Three monitors. Four lines of code.
Kennedy’s hands moved faster across the keyboard. Her eyes tracked the patterns she’d seen a dozen times before—except now they meant something different.
The ghost signature sat there in the firewall logs, mocking her. She’d built this system. Designed every protocol. Midwest Medical Collective’s security was supposed to be airtight.
Someone had walked through it like an open door.
She pulled up the timeline again. 7:14 p.m. Initial breach. 7:17 p.m. Database access. 7:21 p.m. Data extraction. 7:21 p.m. Ghost signature. Gone.
Her phone lit up. Simone.
“Tell me you’re not still at the office.”
Kennedy kept typing. “Someone hit Midwest Medical. Got their patient billing database.”
The silence stretched too long.
“How bad?”
“Five hundred families. Names, addresses, credit cards, insurance numbers. Everything.”
“Jesus. That’s—Kennedy, that’s horrible. They’ll want to sue us.”
“Can you blame them? They trusted us to protect them.” The words came out mechanical. Kennedy opened her client contact list, pulled up the template she’d hoped she’d never need. “I have to tell them.”
“At midnight? Kennedy, wait until morning. Talk to legal first, we need to—”
“I’m not hiding this, Simone.” Kennedy’s finger hovered over Dr. Masterson’s number. “I’m calling her now.”
She disconnected before Simone could argue.
Dr. Lisa Masterson answered on the third ring. “Kennedy? It’s after eleven.”
“I know.” Kennedy’s throat felt tight. “Lisa, I need to tell you something.”
The conversation lasted twelve minutes. Dr. Masterson didn’t yell. Didn’t scream. That would have been easier. Instead, her voice got quieter with each question. Smaller. Like she was physically shrinking under the weight of what this meant for her clinic.
“Those families,” Dr. Masterson said finally. “They already can’t afford their medications. Now someone has their credit cards? Their social security numbers?”
“We’ll pay for identity protection services. Credit monitoring. Whatever they need.”
“They needed us to keep them safe.” A pause. “I built this clinic for them, Kennedy. For people who have nothing. And now we’ve given some criminals everything.”
Kennedy closed her eyes. “I know.”
After Dr. Masterson hung up, Kennedy sat in the dark. The office felt too big. Too empty. The monitors glowed blue against her face.
She went back to the logs.
Pulled up the first breach. Three weeks ago. Small accounting firm in Glenville. Black-owned, fifteen employees. Clean extraction of client tax records.
Second breach. Two weeks ago. Community development corporation in Hough. Grant applications. Donor lists. Business plans.
Third breach. Tonight. Midwest Medical Collective.
Kennedy opened a new window. Mapped the attack patterns side by side. Different entry points. Different vulnerabilities. Different systems.
Same signature buried in the code.
Her heart rate spiked. She’d seen this before—months ago, a conference presentation on coordinated attacks. Someone targeting a specific demographic. Testing defenses. Building a profile.
She pulled up the server logs. Started tracing the masked IP addresses. Layer by layer. Proxy by proxy.
At 2 a.m., she found it.
All three breaches—routed through the same server. Same digital fingerprint. Same source code structure buried beneath different attack vectors.
This wasn’t opportunistic. Someone was hunting her clients. Systematically.
Her phone buzzed against the desk.
Unknown number. Text message.

“You should have stayed in your lane. 30 days.”

Kennedy stared at the screen. Hit callback.
Disconnected number.
Her security app pinged. Motion detected—HOME.
She pulled up her apartment cameras on her phone. Living room feed. Bedroom feed. Front door. Kitchen.
All black.
Not offline. Not disabled. The feeds were active. Recording. But the screens showed nothing except darkness.
Someone had painted over her cameras.
Kennedy pushed away from her desk. She grabbed her keys, her phone, her laptop. Shut down her monitors. The office plunged into darkness.
Her hands shook as she locked the door. The parking garage elevator took forever. Each floor number lit up too slowly. The garage was empty. Her car sat alone under the fluorescent lights. Kennedy scanned the space. Checked the back seat before getting in. Locked the doors immediately.
She pulled up her security app again. The camera feeds were still black. Whoever did this wanted her to know. Wanted her to see. Wanted her scared.
Kennedy started the engine. Pulled out of the garage. The streets were empty this time of night. East 9th Street to Chester. Chester to Euclid. Her apartment building rose ahead. Lights on in scattered windows. Her floor looked normal from the street.
