My Husband Kissed My Feet in Front of His Guards Before Telling Me Who Had Been Erasing My Messages

While Adrian met with Nolan and Carter in the main tactical room, I sat behind the heavy mahogany desk in the study, the cold steel of the pistol resting beside my laptop.

I couldn't just sit there waiting like a helpless victim. Five years of living with Adrian Vale had taught me one thing: if you want to survive in his world, you have to learn how to look closely at the details everyone else misses.

I opened my laptop. Connected to the safehouse's isolated, off-grid satellite network, I pulled up my own personal cloud storage.

As Adrian had said, my sent messages were completely empty for the past six months. But as an art historian who spent hours cataloging digital archives, I knew that true deletion required overwriting data sectors multiple times.

I ran a basic data recovery diagnostic tool that my college professor had taught me years ago.

For forty minutes, the screen blinked with lines of red code.

Then, a partition recovered.

A list of routed IP addresses flashed across the screen. I scrolled through the technical jargon until my eyes caught a recurring string of numbers.

Server Destination: 192.168.1.104 - Port 8080.

I recognized that IP structure. It wasn't an external hacker from a rival syndicate. It was a local network device—a hardwired unit built into a specific physical location.

I opened the Vale corporate registry file that Adrian had shared with me years ago when I helped design the interior of his downtown headquarters. I matched the IP address against the building's infrastructure log.

The server intercepting my desperate messages wasn't located in a basement in Chicago or a server farm in Eastern Europe.

It was located inside The Gallery—my own art studio in downtown Seattle, funded entirely by the Vale Foundation.

The breath hitched in my throat.

Someone hadn't just hijacked my digital life from afar. They had physically sat in my private office at the gallery, plugged a hardware bridge into my personal desktop, and maintained the mirror protocol every single week while I was teaching art classes to local children.

And there were only three people who held the security passcodes to my private studio: