Chapter Seventeen: Cracks in the Armor
Delgado paced inside his penthouse suite at The Residences, glass walls overlooking Makati's skyline. The city lights glittered beneath him, but to his eyes they were accusing—every billboard, every flickering neon a reminder that the streets could be whispering his name.
His phone buzzed again. Another message.
"We know what you've done. Pay, or we burn you."
He crushed the phone in his fist, rage coursing through him. These weren't empty threats. He recognized the phrasing, the subtle codes—the rival contractor he had cheated was moving in for blood. Worse, a journalist had emailed questions earlier, too precise to be coincidence. Something about shell companies in Singapore.
It was as if his entire empire had been stripped naked overnight.
Delgado stormed toward his liquor cabinet, slamming a tumbler of whisky down his throat. His mind spun. Who leaked this? Who dared? Salonga's humiliation was still raw, a stain on their unit's reputation. But this—this was different. This was his life's work unraveling.
"Cipher," he spat, the name venom on his tongue.
His comms device buzzed again, a secure channel flashing with urgency. Torres' voice cut through, cold and clipped:
"You've been compromised. Do not panic. Stay in place."
"Stay in place?" Delgado barked. "Everything I've built is crumbling! Accounts exposed, rivals circling—"
"Calm yourself," Torres snapped. "This is controlled. Cipher is inside the web, but we're watching him. Your… difficulties are part of the lure. Once he bites further, we strike."
Delgado's breath hitched, chest heaving. He wanted to believe Torres, wanted to believe this was still salvageable. But doubt gnawed at him. Cipher wasn't just probing. Cipher was dismantling.
And in that moment, Delgado realized something terrifying: maybe he wasn't the bait. Maybe he was the liability.
Meanwhile, across the city, Cipher hunched over his laptop, sweat dampening his brow as he traced the Shadows' hidden hand through Delgado's system.
The trap was elegant. Delgado's greed had been tethered to a ghost channel—every step Cipher took inside the system mirrored to the Shadows' own surveillance hub. They wanted him to get comfortable, to keep feeding until they could triangulate his signal and swarm his location.
Cipher smirked. He'd seen this before, in cyberwar manuals stolen from state academies. Classic "honey net" technique. Effective against brash hackers. Deadly against the unprepared.
But Cipher wasn't unprepared.
He spun up his countermeasure—a false identity, a decoy hacker, stitched together from old logs and botnet chatter. Using Delgado's own sloppy entry as cover, Cipher injected the decoy into the honey net. To the Shadows, it would look like Cipher had fallen for the bait, bumbling deeper into their snare.
Meanwhile, the real Cipher ghosted sideways, siphoning traffic from the Shadows' surveillance hub. Each packet was a breadcrumb, revealing not just Delgado's entanglement but the servers Torres used to monitor operations.
He chuckled under his breath. "You wanted me in your net? Fine. But I'm the spider now."
His fingers flew. He rerouted Delgado's exposed corruption files to multiple mirror nodes, ensuring that even if the Shadows realized what was happening, Delgado's empire would still crumble under its own weight.
The Shadows thought they were tightening their jaws. But in reality, they were biting down on smoke.
Delgado slammed his fist against the glass wall, watching cracks spiderweb through the panel. His empire—years of bribes, schemes, and backroom deals—was slipping through his fingers, and Torres' assurances rang hollow.
He imagined the others—Ramos, Estrella, even silent Santos—watching him unravel, judging, waiting for weakness. The thought made bile rise in his throat.
He poured another drink, hands shaking. For the first time in years, Delgado felt fear—not of the public, not of rivals, but of irrelevance. If Cipher could make him look weak, what would Villareal do? Shadows were only as strong as their reputation.
And in the dark recess of his mind, a whisper he couldn't silence: Maybe they'll cut me loose.
Across the city, Cipher leaned back, exhaling slowly. Delgado was unraveling beautifully, paranoia eating him alive. The Shadows were watching, thinking they still held control, but Cipher had seen their move. He had survived the layered trap, flipped it on its head, and in the process gained another sliver of their structure.
One Shadow was cracking. The others would follow.
Cipher's eyes narrowed. "One piece at a time."
And outside, the Manila rain kept falling, washing secrets into the sewers, as both predator and prey sharpened their blades for the next strike.