She parked and watched the building for ten minutes. Nothing moved. Nobody entered or left.
Kennedy killed the engine.
Got out. Locked the car. The click echoed in the empty street.
Her building was half a block away. Too far. Too exposed.
She walked fast. Keys already in her hand. Sharp end out.
The lobby door required a fob. She scanned it. The lock clicked green.
Empty lobby. Polished floor reflecting one dim overhead light. Elevator doors closed.
She took the stairs.
Five flights. Her footsteps too loud on concrete. Each landing identical. Each door locked.
Fourth floor. Fifth floor. Her floor.
Kennedy paused at the stairwell door. Looked through the small window.
Empty hallway. Dim lighting. Her apartment door visible at the far end.
Closed. Normal. Untouched.
She pushed through.
Walked the hallway. Thirty feet felt like thirty miles.
Her door. 5G. Brass numbers slightly tarnished.
No marks on the lock. No scratches. No signs of forced entry.
Kennedy pressed her ear against the wood.
Silence.
She reached to unlock the door. Two deadbolts. The chain.
Her hand steadied on the second attempt. The key slid home. The first deadbolt clicked open. Then the next. She pushed the door open six inches.
Darkness inside.
She reached around the frame. Found the light switch.
Flipped it.
Everything looked normal. Track lighting dimmed to the level she preferred when she left in the morning. TV remote on the coffee table, angled the same way. Kitchen counter clear except for her French press, still rinsed from yesterday’s coffee.
The security panel by the door glowed green. Armed when she left. No alerts. No breaches logged.
But the cameras on her phone still showed black.
Kennedy set her keys in her pocket slowly. Listened. The refrigerator hummed. The building’s ventilation system whispered through the ceiling vents. Traffic noise filtered up from Euclid Avenue, muted and distant.
She moved through the living room. Nothing disturbed. Her throw blanket still draped over the armchair where she’d left it Sunday night. The stack of industry journals on the side table sat untouched, her bookmark visible in the top issue.
Bedroom next. Bed made—she always made it, even when rushing. Closet door half-open, the way she left it. Dresser drawers closed. Her jewelry box on top, undisturbed.
Kennedy checked the bathroom. Toothbrush in the holder. Towels folded on the rack. Medicine cabinet organized the way she liked it.
Paranoid. She was being paranoid.
Then she saw it.
Her backup laptop sat on the desk in the corner of her bedroom. Right where she’d left it. Screen closed. Power cord attached.
But the cable was on the wrong side.
She always plugged in on the left. Always. The outlet was closer. The cord didn’t stretch across her workspace.
Now it snaked across to the right side. Still connected. Still charging.
But wrong.
Kennedy’s breath caught. She stepped back. Didn’t touch it.
Her phone was already in her hand. She opened her network monitor app—the one she’d built herself, the one that tracked things the standard apps missed.
Home system showed normal. Router activity consistent with her IoT devices. Nothing suspicious.
She dug deeper. Into the logs most people didn’t know existed. The ones that recorded every handshake, every connection attempt, every device that pinged her network.
Three days ago. Tuesday night at 11:47 p.m.
Unknown device. Connected for six minutes. Accessed her backup drive. Then disconnected.
Kennedy’s skin went cold.
They’d been inside her network for seventy-two hours.
Her cameras weren’t painted over. They were looped. Old footage cycling while someone moved through her apartment. Touched her things. Moved her laptop.
Watched her.
She spun toward the bathroom. Scanned the ceiling vent. There—tiny lens, barely visible behind the grate. Still recording. The red LED smaller than a pinhead.
Kennedy grabbed her desk chair. Stood on it. Ripped the vent cover off. The camera came away in her hand, trailing a wireless transmitter the size of a quarter.
Bedroom next. She checked every surface. Every angle. Behind the dresser mirror—another one. Pointed at her bed.
Her hands shook as she tore it loose. The mirror cracked. She didn’t care.
Living room. One behind the bookshelf. Kitchen. One above the refrigerator.
They’d been watching her. For days. While she slept. Changed clothes. Lived her life.
Kennedy threw them all in the kitchen sink. Grabbed the hammer from her junk drawer. Smashed them one by one until nothing remained but plastic shards and broken circuit boards.
