Midway through his hacking, the door creaked open, and Maisie stepped in quietly. She paused, watching her brothers for a moment, taking in the intensity, the desperate haste between them.
A slow realization dawned: they'd been digging without her, unearthing secrets she hadn't been trusted to see.
Her voice broke the silence, cagey but firm. "What are you concealing from me?"
Dash didn't look up right away, but the glance he finally gave her was sharp, weighted. Leo shifted beside him, caught between the need for secrecy and the fragile bond of their family.
Maisie's eyes searched theirs, fierce but uncertain. "You're in this, too, aren't you? Whatever this is... I'm not going to be left out."
The room throbbed with anxiety, mysteries uncovered, alliances tested, and the silent promise that nothing would be the same from this moment forward.
Maisie's voice cut through the low hum of monitors, sharp and accusing. "How long have you known, Leo? How long have you been keeping this from me?"
Leo's gaze darted away, unable to hold her stare. His fingers gripped the edge of the desk, knuckles paling from the tight hold.
After a beat, he exhaled slowly. "Only a few days. Dash told me… just before I came here."
Maisie's jaw tightened, disbelief mixing with anger. "Days? You're going to act like that's enough time to process this? To just... pretend like it's normal?"
Dash stepped forward, hands still hovering above the keyboard. His voice was low but steady, trying to break through the charged air.
"It's worse than just forgetting. Dad didn't just hide things. He messed with our memories. There's tech, memory suppression, trigger phrases, words or signals that can lock parts of our minds away or bring them back when he wants."
Leo's eyes darkened as he absorbed Dash's words. "I think he used it on Igor, too. That's why he's been acting strange. Maisie, it's why you've been feeling off around him lately. He's working with someone in a deeper conspiracy."
Maisie's brows furrowed, the pieces clicking into place, but the shock made her voice tremble. "So, it's not just the secrets or the memories anymore. It's like we're... puppets. And we didn't even know it."
Dash nodded grimly, eyes scanning the glowing files on his screens. "Exactly. We've been living in a cage built from our memories. And it's going to take more than just digging through data to break free."
Leo ran a hand through his hair, the weight of everything settling deeper. "We need to be careful. If Dad finds out we're onto him..."
Maisie cut him off fiercely. "Then we'll show him we're not the ones who get to pull the strings."
The room pulsed with a new kind of fire, a fragile alliance born of betrayal, suspicion, and a desperate need for truth.
Maisie stepped back from the desk as if scorched, the flicker of old lamplight catching the sharp angles of her expression. Her jaw clenched, brows drawn low, not just angry but betrayed in a way that went deeper than words.
It was still stuck in her craw that her two brothers didn't trust her despite their full lack of history in recent years.
"You knew," she said, voice quiet but fraying. "You both knew, and you let me sit in that house like nothing was wrong."
Leo opened his mouth, but there was nothing useful waiting there. Just guilt, stale and sour in the back of his throat. He hadn't meant to keep her in the dark, it just… hadn't felt safe to let the truth out loud. Not yet. Not with Harry watching every move from the shadows, strings in hand.
"We were trying to figure out what was real," Dash offered, his voice low but urgent. "There's too much we still don't know."
Maisie's laugh cracked out, hollow and bitter. "Is that supposed to make it better? Were you afraid? That you thought I couldn't handle it?" Her hands were trembling now, not from fear, but fury.
"She was my mother. You didn't think I deserved to know that something was wrong?"
Silence pooled in the corners of the room like stagnant water.
Then Maisie straightened. The fury didn't leave her, but it settled into something colder, more focused. A fire that had a direction now.
"I'm going to ask him," she said, voice firm, lips bloodless. "I'm going to look him in the eye and make him lie to my face."
Dash's head snapped up from his monitor. "Maisie, wait..."
"No," she said. "No more waiting."
"You don't corner a man like him without a way out." Dash pushed himself up from the desk, stepping into her path.
"You know what he's capable of. He's been ahead of us for years. This, this is what he wants. Us tearing at each other while he keeps his secrets locked up tight."
Maisie didn't flinch. "Then I'll pick the lock."
For a moment, none of them moved. The whirr of Dash's cooling fan buzzed softly in the background, undercutting the sudden stillness.
Leo exhaled slowly. "Then we do it together. No more secrets. Not between us."
Maisie's eyes flicked between them, still furious. But she nodded.
Just once.
The house didn't feel like a home anymore.
Later, after Maisie had stormed upstairs, too tense for sleep, too angry for comfort, Leo lingered at the bottom of the stairs. Dash had returned to his room in silence, the weight of what they'd unearthed pulling heavy on his shoulders.
Leo watched the shadowed hallway for a beat longer, then turned away.
Down the hall, behind the old basement door, Dash's room flickered dimly with the soft blue glow of monitors. The room smelled faintly of solder and warm plastic, and the whirring hum of his hidden server rig filled the silence like a distant swarm.
Dash hunched over the desk; focus narrowed to the files he'd just copied from the memory crystal.
He'd already seen the playback with Leo, but this time he watched it through the lens of a technician, cataloging metadata, identifying embedded timestamps, searching for any clue Mara might have left behind. Something about the crystal still buzzed under his skin, like an unfinished sentence trailing into static.
Lines of encrypted script ran like water down the screen. His fingers flew across the keyboard, uploading fragments into a remote, off-grid server he'd built in secret the summer before. Just in case.
Just in case this happened.
Just in case everything came unstitched.
He paused to check the feed from the external estate cameras, one of the few systems he still trusted. A cluster of windows bloomed across the screen, showing angles of the garden, the outer gate, the gravel drive. All quiet. All still.
Mostly.
As Dash resumed sorting the next string of data, the screen hiccupped.
A flicker.
Then static.
Then a frozen frame.
He frowned and tapped a key.
The image didn't budge.
He leaned closer. Narrowed his eyes. His cursor hovered over the playback frame, camera three, southeast perimeter.
There.
A figure.
Standing just outside the estate's old wrought iron fence.
They weren't moving. We weren't pacing. We weren't trying to get in.
Just watching.
The night vision overlay washed their features pale and blurry, impossible to make out, except for one thing:
They were facing the house. Perfectly still. Perfectly silent.
Dash's breath caught in his throat.
And then the feed went black.