THE TRASH SON-IN-LAW'S ULTIMATE SYSTEM

FRAGMENTS OF HER VOICE

Chapter 10 – Fragments of Her Voice

The city never truly slept, but the hour between midnight and dawn had its own silence — heavy, watchful, and secretive. Liam’s car sliced through the rain-slick streets, engine humming softly beneath the storm’s rhythm. He drove without headlights for most of the way, the route imprinted in his mind long ago.

When he finally stopped, it wasn’t in the city’s wealthy districts or the Hunt estate’s glass towers. He parked in an alley, between two abandoned warehouses. The building ahead looked forgotten, its walls draped in vines and grime, its windows opaque with dust. To anyone else, it was another ruin swallowed by the city. To Liam, it was home base — the only place untouched by Hunt surveillance.

He keyed in a code on the steel side door, and the biometric scanner hummed before clicking open. Inside, the space was dim, lined with old computer rigs and data servers stacked like tombstones. Blue light spilled from the monitors, casting long shadows across the room.

Liam shrugged off his soaked jacket, set the encrypted drive on the main console, and sat. His movements were deliberate, unhurried, but his pulse betrayed him. For days, he’d been chasing faint digital ghosts — and tonight, one had spoken.

He connected the drive. The system came alive instantly, scanning and decrypting layer after layer of encoded data. It resisted, adapted, then finally yielded — Emma’s code always did that.

The screen filled with cascading strings of text, mathematical sequences, old Hunt project files. He leaned in, eyes narrowing. Most of it was scrambled, overwritten by dummy data. But buried deep in the folder hierarchy was a file labeled “ECHO_01.”

He opened it.

The video flickered once before stabilizing. Emma appeared — not the formal, poised woman from corporate portraits, but the one he remembered from years before: eyes sharp, hair tied back, exhaustion etched across her face.

“Liam,” her voice began, clear this time, recorded in her private tone — the one she used when they were alone. “If you’re seeing this, you’ve found the code. And that means you’ve gone too far.”

He didn’t blink, barely breathed.

“I didn’t disappear,” she continued. “I was erased. They found out what I built — and they turned it into something worse. The system wasn’t meant to control people, Liam. It was meant to predict them. Every choice, every behavior, modeled and sold.”

She paused, glancing off-screen, as if hearing something. “They’re using E-03 to manipulate financial patterns, political outcomes — even lives. Damian knows. So does your father-in-law. They’ll come for you if they think you have this.”

The screen glitched. Emma leaned closer, her expression softening for the briefest moment. “You always said secrets can’t hurt you if you own them. But some secrets… own you back.”

The feed ended abruptly, the screen dissolving into static.

Liam exhaled slowly, eyes locked on the flickering light. For the first time in weeks, the calm mask on his face fractured — not with emotion, but with something sharper: resolve.

He ran a trace on the file metadata. The video was recorded only nine days before she vanished. The coordinates in its code pointed to another Hunt facility — Research Node 4C, decommissioned on paper, but clearly still active.

Before he could decrypt further, his system beeped — an external ping.

Incoming connection detected. Unknown source.

Liam’s fingers flew over the keyboard, rerouting the signal through layers of encryption. But the ping repeated, this time followed by a message line flashing across his secondary monitor:

“You shouldn’t have opened it.”

For a second, the lights flickered. One of his security feeds showed a blur — a dark car parked two blocks down, headlights off. He zoomed in. The license plate matched one of the Hunt security units.

He’d been traced.

Liam killed the connection, wiped the last twenty minutes of activity, and pocketed the drive. His movements were fast but controlled. Years of military discipline kept his breathing steady even as the sound of distant engines grew louder.

The warehouse lights went dark. Only the rain remained, tapping softly against the metal roof as he moved to the back exit. He could already see faint headlights reflecting off the puddles outside.

But then — another beep. His console, though disconnected, flashed once more.

“Emma: Fragment 2 — Available.”

He froze.

The message wasn’t from the Hunts. It was from her code.

Liam turned back, fingers hovering over the console. The system interface had changed — lines of text appearing on its own, forming a pattern of words like a whisper written in binary.

“If you want the truth, go to where it began.”

The text blinked once, then vanished.

Liam stood there for a moment, drenched in the blue glow of the monitors, trying to piece together the message. Where it began. For them, that could only mean one place — the first Hunt R&D site Emma had ever worked in. A location long since erased from corporate maps.

He closed his eyes, remembering her laugh echoing down the sterile hallways years ago when they’d first met there. Back then, she wasn’t yet the Hunt heiress’s perfect daughter or the CEO’s wife — she was a genius coder chasing purity in data. That place had shaped both of them.

He slipped the drive into his inner pocket, then reached for the wall panel behind one of the server racks. Hidden beneath layers of dust was a steel case. He opened it, revealing a sidearm, a spare transmitter, and an old photo — Emma standing in the sunlight, smiling faintly at him through her camera lens.

He pocketed everything and headed for the door.

Outside, the storm had eased, leaving the air heavy with the smell of wet earth. The street was empty now, the Hunt security car gone. But he knew better — they didn’t vanish; they watched.

Liam got into his car, started the engine, and set his navigation to a location that officially didn’t exist anymore. The first R&D site. The birthplace of E-03.

As the city lights blurred past his windshield, fragments of Emma’s voice played on a loop in his head: “Some secrets own you back.”

He almost smiled — not out of joy, but out of grim irony. She was right. The secret had owned them both, and now it was coming for the entire Hunt empire.

By the time the car reached the city’s outskirts, the clouds had begun to thin. A pale, early light broke through, silver and uncertain. Liam drove faster.

Because for the first time since Emma vanished, he wasn’t chasing shadows anymore.

He was following her trail.