Chapter 13
Will
I hurried down the hallway toward our room, heart racing. The Deep. I’d actually been inside the most restricted area of Mnemis. Ronnie’s unexpected trust had given us an enormous advantage, and I couldn’t wait to share what I’d learned with Brie.
Using my key card, I opened the door to find Brie propped up in bed, laptop balanced on her thighs. Behind her on the wall, the window-like display showed a beach scene like the ones in the Grotto.
She looked up when I entered, her face brightening. “There you are! What took you so long?”
My brain stuttered. That smile. The way her hair was pulled up in a messy bun, and her glasses sat near the end of her nose.
Wait. Why did you rush back?
Oh right.
I locked the door behind me. “You won’t believe where I’ve been.”
“Tell me.” She shifted the laptop and sat up straighter, her smile growing from the curiosity I knew was bubbling inside her.
“I got into The Deep.” I kept my voice low despite the noise machine’s protection.
“The what?” Her eyebrow—the infamous Reynolds eyebrow—shot up.
“Their highest security zone.” I crossed to the dresser where I’d stashed my clothes, pulling off my shirt and grabbing a clean T-shirt from the drawer. “Ronnie took me in.”
“And it’s not even your first day!” Her eyes widened. “How’d you manage that?”
“Pure luck. Some tech screwed up a power supply replacement, and Ronnie brought me along.” I provided her with the details about assisting him with server maintenance, how we’d been tracked by security after spending too long in one section, and finally, about the emergency that had given me access to the restricted area.
“He told the head of security that he didn’t care I wasn’t supposed to go in. ”
“What was it like in there?”
“Different from the other server areas. More cameras, fewer staff. Still only guards at the entrance, though.” I moved to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I called out to her, “Ronnie suggested I work with him directly this rotation.”
When I returned, Brie was nodding thoughtfully. “He has white-level access, right?”
“He does.” I sat on the edge of the bed opposite her. “Did you make any progress?”
“I may have found something with the authentication system,” she said, her fingers tapping absently on her keyboard. “But more importantly, I installed the Mnemis app on my phone.”
“It’s safe?”
“No way! But I partitioned my phone’s memory the same way I did with my laptop.
The app is isolated on the public-facing section with zero communication to the hidden Reynolds section.
” She smiled, clearly pleased with herself.
“I was going to update yours tonight, but you were gone longer than I’d expected. ”
“Sorry about that.” I smiled back. My Brie was so clever. And using a little jab to disguise her worry about me being off on my own. “I assume you only did that after inspecting the code?”
“Of course!” Her eyes lit up—the same gleam she’d worn when we were kids and she’d figured out how to reprogram my Game Boy to run twice as fast. “The app’s not as bad as I expected.
It’s got built-in tracking, captures screenshots periodically, and it uploads every text or call you make to a central server. ”
“Corporate surveillance on steroids.”
“Exactly.” She leaned over, precariously balancing her laptop as she grabbed her phone from the bedside table. Once she had it, she woke the screen for me. “I created a modified version of the app that will let me intercept some of those data requests.”
“Smart.”
She tapped an area that looked like the background—but I knew full well she’d hidden something there.
The screen shifted to one that only showed a single app—the Reynolds control hub.
“If I switch to the Reynolds partition, the Mnemis app will think I’ve shut the phone off.
But then I can send it fabricated data.”
“Such as?”
“Location pings that show us in the nearest approved areas. Audio loops of us having mundane conversations about work and the weather. Screenshots of us browsing innocent websites.” She paused, grinning.
“Maybe I should throw in some phone call arguments about whose turn it is to do laundry, just to make it convincing.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“They want to spy on us? Fine.” She switched the phone back to its public-facing version. “But they’ll only see what I want them to see.”
“What about the rest of your tour?”
“Not as productive as yours.” She rolled her eyes dramatically and closed her laptop. “I’m locked out of almost everything. Unless Fenix calls in for support and I get assigned the call, I won’t be legitimately able to find their server.”
“Here’s to luck finding us, then?” I left my comfortable seat near her to finish my bedtime routine. As I changed into my sleep shorts, she looked away.
“We may need it.”
“Perhaps,” I said, slipping under the covers beside her. The king-size bed suddenly seemed smaller than it had this morning. “Between your hacking skills and my new friend in hardware, we’ll find a way in.”
She set her laptop on the bedside table and turned off both the lamp and the window display, plunging the room into darkness.
I stared up toward the ceiling, a surprising peace settling over me. “You know, working with Ronnie was the perfect distraction. I barely thought about my mother the whole time I was in there.”
Brie made a little noise in the dark, part happy, part tired. “I heard you get up in the middle of the night at the hotel in Freeport. Were you checking on her?”
