything — the money, the house, the safety net. She chose a studio with a broken radiator and a mattress on the floor because it was hers. And he was in the walls the whole time."
Raf doesn't say anything. He lets the silence hold, the way he does when words aren't the tool the moment requires. The energy drink cans stand in their row. The monitor glows with financial filings that prove what I already knew in my gut — that Arthur Wilson doesn't lose. He adapts. He escalates. He rebuilds the cage with better materials and waits for his daughter to stop noticing the bars.
"How do we prove it?" I ask. "The shell company, the funding trail — it's circumstantial. He'll have lawyers between him and every document."
"We need the data itself. The server contents — the actual audio files, the biometric logs, the surveillance records. If we can prove what Meridian is capturing and tie it to Ashford's access clause, that's not a civil case. That's criminal wiretapping. Federal jurisdiction."
"So we need to get inside Meridian's servers."
"Or find someone who's already inside." Raf closes the laptop. The click echoes in the empty garage. "I've got feelers out. Give me another forty-eight hours."
I nod. Stand. My legs feel like they belong to someone else — someone who hasn't just learned that the man who raised the woman he loves built a surveillance empire to keep her in a cage she can't see.
"Are you going to tell her?" Raf asks.
"Yeah."
"How?"
I think about Nora asleep on our mattress. The note on the fridge about my snoring. The way she cried in that field with the stars above us, crying because she'd remembered that her body belonged to her. How do you tell someone that their father bought the infrastructure to ensure it never would?
"I don't know yet," I say. "But she deserves to know exactly who she's fighting."
I ride home with the financial filings burned into my memory and the name Ashford Capital Partners sitting in my chest like a stone.
Four point two million dollars. That's what Arthur Wilson spent to keep his daughter under surveillance.
I wonder if he considers it a bargain.