Inside the quiet house, In-ah moved methodically from room to room, a dust cloth in hand. To anyone watching, she was simply maintaining her strict, orderly routine while Da-eun and Rora were away at the academy. But In-ah’s eyes missed nothing.

When she reached the heavy wooden desk near the living room window—the one facing the perimeter line—she noticed a microscopic misalignment in the baseboard below it.

She knelt down, her fingers tracing the edge of the wood until they caught on a tiny, artificial seam. With a sharp pull, the panel popped loose. Hidden inside the recess wasn't dust, but a highly sophisticated, unauthorized hardware node—a compact signal repeater drawing power directly from the house’s internal wiring.

It was a data-capture device, stamped with the proprietary, unbranded serial numbers used exclusively by the Kim family's private security division. They hadn't just been watching the girls outside; they had bugged the house's local network grid to intercept every local frequency.

In-ah’s expression didn't change. Her face remained a mask of cold, unbothered precision.

She didn't call the police. She didn't panic. Instead, she walked to the kitchen, retrieved a heavy, insulated wire-cutter and a high-intensity grounding probe from her utility kit, and returned to the desk.

With two swift, calculated snaps, she severed the data-feed lines, instantly blinding the Kims' local interception feed. Before the remote system could trigger a tamper alert, she jammed the grounding probe directly into the unit's main capacitor, sending a high-voltage surge ripping through the delicate circuitry. The tiny indicator lights on the device flared a violent purple before dying permanently, the internal microchips melting into useless plastic.

She tossed the ruined hardware into a trash bag, snapped the baseboard back into place, and went right back to wiping down the desk.

In the Kim control room, a sharp, high-pitched error tone cut through the low hum of the servers. On the central wall, the data stream labeled NODE-04—the silent tap inside the girls' house—suddenly turned bright red before completely flatlining into static.

Min-jun’s fingers flew across his console, trying to force a diagnostic ping to the device. "We lost the feed. The hardware isn't responding."

"Did the connection drop?" Ji-hoon asked, stepping forward, his eyes fixed on the dead screen. "Run a remote reboot."

"I can't," Min-jun muttered, his brow furrowing as he read the system logs. "It's not a software crash. The capacitor didn't just go offline—it fried. The internal microchips melted from a catastrophic voltage surge. Someone found the node and physically destroyed it."

Ji-hoon turned to Seo-jun, his expression darkening. "I told you they were playing us. Rora must have found it. She’s smarter than we gave her credit for."

Seo-jun didn't answer immediately. He stared at the dead monitor, his fingers tapping a slow, deliberate rhythm against his arm. His face remained completely calm, but his eyes were ice cold.

"No," Seo-jun said quietly. "Rora didn't do this. If she had found it, she would have used it to feed us fake data to keep us off their trail. That's what a coder does. This wasn't a digital bypass. This was a clean, physical execution."

He stood up straight, turning away from the surveillance grid. "It was In-ah. She’s cleaning up the house, just like she always does. She’s reminding us where the boundary line is."

"Are we just going to let her blind us?" Ji-hoon demanded fiercely. "We have no eyes inside that house now."

"We don't need eyes inside the house to know what they're doing," Seo-jun replied, his voice dripping with absolute certainty. "In-ah thinks she’s protecting them by destroying the tap. But all she did was confirm that the girls are still a liability. Keep the external perimeters locked down. If any of them breathes a word about seven years ago outside that house, we don't wait for a breach alert. We move in."

CHAPTER ENDS