Fractured Loyalty

Loyalty was the only thing that ever kept her alive.

Now it’s the weapon being used to erase her.

After surviving the kind of black-ops mission no one was meant to walk away from, former empathic operative Lyra is doing what ghosts do best—staying off the radar, living between signal and shadow. The systems that built her, broke her, and nearly turned her into a god are still watching. But for the first time, they’re watching from a distance.
Until the world watches her kill a man she never touched.

A flawless broadcast from a global summit shows Lyra pulling the trigger. Neutral AIs certify the footage. Security grids flip her status from asset to atrocity. The same empathic networks that once echoed her heartbeat now flood the world with outrage—turning millions of strangers’ grief into a weapon with only one target.

Forced back into the game as a hunted ghost, Lyra has only two people she can’t quite bring herself to trust—and can’t afford to lose:

• Sage, the handler who helped design the cage she escaped.
• Delphine, an ex-asset whose idea of loyalty cuts as deep as any blade.

To clear her name and stay one move ahead of a planet sized manhunt, Lyra has to track the lie to its architect: a buried directive whispered about in old war files, a design for “peace” that uses human feeling as both leash and knife. The further she digs into ghost labs, echo archives, and pleasure turned into programming, the more she realizes the worst betrayal isn’t on the feeds at all.

It’s written into her.

Someone has been saving the most intimate version of her for the next phase of the plan. And finishing what she was built for may mean choosing which part of herself to sacrifice: the woman she’s fought to become… or the monster the world already believes she is.

Fractured Loyalty is Book Two of the Ghost Protocol trilogy—a dark, sensual cyberpunk espionage saga about weaponized empathy, buried directives, and the dangerous hope that even in a surveillance state, a broken ghost can still rewrite her own code.