She braced against the counter. Tried to breathe. Her apartment felt wrong now. Contaminated. Every surface a place someone had touched. Every room a space where she’d been watched.
The go-bag was in the back of her closet. She’d packed it two years ago, after Walt. After learning that people you trusted could make your life turn to shit if you weren’t prepared to run.
Laptop. External hard drives. USB with encrypted backups. Cash. Spare phone. Change of clothes.
Her phone buzzed in her hand.
Unknown number.

“We see you, Kennedy. Stop looking or it gets worse.”

She stared at the screen. At the smashed cameras in the sink. At her violated space.
Typed back: “Who is this?”
The message showed delivered. Read.
No response.
Kennedy sat on her couch. Go-bag at her feet. The apartment was too quiet now. The normal sounds—refrigerator, ventilation, traffic—felt threatening. Like they were covering something else. Someone else.
She couldn’t stay here tonight. Couldn’t sleep in a bed someone had watched her sleep in. Couldn’t shower in a bathroom they’d monitored.
Her phone opened to a hotel booking app. She searched downtown. Found something on Prospect. Corporate place. Good security. Available tonight.
Booked it.
After that, she didn’t waste time. Grabbed her toiletries. Another change of clothes. Another backup laptop from the safe in her closet. The external drive with her client data, encrypted six ways.
She did one final sweep. Made sure nothing critical was left behind.
Locked the door behind her.
The parking garage felt different now. Darker. She checked the back seat before getting in. Locked the doors immediately. Started the engine and pulled out fast.
Euclid Avenue was empty this time of night. A few cars scattered at red lights. Late shift workers heading home. Delivery trucks making rounds.
Kennedy took East 9th toward the hotel. Checked her mirrors. A sedan three cars back. Dark color. Couldn’t tell the make.
She turned on Prospect. The sedan turned too.
Could be coincidence. Downtown was small. People took the same routes.
The hotel appeared on her right. She pulled into the parking garage. The sedan drove past.
Kennedy exhaled. Paranoid. She was being paranoid.
She grabbed her go-bag. Headed for the elevator. The garage was well-lit. Cameras visible in every corner. Security desk in the lobby.
Safe. This was safe.
The elevator doors closed. Kennedy leaned against the wall. Let herself shake.
The hotel room smelled like industrial cleaner and stale air conditioning. Kennedy dropped her go-bag on the desk. Checked the locks. Deadbolt, security latch, both engaged.
She moved through the space the way she’d searched her apartment. Bathroom first—shower stall empty, no cameras in the ceiling vent. Closet next, nothing but extra pillows and a spare blanket. She checked behind the TV, under the desk, inside the lampshades.
Clean.
Kennedy sat on the bed. Her hands had stopped shaking but her chest still felt tight. The adrenaline was fading, leaving exhaustion in its wake.
She should sleep. It was past three. She had the Midwest Medical crisis to manage in the morning. Dr. Masterson would be calling. Maybe lawyers.
Instead she walked to the window. Pulled back the curtain.
Cleveland spread beyond her window. Terminal Tower lit against the night sky. The lake invisible beyond it, just darkness where the city lights ended.
Somewhere out there, someone was watching her clients fall apart. Watching her fail to protect them.
Thirty days, the message had said.
Thirty days until what?
Outside in the street, the dark sedan circled the block. Parked across from the hotel entrance. Engine running. Lights off.
Waiting.

Kennedy unlocked the office door at six a.m., before the building’s fluorescent lights had fully warmed to their usual harsh white. The familiar click echoed in the empty hallway. Her hand shook slightly as she pushed inside.
The office looked the same as when she’d left it hours ago. Three monitors dark on her desk. Client files still scattered across the conference table. Coffee mug half-full, cold now, lipstick mark on the rim.
Normal. Everything looked normal.
Except nothing was normal anymore.
Kennedy dropped her bag by the door—the same go-bag from the hotel, everything she needed compressed into one emergency kit. She’d checked out at dawn, couldn’t justify another night’s charge on her maxed credit card. Besides, the hotel bathroom’s door lock had felt too flimsy. The windows too accessible. The hallway too long.
She pulled out her laptop. Booted it up. Spread the breach analysis across all three monitors.
Midwest Medical Collective. The accounting firm in Glenville. The community development corporation in Hough.
