I kept my body angled away from the camera in the digital clock.

I opened my private cloud backup portal, which was linked to the firmware of my external drives.

Three months ago, fearing Hunter’s jealousy, I had installed a background tracking utility on my primary solid-state drives.

It was a silent beacon that would ping my personal server whenever the drives were plugged into a network-connected machine.

I tapped the refresh key on my laptop screen.

A small red dot was blinking on the map.

They had already plugged the drives into a computer.

The signal was strong, and it was not coming from Barbara’s estate.

It was not coming from Hunter’s apartment on the edge of campus either.

The coordinates placed the signal in the heart of the downtown business district.

It was located at the exact address of Hayes Industries.

My father’s corporate headquarters.

I stared at the blinking red dot, my heart hammering against my ribs.

Why would my research drives be at my father’s company?

Arthur had always been supportive of my doctoral work, even if he did not fully understand the technical details.