SWNOVELXO Chapter 246: Building Trust With Ileana
The moment Kara slid the sleek, obsidian terminal across the polished desk towards her, Ileana felt the world narrow. The cool plastic beneath her hovering palms felt alien, threatening. Her own breath sounded loud and shallow in her ears. Every instinct, honed by years of survival in Skinner's shadow, screamed at her to bolt, to vanish into the city's sprawl.
She stared at the blinking cursor — a tiny, demanding eye. And cutting through the thrum of servers and the weight of Darren's unseen gaze, she heard him.
Skinner's voice, rough with cheap vodka and cheaper cigars, echoing from a command suite choked with cathode-ray glow and smoke in Bucharest:
"Make the code bleed, ShadowBloom. Make it scream for mercy it won't get."
His commands were never repeated. You obeyed the first time, instantly and perfectly, or you ceased to exist. She remembered the acrid sting of smoke, the greasy feel of the keyboard under her young fingers, the cold dread as he dictated the specs for traps like this one.
They weren't defensive tools. They were coffins. Digital graves for the curious.
All her life she had spent coding, creating digital lines that she almost viewed every single one as a sibling. New codes and calculations by heart.
Just as she knew this one. Knew it in the malignant elegance of its timestamp rotator buried beneath the primary layer. She recognized the signature pulse-coded triggers woven into the very checksum callouts.
Yes, she had made this honeypot. But it wasn't for Darren. Lotus Triad was using her own inventions against the person she now worked with.
They could have used any other but they chose hers. Clearly, this was intentional.
She watched with an anxious expression.
Opening this wrong, even inside Kara's sophisticated sandbox, wouldn't just fail. It would ignite. A blood flag— a suicide flare designed to scream her location and Steele's complicity to a dozen sleeping Triad nodes. Failure meant annihilation.
"Let me do it," Ileana suddenly said.
Darren and the rest turned to her. He hadn't spoken to her, allowing himself to think, to know whether or not to believe she was guilty or innocent.
However, now he had to decide whether or not he could trust her.
"It's my honeypot. There's no one else that can bypass it better than me."
Darren and Kara shared a glance. Kara shrugged and said, "She's right."
Then he and Ileana shared a long gaze before he stepped out of the way and allowed her to take control.
Brooklyn bit her nails as she watched.
Ileana instantly began, closing her eyes for a fraction of a second, before her fingers suddenly activated like a robot and she typed.
Fast. Precise. Click! Click! Click!
Nonstop.
Soon, the phrase materialized:
'ShadowBloom_000x://auth.fragment.key'
The terminal paused. A heartbeat stretched into eternity. Then, it flashed a single, stark word:
> Green.
> ShadowBloom: Access Granted…
> Decryption Phase One Beginning…
The jaws of the honeypot sprung open.
Kara walked to her and tapped her slightly on the shoulder. "You did it."
Darren didn't say anything, only ignored her pleading gaze.
Inside the sandbox display, the data surged like a dark tide breaking free. Kara held her breath, muscles coiled, watching the containment fields strain but hold.
"Okay," she breathed out, the word tight with tension. "We're in. Cage is holding."
Data unfurled with brutal efficiency under Kara's commands— fragmented payloads laid bare, metadata strings dissected, source relay logs spooling out like confessions. Darren leaned in to watch.
"There," Kara stabbed a finger at a dense cluster of relay markers. "Message origin trace. It's not just generic Triad chatter… it's stamped with Cell 6 identifiers."
Brooklyn frowned. "Cell 6? What the hell is Cell 6?"
"Ghosts," Kara muttered. "The Lotus Triad's deepest black unit. I didn't even know the Lotus Triad still existed, this is awesome for me by the way. But... as I was saying; these are wetwork, high-value asset burns, data extortion so clean it vanished without a trace. Supposedly wiped off the map after the Bucharest firewall cluster collapsed and burned half their network."
"Clearly," Darren chipped. "the reports of their demise were greatly exaggerated."
Kara's fingers froze mid-keystroke, hovering over the interface. Her eyes widened a fraction, scanning a fresh, ugly alert blooming at the screen's edge. "Hold on— no."
Darren frowned. "What is it?"
Kara grew more frantic. "NO — something's bypassing the—"
The lower quadrant of the massive display flashed a vicious, arterial red.
'WARNING: EXTERNAL PACKET TRANSMIT DETECTED'
'SOURCE: SANDBOX ENV [USER: ILEANA]'
Darren's heart slammed against his ribs. 'The trap had a second trigger.'
"The sandbox—" Kara's voice was razor-edged panic as she slammed commands, fingers a blur, "—it's not us leaking! It's her login signature! The damn thing piggybacked on her auth handshake! It's a tracer flare— it's broadcasting—!"
Ileana looked terrified. "They... knew you would meet me to bypass it. They... knew..."
"Kill the node! Now!" Darren barked, the command cracking like a whip.
"I'm trying!" Kara jammed her palm onto a physical kill-switch pad. The entire sandbox environment on the main display imploded in a cascade of silent, digital explosions. Simulated routers detonated into pixelated dust. Firewalls crumbled into static. Fake IP addresses blinked out like extinguished stars.
But in the chaotic, microsecond collapse, one tiny, malignant spark—a single, focused tracer packet—slipped through a crumbling firewall seam. Just one. A digital whisper carrying their location into the dark.
---
The silence that followed was absolute, deeper and colder than before. It was shattered by the raw scrape of Brooklyn's chair as she shoved back from the desk, her fury a tangible heat radiating across the room.
"You led them here, didn't you?" she said accusingly. "Who are you, really?"
Ileana didn't flinch, didn't step back, though the color had drained from her face, leaving her pale as marble.
"Step back, Brooklyn." Darren ordered. "That's not going to happen. Not here."
Finally, Ileana, anxious and scared, replied. "That trap… was mine. I built it. Two years ago. Under Skinner's gun."
She swallowed hard, the admission like ground glass. "I didn't know it was still active. I didn't know it had a secondary trigger keyed to me. I swear it."
She met Darren's impassive gaze, her own eyes haunted. "But the Triad knew I would be the one to clear the honeypot. I'm sorry, I didn't think about that. I was just trying to help."
Darren said nothing, his hands were folded and he slowly walked towards Ileana, gaze locked with her.
Soon they were standing within a hair's distance, and his scrutiny made her feel inferior.
"If the Triad comes knocking," Darren said, his voice low, "whose door do you answer, Ileana? Theirs? Or ours?"
The only sound was the relentless, accusing thrum of Kara's mainframe and the ragged edge of Ileana's breathing.
Ileana's jaw clenched, a muscle jumping in her cheek. Her hands balled into tight fists at her sides, nails digging into her palms. Yet when she lifted her head to meet Darren's gaze, her voice was stripped bare, raw, and terrifyingly firm.
"I want to be of help to you. I will do anything you ask because you saved me." She took a step towards him, ignoring Brooklyn entirely. "Give me access to Cell 6's vault. I promise, I will burn it from the inside out. They don't know it, but I know exactly how to destroy the Triad and take all that they have."
"I will do it for you. I promise."
Kara and Brooklyn shared a glance of surprise.