Three clients. Three breaches. Same signature buried in the code.
Someone was hunting her clients.
The office door opened behind her.
Kennedy spun, hand going to her bag where she’d stashed pepper spray after the apartment invasion.
Simone stopped short, coffee carrier in one hand, bag in the other. “Jesus, Kennedy. Did you sleep here?”
“Didn’t sleep.” Kennedy turned back to her screens, forced her breathing to steady. “Come look at this.”
Simone set down the coffee. Moved around the desk to study Kennedy’s analysis. Her silence stretched too long.
“These three data breaches are connected,” Kennedy said. She pulled up the pattern overlay. “Same attacker, different entry points. They’re testing our security across multiple clients.”
“Why would someone do that?”
“I don’t know yet. But there’s more.”
Kennedy opened a new window. The research she’d compiled while the hotel room walls had pressed in too close, while every footstep in the hallway had sounded like a threat.
“Remember Velocity Tech Solutions? They dropped us last month, said they were going with a bigger firm.”
“Yeah.” Simone’s voice was careful. “Lost us twenty thousand a year.”
“They were breached two weeks after switching. Lost their entire customer database. Company folded.”
Kennedy pulled up another file. “Henderson Digital Consulting. Dropped us in August. Breached in September. Out of business by October.”
Simone’s face went pale in the monitor light. “You think someone’s targeting our clients?”
“I think someone’s targeting businesses we protect. Or were supposed to protect.”
Kennedy pulled up a map of Cleveland. Marked each affected business with a red pin. Midwest Medical in the center. The accounting firm to the east. Henderson Digital to the west. Velocity Tech to the south.
“All minority-owned,” Kennedy said. “All small operations. “
“Kennedy.” Simone’s tone shifted, took on that careful quality Kennedy had heard from everyone who thought she was being ridiculous. “Are you sure you’re not seeing patterns that aren’t there? You’ve been under a lot of stress—”
“My apartment was bugged. Someone’s been watching me for three days.”
Simone went very still. Set down her coffee. “What?”
Kennedy told her. The cameras in the bathroom vent, behind the bedroom mirror, above the kitchen. The laptop moved an inch. The network breach that had persisted for seventy-two hours. The surveillance she’d lived under while sleeping, changing, existing in what she’d thought was her safe space.
When she finished, Simone sat down heavily in the chair beside her. “We need to call the police.”
“And tell them what?” Kennedy’s hands moved across the keyboard, pulling up the anonymous texts. “Someone hacked my security system and I can’t prove who? That I received anonymous texts I can’t trace? That my clients are being attacked and I think it’s connected but I have no evidence?”
“Kennedy—”
“They’ll say I’m delusional. That I’m imagining things because of what happened with Walt.”
She didn’t need to elaborate. Simone knew. Everyone knew. Kennedy’s ex-boyfriend had stolen her code two years ago, gaslit her about it for months while colleagues called her suspicious, possessive, unable to let go. Until the proof surfaced and Walt had already profited, already moved on, already destroyed her credibility.
Simone didn’t argue because they both knew it was true.
“Then what do we do?” Simone asked quietly.
Kennedy looked at the TechCLE conference registration on her desk. The badge she’d printed last week, back when her biggest concern was nailing the new Sentinel product presentation.
Two days away.
“We go to TechCLE. We present Sentinel. We warn everyone in the Cleveland tech community that someone is systematically attacking minority-owned businesses.” Kennedy met Simone’s eyes. “And we find out who’s behind this before the thirty days are up.”
Simone picked up the conference badge. Read the schedule printed on the back. Her expression changed.
“Isaiah Binutu is keynoting. You know his company, right? Guardian software launch?”
Kennedy knew. Everyone in tech knew Isaiah Binutu. Charismatic, intelligent, always had investors eating out of his hand while the rest of them scraped for funding.
“What about him?”
“Nothing. Just—he’s launching security software too. Direct competition to Sentinel.” Simone set down the badge. “Weird timing.”
Kennedy looked at Isaiah’s name on the conference schedule. Felt something cold settle in her stomach.
She thought about the pattern. The systematic targeting. The thirty-day countdown. The professional precision of the attacks.
This wasn’t some random hacker. This was coordinated. Funded. Someone with resources and reach.
Someone in the Cleveland tech community.
“Yeah,” Kennedy said. “Weird timing.”