Chapter 225: 226 | Federal Infrastructure
I made it back to the penthouse in under fifteen minutes. Would have been faster if I’d used Liminal Step, but burning reserves before whatever came next seemed like a bad play. The elevator ride up felt like it took three years.
The door was already open when I reached my floor.
Mera stood in the entrance. Her tail was rigid behind her, the way it got when she was ready to fight something and hadn’t found a target yet. She pulled me inside without a word and locked the door behind us.
Noel sat on the couch. Her violet hair had come loose from its severe ponytail, strands falling across her face in a way that made her look younger. More vulnerable. The corporate armor was cracked. Not broken, but showing stress fractures I’d never seen before.
Cheon occupied her usual position at the kitchen island, surrounded by screens and data streams. Her fingers moved across the tablet without pause. Processing. Analyzing. Doing the thing she did when the world stopped making sense and she needed to force it back into patterns she could understand.
"Talk to me."
Noel looked up. Her grey eyes were bright. Not with tears. With something sharper.
"Your sister was scared." Her voice came out steady despite whatever she was feeling underneath. "Not scared of being caught. Scared like someone who just realized the ground under their feet was never solid to begin with."
"You think she didn’t know?"
"I think she believed she was playing a game with rules she understood." Noel’s hands were shaking slightly. She noticed and clasped them together in her lap. "I think your father let her believe that because it was useful. And I think the message that came through wasn’t meant for her. It was meant for whoever planted the phone tap."
Cheon spoke without looking up from her screens. "The encryption on that message was military-grade. Not corporate security. Not standard surveillance equipment. Someone with government connections is feeding information to your father’s operation."
That was worse than I’d expected.
Corporate surveillance I could handle. My father’s security team was good, but they operated within certain boundaries. Legal ones, mostly. The kind of limitations that came with being a legitimate businessman who needed to maintain plausible deniability.
Government connections meant those boundaries didn’t exist anymore.
"The NEA?"
"Unknown." Cheon finally looked at me. Her expression was the same neutral mask she always wore, but I’d learned to read the tension in her jaw. The slight narrowing of her eyes. "The signal routing suggests federal infrastructure. Beyond that, I cannot determine specific agency involvement without compromising our own communications security."
Mera moved to stand behind the couch. Her hand dropped to Noel’s shoulder. A silent gesture of support that Noel accepted by not shrugging it off.
"Rome." Mera’s voice was careful. "If your father has federal contacts feeding him intelligence, then everything we discussed about becoming too visible to touch might not work. Visibility doesn’t matter if the people who could protect you are already on his payroll."
She wasn’t wrong.
The entire strategy Laurana had proposed depended on public opinion and hero community support being powerful enough to counterbalance my father’s corporate influence. But if he’d already bought the referees, the game was rigged before we stepped onto the field.
I walked over to the window — the same view I’d stared at since moving into this penthouse. Century City spread out below like a circuit board someone had left running. All those lights, all that movement, all that carefully maintained illusion of order imposed on chaos that didn’t care about the illusion at all.
Somewhere down there, my father was sitting in an office or a car or a private room in some restaurant I’d never heard of, receiving reports.
Federal-quality intelligence.
Adjusting his plans in response to information he shouldn’t have had access to in the first place. Moving pieces on a board I couldn’t see and couldn’t counter.
Somewhere down there, my sister was sitting in a café or walking through the Corridor or standing in her apartment, staring at her phone and wondering what the hell just happened.
Wondering if the message she’d sent had been the right call or the biggest mistake she’d made in years. Vivian had always been careful. Calculated. The fact that she’d reached out at all meant something had shifted for her too. I just didn’t know what yet.
Somewhere down there, seventeen-year-old Liam — the real one, the original one — was waking up in a body that finally belonged to him again. He’d go through his morning routine. Check his phone. Wonder why certain memories felt distant or incomplete.
He had no idea that his existence proved my father had been conducting illegal Essentia experimentation on kidnapped teenagers. He had no idea he was evidence of a crime that should have destroyed the Angelo Corporation ten times over.
None of them knew what was coming. Not really. Not the way I did.
"What do we actually know?" I didn’t turn around. Just kept staring at the city like it might give me an answer it hadn’t given me the last hundred times I’d asked.
Cheon answered immediately, her voice steady and clinical in the way it always got when she was compiling intelligence. "Your father is aware we attempted to gather intelligence through Noel’s meeting with Vivian.
He possesses federal contacts capable of intercepting communications at a level that suggests either direct NEA cooperation or someone embedded within that organization acting independently on his behalf.
Vivian’s current role remains uncertain — whether she is an ally, a liability, or an asset he is attempting to reclaim. The timeline for his next action is unknown but statistically likely to be accelerated given the breach in operational security."
"And the exhibition match?"
"Still scheduled. No indication that your father intends to interfere with that directly." She paused. "Yet."
Three weeks.
I had three weeks to win a match that would determine my future, while my father worked to undermine everything I was building with resources I couldn’t match and allies I couldn’t identify.
My phone buzzed.
Aurora: on my way. bringing ramen from that place you like. eta twenty minutes.
I stared at the message.
Twenty minutes.
In twenty minutes, Aurora would walk through that door with food and questions and the expectation that I would explain everything clearly. She’d joined this arrangement less than twelve hours ago. She didn’t know about the federal connections or the compromised sister or the escalating threat timeline.
She just knew that Rome D’Angelo had complicated feelings and multiple girlfriends and an ability that defied classification.
"Aurora’s coming."
Mera’s tail twitched. "She doesn’t know about any of this."
"No."
"You’re going to tell her?"
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