Chapter 9
Ryder
“A re you sure this is going to work?” I ask, hesitantly. “Trust me. It will work. Let’s make our plan. We’ve got 36 hours to figure it out. It will be fine.” Elara replies .
She sits at the desk as I stand next to her, watching as she writes bullet points down the page. “First off, I say we use fake accents.” She says excitedly. “I think you just want to use a fake accent because we’re going to a fancy ball. But sure, we can call this a decision for the stability of our ruse.” I say as I shoot her a wink. She blushes and pivots her head back to the paper.
“We need to find a way to get Harper alone, but not get caught. This is where your plan of posing as potential partners comes in.” I nod in response. “And if we can’t get him alone?” I ask, trying to cover all our bases. She hesitates and I can swear I can hear gears turning in her head. “One of us could distract him while the other searches his house. The only problem is he probably has an obscene amount of security.”
“We could pull the old ‘sorry, I got lost’ card.” I say in a bad accent, making Elara cringe. “Maybe we won’t do the accents.” She says, patting my shoulder. “It wasn’t that bad.” I say, chuckling. “Uh-huh.” She mumbles. “We could still use that tactic and find his office and hope he’s got a computer or something with everything we need.”
“For someone worth $2 trillion, I don’t think he’ll just have his computer open with everything on display. He’ll probably have some super complicated encryption on it.” She retorts. I rub my hands over my face. I’m going to regret this . “I’ll handle the encryptions.” She looks at me, dumbfounded, and I sigh. “When I was in the military, part of my job in special OPs was hacking through code.” I pause. “Technically, you’re not supposed to do it outside the military because it involves adding a virus that can wipe everything on the device… and possibly the power grid up to a 5-mile radius.” I look at her as she stares at me, wide-eyed. “That’s cool as shit! We’re doing that.” I laugh at her unexpected reaction.
“While you do that, I distract Sebastian.” I raise an eyebrow at her. “How do you plan on doing that exactly?” She shrugs her shoulders. “I’ll get him on the dance floor or flirt with him or something.”
I’m not a fan of that, mostly because it could involve his hands being on her. Granted, she can take care of herself. I’m still inclined to protect her. That’s my personality, though. Definitely has nothing to do with anything else that you might be thinking. So, for the sake of the case, I’ll go with it… But I’m not going to act like I like it.
“Alright.” I say flatly. “I’ll need a new flash drive for this to work.” I add and she nods, writing it down. “We’re going to pull it off, don’t worry.” She says, holding her hand up in the air. Her hands are so small . I give her a high five before running my hand down my face.
This is going to go one of two ways. 1: it’ll go perfectly, without a hitch, or 2: it’ll all go to shit and we could die. It’s fine, though. Yeah, we’ll be fine. “You think we should tell Hartwell what we’ve found so far?” She nods her head. “Yeah. We just have to be discreet. Make sure no one is listening to our call. We don’t want to get found out through a bugged phone. Good way to get killed.” She says. She has a fair point; we don’t need to paint ourselves as targets. Elara calls Hartwell and gives him an encrypted message basically saying ‘ we need to talk ’.
???
T-minus ninety minutes until this ball starts and everything is ready to go. We just have to finish getting ready and drive over. Elara refused to show me her dress and kept it in the protective sleeve since she brought it back. I do know that it’s red because my tux has red undertones to go with the black and a red tie to match. I’m genuinely glad I told her to get me something that matches her dress because she was so flustered when I said it. Her cheeks got all red and I don’t think she could've gotten out the door any quicker to hide it. It was cute.
“Hey, El? Are you almost ready? Also, were you able to talk to Hartwell?” I ask as I fix my tie in front of the mirror hanging on the door. I hear the bathroom open and she walks out, fixing her earrings. “Yep, and yep. We’re all set on both fronts. I talked to him last night after you fell asleep. He said he wants us to keep looking into it and find something we can use in court.” She says happily. I turn away from the mirror to fully look at her. She is wearing a floor length crimson colored dress that has thin straps and a slit up the side that stops at the top of her knee. “Wow.” Is all I manage to get out.
“What? Does it look okay?” She asks, running her hands down the silk dress. “It looks perfect.” She looks back up at me. “You look beautiful, El.” I finally utter. She smiles softly as she walks towards me and adjusts my tie. “Thank you. You don’t look too bad yourself. How’s your leg?” she asks, glancing at my leg and back at me. Her question is barely audible because I can’t help but fixate my eyes on her. Her piercing, electric blue eyes are more pronounced with the black eyeliner she’s wearing and her matte red lipstick brings out her rosy cheeks. She has parted her brownish-red hair on the side and it flows down her shoulder.
“Ryder.” She pulls me out of my trance and I clear my throat. “Oh. Sorry. My leg is okay. Still sore, but I can walk.” She smiles as she grabs her phone and heads for the door. Tonight is going to be more difficult than I thought .