Prologue
DEADLY SINS SERIES: BOOK TWO
Eva
I've learned a lot of lessons in my life, and the harshest one was that business and pleasure should never mix. Now I'm about to spend the next fourteen months regretting that I opened my legs for that bastard.
Daniel McCabe sits in the courtroom gallery three rows back from me.
He's wearing a suit that's too nice for a man who just destroyed someone's life to save his own ass. But the joke’s on me because the mastermind himself is walking out the front door of this courthouse scot-free while I’ll be led out of here in handcuffs and loaded into a fucking paddy wagon.
He never once looked at me. Not during the trial, not during his testimony, and not now, while the judge reads my sentence.
Fourteen months in a federal penitentiary for corporate data theft.
That's what the charge says. Clean and simple. But what it doesn’t include is the fact that Daniel planned the whole thing, recruited me, ran half the operation, and then cut a deal before I even knew there was a deal to be cut.
By the time I figured out what was happening, my name was the only one on the indictment.
He walks out the front door today. I will be behind bars by dinnertime.
My lawyer puts his hand on my arm. I don't feel it. I don't feel anything except rage so hot it's making my vision blur and my gut twist with a deep-rooted shame that's worse than the anger because at least anger has teeth.
Shame just eats you from the inside.
I did this to myself. That's the part I can't get past. I'm not some naive kid who got swept up in something she didn't understand. I'm a grown woman who saw the red flags and fucked him anyway because he was smart and charming and he looked at me like I was the most brilliant person he'd ever met.
And I fell for it. All of it. Like a goddamn amateur.
"Ms. Moreno." The judge finally looks at me. "Do you have anything to say before sentencing is carried out?"
Oh, I have plenty to say. I want to tell him the operation was built for two people and the evidence proves it if anyone bothered to look close enough. I want to turn around and ask Daniel how he sleeps at night. I want to scream until my throat bleeds.
But my lawyer told me to keep my mouth shut. And he's the only person in this room on my side.
"No, Your Honor."
The gavel comes down and I shudder at the finality of it. Two marshals step forward. Cold metal closes around my wrists and the sound of the cuffs clicking shut reverberates between my ears.
That’s when I hear the noise.
It comes from my brother Sal who’s sitting behind me…
a raw, gutted sound that isn't a word or a sob.
It's the sound of someone watching the only family they have left get taken away. I know it because I made the same sound in a hospital hallway when they told us about Mom and Dad. I was nineteen. Sal was seventeen. That’s when the world ended for the first time.
It's ending again. Right now. In a courtroom that smells like floor polish and stale coffee.
My pulse lodges in my throat along with the knot of tears.
I can't turn around. If I see his face, I'll lose it. And I will not lose it in this room. Not in front of the judge, not in front of the lawyers, and not in front of Daniel, who doesn't have the balls to look at what he did.
The marshals lead me toward the side door.
I keep my spine straight and my chin up because it’s all I have left.
My legs are on the verge of buckling. My chest heaves with short, sharp gasps.
But I will walk out of this courtroom like a person who still has her shit together, even if it's the biggest lie I've ever told.
My eyes betray me and I sneak a look at Sal. I can't help it.
He’s standing, his finger gripped tight on the back of the bench in front of him. White knuckles. Red eyes. Absolutely destroyed.
He mouths my name. No sound comes out, it’s just his lips moving around the two syllables that have meant "I'm here" since we were kids.
I mouth back, “I'm okay.”
I'm not okay. I'm about to go to prison because I couldn't keep my hands off a man who was playing me from day one, and my brother is going to be alone for fourteen months with no parents, no family, nothing except a nasty gambling habit and a heart too big for the world he lives in.
The door slams closed behind me, jolting me from my toxic thoughts. I shiver at the chill as we walk the length of a concrete hallway, my rubber soles squeaking on the linoleum.
I make it eleven steps before my knees give out. The marshal catches my arm before I face-plant.
"Easy," she says.
I clench my teeth so hard my jaw pops. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth and I put one foot in front of the other because that's my life now.
Sal is alone with no parents, no other family. It’ll just be him and whatever mess he's about to make of his life while I'm locked up and can't stop him.
That's the sentence the judge didn't give me. And it's the one that'll actually break me.
The handcuffs dig into my wrists, my heart racing harder with each step toward my next destination. My temples throb like the hammer of the gavel.
I file everything away as I walk. All the shame, disgust, and fear. I shove it into the place where I keep the things I can't afford to feel, right next to the image of Daniel on the witness stand lying through his teeth while I sat there in a cheap suit and watched my life swirl down the drain.
Fourteen months from now I'll walk out of here. And whoever comes out that door won't be the same woman who went in. Because that woman trusted people. That woman let someone get close enough to gut her.
As of now, that woman is dead. And whatever's left of her is about to become someone that nobody…not Daniel, not the judge, not anyone… will ever be able to touch again.
* * *
Wolfe
Eighteen Months Later
I stare at her face on my monitor at four in the morning.
The image was attached to a payment trail I cracked twenty minutes ago.
Eva Moreno. Convicted of corporate data theft, served fourteen months in federal prison.
She was released four months ago and then dropped off the map.
Until three months ago, when someone very skilled started intruding in my family's networks.
I've been hunting this ghost for weeks. Tonight I finally found her.
And I know that face.
My mind trips back to the night that changed our lives.
A gala was being held for Boston elite and my father wanted eyes on certain areas of the venue.
I walked in with bullshit credentials and ran cable through a restricted area when a women called me on it.
She checked her tablet, didn't buy my cover story, and moved on because she had bigger things to deal with than some guy with a random wire.
"Go left at the split," she said. "Or you'll get interference from the kitchen."
She worked that out from a five-second look at my setup. Then she walked away without looking back, and I knelt there on the floor like an idiot trying to remember what I was doing with my hands.
I saved a screenshot of her, one I grabbed from the corridor later that night, after a group opened fire on the gala attendees.
I've looked at it twenty-four times since.
I told myself I save everything, which is true, but my brain doesn't do this.
It doesn't hold onto people. It holds onto systems, patterns, problems it can't solve.
She's the first person it won't let go of. I don't know why. The gala attack was over two years ago, and my brain still won't file her away. I can’t for the life of me figure out why.
Now she's the ghost.
And forty-nine minutes ago, I was inside her system. I left a timestamp on purpose, because if she's as good as I think she is, she'll find it. She'll have a choice…patch the hole in her security and disappear, or leave it open and wait.
She left it open.
I know what this looks like. I know what I look like…
a man sitting alone at four in the morning, staring at a woman's face on a screen.
But this isn't about wanting something from her.
It's about the fact that my brain chose her as the problem it can't solve, and I've never been able to walk away from one of those.
She left the door open. For me.
So I'm going through it.
But I'm going to knock first.
He could have saved me. Instead, he made me his and gave me a choice with only one option.
Click here to preorder SHADOW OF SIN!