THE TRASH SON-IN-LAW'S ULTIMATE SYSTEM

THE GHOST SIGNAL

Chapter 9 – The Ghost Signal

The applause from the Hunt family dinner still echoed faintly through the mansion’s corridors as guests began to leave, their laughter drifting like smoke. Liam stood by the balcony for a moment, watching the procession of cars vanish into the night. His expression remained carved from stone, but behind that calm exterior, his mind raced. The signal Ava triggered wasn’t random — it pulsed with purpose, like a heartbeat buried in code.

He checked his watch. 10:47 p.m. The Hunt servers would begin their nightly data sync in thirteen minutes. That was his window.

“Leaving so soon, Mr. Hunt?” Damian’s voice came from behind, casual but probing.

Liam turned, perfectly composed. “Just some unfinished work,” he replied.

Damian smiled — the kind of smile that never reached his eyes. “Even during family dinners, you work. Emma used to say you’d marry your job before you’d ever love anyone.”

Liam didn’t flinch, though something cold coiled in his chest. “She said a lot of things.”

“Yes,” Damian murmured, stepping closer. “She did.”

For a moment, they stood face to face — the protective brother and the man who’d married into his world. Then Damian’s smirk faded. “Be careful what ghosts you chase, Liam. Some of them don’t want to be found.”

He walked away before Liam could respond.

Liam waited until the last guest’s car lights disappeared down the drive, then moved. He slipped through the servant hallways, past the empty kitchens and locked doors, until he reached the secure server room beneath the mansion — the nerve center of Hunt Enterprises’ estate systems. Only family members and a few technicians had clearance, but Liam’s credentials opened every lock.

The hum of machinery greeted him as the heavy door slid open. Monitors flickered, displaying cascading data streams, routine sync logs, and dormant partitions. But one line of code glowed faintly on the main screen: E-03 active node link detected.

Ava’s signal.

Liam sat at the terminal, fingers moving across the keyboard with mechanical precision. The code responded instantly, as if recognizing him. The trace led beyond the mansion’s secure intranet, branching toward a remote subnet — one owned by Hunt Industries but marked inactive for nearly two years.

An abandoned property.

Liam’s eyes narrowed as coordinates appeared: District 9 – Hunt Research Annex 3A.

He closed the terminal, wiped the trace, and left.

Within minutes, he was in his car, the night pressing in around him as he drove through the city’s outskirts. Streetlights faded to shadows as glass towers gave way to steel and concrete. The rain began softly — a steady whisper against the windshield. By the time he reached the old research compound, the storm had thickened, wrapping the structure in darkness.

The gates were rusted, the security cameras dead. But the faint hum of power told him the facility wasn’t entirely abandoned. He stepped through the gate, silent as a shadow, and made his way to the main building.

The entrance keypad blinked weakly — still operational. He entered a sequence, and the door hissed open.

Inside, the air smelled of metal and dust. Rows of dormant terminals lined the walls. Some still flickered with faint blue light, running on backup generators. The silence was oppressive, broken only by the low hum of servers buried somewhere below.

Liam pulled out his phone and activated a trace — the same signal Ava had triggered. The pulse was faint but steady, leading deeper into the building. He followed it down a corridor littered with old research files and broken screens, each step echoing softly.

The hallway ended at a reinforced door marked Lab 03 – Restricted Access.

He entered.

The room was dark except for one terminal glowing faintly at the far end. As he approached, the system flickered to life, displaying cascading code — Emma’s code. E-03: the same symbol, the same rhythm, but evolving, adapting as if it were alive.

He stared at the screen. “Emma…” he whispered, the first sign of emotion cracking his calm.

Then the speakers crackled.

A faint voice, distorted but undeniably human, filled the room. “Liam… if you’ve found this, you’re already too close.”

His heart clenched. The voice was hers — faint, digitized, but hers.

He stepped closer, every muscle taut. “Emma, where are you?”

The recording continued, fragmented by static. “They’ll erase everything. You can’t trust them. Not Damian, not anyone tied to the Hunts. If you want the truth—” the audio glitched, “—you’ll have to finish what I started. The code isn’t just data, it’s—”

The rest dissolved into noise.

Liam’s fingers tightened around the edge of the terminal. The file was corrupted, but the metadata timestamp was recent — less than seventy-two hours old. Someone had accessed and updated Emma’s encrypted system this week.

He quickly copied the remaining data to his drive, scanning for an origin log. The network trace pointed not to the Hunts’ servers, but to a private address tagged under a name he hadn’t seen before: A. Verin.

Ava.

The woman from the dinner.

Before he could dig deeper, a sound echoed from the corridor — footsteps. Slow, deliberate, getting closer.

Liam shut down the terminal instantly and stepped into the shadows. The door creaked open, and a flashlight beam cut through the darkness.

Ava stepped inside, calm as ever, her expression unreadable. She wasn’t surprised to find him there.

“I thought you might come,” she said softly.

Liam stayed silent, his body still, eyes sharp.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she continued, walking toward the terminal. “This place isn’t as dead as it looks.”

“Then maybe you can tell me what it really is,” he said evenly.

She glanced at him, a faint smile touching her lips. “Once, it was where Emma built the foundation of E-03. A predictive security model. But it became something else. The Hunts twisted it into a surveillance tool — one she tried to destroy before she disappeared.”

“Disappeared,” Liam repeated quietly. “You mean before they made her disappear.”

Ava didn’t answer. Instead, she crouched by the console and entered a command. The screen flared briefly, revealing a data map with three nodes — two dark, one blinking red.

“What’s that?”

“The last transfer Emma made before she vanished,” Ava said. “Three fragments of the master key. One’s here. The second… the Hunts have it. The third—” she paused, looking at him — “Emma took it.”

Liam’s pulse quickened, though his face gave nothing away. “So she’s alive.”

Ava looked at him, and for the first time, there was something almost human in her eyes. “Alive isn’t the same as safe.”

Before he could respond, the building’s power flickered. A low hum filled the air, followed by the distant grind of machinery. Ava’s expression sharpened. “They traced the signal,” she whispered. “We need to move.”

Liam drew closer, his tone cold. “Who traced it?”

“The Hunts,” she said. “Or what’s left of them.”

The emergency lights snapped on, bathing the room in red. Somewhere in the distance, heavy boots struck the floor — security, coming fast.

Ava moved to the side wall, pressed a hidden switch, and a narrow passage opened behind a server rack. “This way.”

Liam hesitated for a fraction of a second before following her in. The tunnel was narrow and dark, the air thick with dust. As they reached the exit, Ava turned to him, her voice low.

“If you want to find Emma, you’ll have to stop thinking like a husband,” she said. “Start thinking like her enemy.”

Then she vanished into the night rain, leaving Liam standing beneath the broken floodlights of the old compound.

He looked back once — the lab’s red glow fading behind him — and then down at the drive in his hand. Emma’s voice still echoed faintly in his mind, distorted by static yet unmistakably real.

The truth wasn’t buried anymore. It was awake.

And for the first time in two years, Liam Hunt allowed himself to feel something dangerously close to hope.