Warm My Bed, Brother-in-law Chapter 7: Chapter 7: Sweet Little Fool.

Read chapter 7 of Warm My Bed, Brother-in-law by PayalSinghRajput on NovelPedia.

DAMIAN - POV. The sudden, high-pitched screech of audio feedback blasted through the server room monitors. The lead tech specialist flinched and yanked off his headphones. On the main wall screen, the live video feed of Richard’s bedroom flickered twice before it distorted into jagged lines and went completely black, leaving nothing but a flat, grey grid of dead pixels. "Fix it," I said. My voice was calm and normal. But the three technicians sitting at the console immediately tensed up and went still. “I’m trying, Mr. Vitale,” the lead tech stammered, his fingers flying across the keyboard. “Someone didn’t just find the hardware. They deployed a localized frequency jammer. It’s flooding all our receivers with white noise. The encryption keys we used to access the penthouse server are being wiped from the system.” "Step back," I ordered, tapping his shoulder. The man practically scrambled out of the chair. I sat down, my eyes scanning the lines of code scrolling across the secondary monitor. I didn't need a tech team to tell me what was happening. I had spent years building the digital infrastructure for Blackthorn; I knew these algorithms better than the people who wrote them. My fingers hit the keyboard, attempting to reroute the signal through a secondary proxy. But every backdoor I tried was already being slammed shut, isolated, and deleted. The security sweep was thorough, ruthless, and highly professional. They had pulled the pinhole camera from the spine of a book on the third shelf, found the audio transmitters under the kitchen counter and inside the living room light fixture, and now the signal from the master bedroom was being aggressively scrambled into white noise. I stopped typing and leaned back in the chair, my face completely expressionless as I stared at the blank screen. I had caught less than sixty seconds of her morning. Just enough to see her standing by the mirror in a sharp black suit, her dark hair pulled back tightly, looking smaller and more fragile than she ever let anyone see. And now, she is gone. Marco stepped into the doorway of the server room, his arms crossed over his chest. He took one look at the dead monitors, then looked at the sweating technicians, and finally at me. "Clear the room," Marco snapped authoritatively, "Leave the hardware. Get out." The three techs didn't need to be told twice. They gathered their things in a rush and sprinted past Marco, closing the soundproof door behind them. "Leave the equipment alone, Damian," Marco said, walking over to lean against the console. "You knew this was going to happen the second Mikhail’s plane touched down." "Lev," I muttered, my jaw tightening until it ached. "Lev," Marco confirmed. "The man spent years in the Russian Special Forces clearing high-profile targets in Moscow before Mikhail pulled him into the Bratva inner circle. He knows exactly what frequencies to look for." A deep, suffocating frustration settled under my ribs. For two years, I had held the digital thread to her life. I knew the exact cadence of her breathing when she couldn't sleep. Now, the old men had surrounded her, Lev had cut my line, and she was walking into a snake pit entirely unprotected. "He's doing his job, Damian," Marco added quietly, watching me. "He’s family. He’s there to keep her safe." "His job is to keep her from getting shot," I hissed, spinning the leather chair around. The easy look on my face vanished, replaced by something dangerous. "He doesn't get to block me out. He doesn't get to stand in her living room while she’s bleeding inside and pretend he's the only one who can protect her." "Well, right now, he is," Marco countered, refusing to back down. "And they just left the penthouse five minutes ago. Lev has a three-car convoy moving her toward the Vitale estate for the meeting. Your father and Mikhail are already waiting for her there." The Vitale estate. A sprawling, heavily guarded fortress outside the city limits, completely separate f