Her Obsession (by Sheridan Hartin) novel Chapter 21

Take Notes, Al Boy.

“Yours?” he asked, not even trying to hide the nerves in his voice.

“No.” I said. “Mine don’t get caught.”

He swallowed and bly. On the fourth loopback. I caught a static flicker, a stutter in their cloaking. A mistake. Small, but there. Someone moved too fast, tried to open two ports simultaneously. Rookie error. Overconfident. I froze the moment in the packet stream and blew it up on the screen. Bingo. A fragment of an origin trail. Just enough.

“Nico, write this down,” I said. “Cairo. Sector 9. Former Interlink node, now privatized. We’ve got a ghost in the system. Not ours.”

“That’s old Spire intel territory,” he said, eyes widening. “I thought they were disbanded.”

“Only the ones with names and pensions,” I muttered. “This smells like freelancer work. Big paycheck. Specific target.”

I didn’t need to guess who the target was. My eyes flicked to the corner of the monitor where a live feed of Conner’s room still ran. He hadn’t moved. Still asleep, still safe, for now. I hardened the firewall around his network again, doubling the nodes and adding three new cloaked monitors to intercept anything with even a whisper of that Cairo signature. Then I pulled up the feed from my drone and adjusted its range. If someone was coming for him, they wouldn’t get within ten clicks without alerting me now.

“I’ve rerouted everything to a secondary sandbox,” I told Nico. “You’ll work out of there until I say otherwise.”

“Do I ask what happens if they break through?”

“You don’t,” I said flatly, eyes still on Conner’s feed. “Because they won’t. Take notes, Al boy.”

Nico let out a low whistle but started typing again, fingers flying over the keyboard like he suddenly had something to prove. Good. I didn’t need fear, I needed competence. I scanned the perimeter feeds one more time, cross-checking thermal and infrared. All quiet. For now. But quiet never lasted. I reached under the desk, fingers curling around the familiar weight of my sidearm. If they were probing defenses, it meant they were close to making a move. And when they did? I’d be ready. Because no one touches what’s mine, not without bleeding for it.

Ghost School.

Nico

It started with a ping. Just one. Soft, Barely noticeable. But by now, I was trained. Or maybe just conditioned like a damn lab rat to respond to the sound of her. The Ghost. I shoved the empty Red Bull can aside and leaned forward, eyes narrowing as a new prompt appeared on my screen.

Line One:

“Rule one: stop using free software to secure a million-dollar operation.”

Line Two:

“Rule two: breathe. You’re about to get schooled.”

I let out a short laugh under my breath and cracked my knuckles. “Okay, show me what you’ve got, Ghost.” And she did.

The next twelve hours blurred into one continuous stream of data, commands, firewalls, port sniffers, live intercepts, VPN tunnels, and too many acronyms for my brain to keep straight. She wasn’t just fast, she was surgical. Efficient. Brutal. She moved through the system like it owed her something, like she’d built the damn internet herself and was just here to fix the amateur mess I’d made of it. And yet she didn’t shut me out. She walked me through every line she rewrote. Every patch. Every bypass. Every backdoor she plugged, then triple reinforced. Her voice, quiet and calm, filtered through the comms like silk dragging over glass.

“Why is your admin login stored in plaintext?”

“Your server talks too much. Mute it.”

“Tell your boss his club is practically an open door. I just slipped past four cameras without tripping a single alert.”

She wasn’t bragging. Not really. Just…informing. The way you’d inform someone that their roof was missing and a storm was coming. Matter-of-fact. Cold. Necessary. Somewhere around 2AM, I leaned back and groaned. “You ever sleep?”

Her response came instantly.

“Not while you’re using a decade-old encryption protocol like it’s fine.”

“Touché.”

We kept going. She taught me how to rewire our surveillance feeds into mirrored ghost networks, no pun intended. She showed me how to rewrite digital fingerprints so our system couldn’t be backtraced. She even walked me through building a sandbox environment to safely trap any future intruders. “Like roaches in a jar,” she said. “Shake it once in a while to remind them who owns the place.”

I was tired, sure. Wired and exhausted all at once. But fuck, I was learning more in this one night than I had in four years of cybersecurity school. And I knew she was holding back. That was the terrifying part. This wasn’t even her full speed. This was her teaching mode.

Somewhere around 4AM, I finally said it.

“You’re incredible.”

Silence for a beat. Then…

“Yes.”

Cocky, sure, but not undeserved.

“Why are you helping?” I asked, softer now. I meant it. Not just because I was curious, but because something about her made me want to understand. Not just her skills, but her. A long pause.

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