Last night’s guilt crept into my brain again.
Other than during our mission in Monaco two months ago, I’d been by my mother’s side every moment since my father passed.
I was the one who’d learned the subtle tells of when she was present or when she was drifting through the past. The one who’d helped her dress when she needed it, helped her with groceries on good days, and encouraged her to rest during the bad ones.
And I’d left her with a group of strangers.
“Will,” Brie prompted gently, “if you need someone to talk to, you know I’m always here. We can talk about anything.”
No, we can’t, Brie. I can’t tell you how I’ve felt about you for years. Or about how seeing you again after my year away made those feelings stronger than ever.
And I certainly couldn’t tell her how much I wanted to drag her across the bed, into my arms, and forget all about the tightrope we were walking in Mnemis.
“She had a minor fall,” I finally said. “Nothing serious. A nurse called to inform me, as they’re required to do, but she’s fine. Just a few bruises.”
The sheets rustled as Brie moved. Her hand found mine. “It’s going to be all right.”
I squeezed her hand, wishing I could believe her. But they were empty words, meant only to make me feel better. No matter how skilled I was with electronics, I couldn’t fix my mother.
“What about your family?” Changing the subject was my best course of action. “You said Evelyn told you, Scar, and Em that your father was framed. But you wouldn’t give me the details. If we can really talk about anything, tell me what happened. Why are we here?”
Brie was quiet for so long. Her fingers rested on mine, unmoving, as though she’d fallen asleep until she took a shaky breath.
“After Monaco, when we learned Enzo was involved in framing Dad, Scarlett confronted Mum.” Her voice floated to me in the darkness, smaller than usual.
“Mum said he was framed because he was investigating an art smuggling ring with terrorist connections. I guess that organization evolved into Fenix.”
“But why would he plead guilty if he was framed?” I curled my fingers more securely around hers, in case she needed the support.
“There was a day, just before his trial, when I was—” Her breath caught slightly, and she let out a slow breath. “Will, I didn’t remember it until Mum told us. A man who claimed to be from the RCMP picked me up at school. Bought me ice cream.”
“Claimed to be?” My stomach clenched. “Bloody hell, Brie.”
“It was a threat—showing they could reach all of us anytime.” Her voice trembled. “Dad’s lawyer had a solid case. The evidence was circumstantial. But he…” She sniffled. “He put us first.”
A surge of anger burned through me. My father’s heart attack last year had been sudden.
We’d had no warning signs at all. The pain was still raw, the absence still jarring.
A different kind of loss, but it tied us together in some way.
“That’s why your mother moved you to Halifax? To keep you safe?”
“Yeah. Scarlett told me that she and Emmett had also been harassed a lot at school and in our neighborhood, but I don’t remember any of it.
” She drew a ragged breath. “We visited Dad last month, like we always do in September. Mum told us to pretend we didn’t know the truth, because Dad never wanted us to know. ”
Her voice faded to a whisper. “When we arrived at the prison, and I saw the guards at the door, I had this flashback to the fake RCMP officer, and part of me wanted to run away.”
Her breath hitched, the way it did when she was fighting tears. The same woman who could crack any system couldn’t find words for her own pain—not unless it became too much to hold back.
Until tonight. Why tonight? Was it the chaos of the past two days? Lying next to me? Or had she simply reached her breaking point?
“The worst part is having to reframe everything I thought I knew. I’d spent my whole life reconciling who my father was, what he did. It didn’t make it okay, but I’d accepted that he was a traitor. But now? I have to build a whole new understanding of him, of us, of everything.”
I inched closer. I needed to do something about this. “That’s a lot to process.”
“Now that we know what really happened,” she continued, voice quavering, “we have to destroy Fenix. If we do that, Dad doesn’t have to keep sacrificing to keep us safe anymore.”
“Brie, Fenix has already tried to kill Emmett, Rav, Jayce, Drew—half the team,” I said gently. “Joseph’s sacrifice isn’t accomplishing anything anymore, is it?”
“That’s one more reason we need to—” Her voice broke as the sobs finally came.
I reached for her, finding her shoulder, then pulling her into my arms. She stiffened for a moment until she simply let it all go. Let the tears flow, let the sobs wrack her body. I held her tighter, stroking her hair as her body shook with years of grief and anger.
I couldn’t fix this. But I could be here, holding her while she processed twenty years of pain, just as I’d been there after every visit she’d made to the prison when we were kids.
“We’ll get them,” I whispered against her hair. “We’ll find the evidence, take Fenix down, and clear your father.”
She tried to pull away—Brie was always embarrassed by her tears—but I didn’t let go. She needed this.
“Let it all out, Bug. I’ve got you.”