Chapter 30
ASTRID
Elena’s computer room is less of a room and more of a sanctum.
Situated beneath the east wing of the Ivanov mansion, it’s cold and sterile, humming with a low, constant buzz from a dozen machines working overtime.
Server racks line one wall like soldiers, a sprawl of monitors along another with three curved screens forming a control center that would make the NSA jealous.
There’s a neon-accented poster of Ghost in the Shell on one wall, a faded EFF sticker peeling from a mini-fridge, and a trash can nearly overflowing with take-out containers.
She’s got EDM pulsing at low volume, the kind of music that either triggers a migraine or rewires your brain for focus. Apparently for Elena, it’s the latter.
“You see this?” I say, pointing to a line item on the spreadsheet I’ve pulled up on my laptop.
The documents Yuri gave me from the warehouse raid have been scanned and uploaded onto my computer for perusal.
“Seven figures routed through a shell corporation in Panama, disguised as a deferred equity swap.”
Elena swivels in her chair, sipping from a mug that says World’s Okay-est Hacker. “What’s a deferred equity swap?”
“It’s when two parties agree to exchange future cash flows tied to equity performance without actually owning the stock. It’s finance speak for ‘hide the money long enough to forget where it came from.’”
She types something rapid-fire, muttering, “Okay, I’m brute-forcing the hashed login to the proxy node, and once I’m in, I can spoof the MAC address and backdoor us through the Cayman mirror.”
“Right,” I say. “Cool. English, please.”
“I’m breaking in to the fund’s shadow ledger. Legally speaking, we’re in a gray area. Morally speaking? Well, that’s a whole other matter.”
I smile. We work in tandem, like people who’ve done this for years. Her hands fly across the keyboard while I scan spreadsheets, and it occurs to me, again, that Elena could run the entire Ivanov IT department single-handedly if she wanted to. Probably already does.
She pushes back from her keyboard with a stretch and wanders toward the little kitchenette tucked in the corner, refilling her mug.
“So,” she says casually, “has Grigori been too much?”
I look up. “Too much?”
“You know. Looming. Brooding. Intimidating like it’s his love language.”
I laugh. “No. Honestly, he’s more of a gentle giant.”
Elena chuckles, leaning against the counter.
“Don’t let him catch you saying that. He likes to be thought of as terrifying.
But yeah, he’s a true softie, especially with Sergei.
Always has been. You should see him at bedtime.
His voice goes all hushed as he reads the same picture book five times in a row without complaining, doing all the silly voices. ”
There’s tenderness and love in her tone, and I think about my twins. I almost tell her. I want to. But it’s not time yet.
Besides, we’ve got too much to do.
“Alright,” I say, swallowing the thought, turning back to my screen. “Let’s see what Legacy Holdings is hiding behind all that red tape.”
Elena grins and slides back into her chair, fingers already dancing. “Time to crack some skulls. Digitally, of course.”
The hours slip by. We dive deeper into the data Yuri pulled from the Legacy Holdings archive, combing through quarterly reports, dormant accounts, and wire transfers that shouldn’t exist.
The goal is simple in theory—find the earliest point of overlap between Agent Spalding and Christian De la Rosa. In practice, it’s like chasing smoke through a hall of mirrors.
“Okay. January 2020. Legacy Holdings moved five million dollars through an SPV into an import company flagged by the DEA last year. In the same quarter, the cartel funded a side operation in Tijuana.”
“There’s a possible link,” Elena says, already flipping between screens. “Give me the transaction ID… yeah, there it is. Same routing chain bounced through a server in S?o Paulo. And guess what? I found an FBI login pinging off the same IP address forty-eight hours later. Guess whose badge ID.”
“Spalding.”
“Bingo.”
My heart kicks harder in my chest. “So they were circling each other that early.”
“At minimum. Could be even earlier. This is just the first one we can prove.”
I tap out a few notes, organizing the timeline into a visual graph.
The connections are starting to sharpen.
Legacy Holdings transfers feeding cartel operations, mirrored by Spalding’s sudden ‘assignments’ to regions where the money moved next.
It’s like watching a pattern emerge beneath dust, horrifying and obvious.
“You’re good at this,” Elena says, eyeing my work. “Like, scary good. You ever think about going full dark-side? Cook some books, offshore a fortune, retire to Monaco? You’re part of the Bratva now. Might as well live the life.”
I snort. “You’re the one who gets off on cracking into sealed servers for fun.”
She grins. “That’s a valid lifestyle choice.”
“Let me guess, your retirement plan involves a villa in Spain and an extradition-proof VPN?”
“Obviously.” She smirks. “But don’t dodge the question. You’ve got the soul of a white-collar criminal who just needs the right excuse.”
I give her a long look. “Only if the law loses all meaning.”
“Babe,” she says, “have you met late capitalism?”
We both laugh, and for a second the air in the pit feels lighter, even warm.
There’s something easy about Elena—sharp-edged, but disarming.
Her mind moves like quicksilver, and even when I can’t keep up with the tech jargon, I can feel us syncing in rhythm, pulling threads together from different sides of the map.
I almost forget to be scared.
Then she stills. Her fingers pause mid-keystroke. Her expression flattens, and the light in her eyes snuffs out into something colder.
“Elena?”
She blinks once, then twice, and suddenly she’s typing again, frantic and aggressive. The rhythm is wrong. Desperate.
“Elena, what happened?”
“I just got kicked out,” she says. “From the Caymans archive. Vault server locked me out. Hard.”
A cold ripple slides through me. “Did someone see you?”
“Could be.” Her voice is clipped, low. “Could also be internal security protocols. Either way, I was ghosting that network for days, and now it’s acting like I never existed.”
She’s already rerouting, flipping into new screens, and killing processes, all while muttering under her breath. The EDM track looping in the background suddenly feels too fast, too loud. My ears ring.
“This a problem?” I ask quietly.
She doesn’t answer right away. Just types. Then leans back, jaw tight. “It’s not good. It means someone touched the system. Maybe someone high up. I need to come in sideways now through a different route, different cloak. It’s slower, more visible, but I’ll get us back in.”
I study her face. She’s trying to keep her expression neutral, but her foot is bouncing under the desk. Elena, cool as arctic glass, has been rattled.
“Are you worried?” I ask softly.
She hesitates. “Only slightly more than usual.”
“Elena—”
“I’ve done worse,” she says, cutting me off. “It’s fine. This just means we need to hit pause. I don’t want to leave a trail in the middle of active tracing.”
I nod, though every inch of me resists. We were making real progress. The connections were finally clicking into place, but now, the door has been slammed shut. Was it because we were getting too close?
“How long will it take?” I ask.
“If I’m lucky? A few hours. Realistically?” She sighs. “A day. Maybe two.”
She exhales sharply, finally meeting my eyes. There’s still a spark of confidence there, but it’s dimmer now.
A beat passes. “You’ll get back in.”
“Damn right I will,” she says, trying to sound cocky. It almost works.
She pushes back from her desk, cracking her knuckles. “Alright. Let’s call it for now. I’ve got work to do that you don’t want to witness. You’d lose all respect for me.”
“Too late,” I murmur, then offer a grin.
She grins back, crooked, tired. “You’re a delight.”
“I try.”
Elena logs out of the system with a few quick keystrokes. The room dims as her monitors power down, leaving only mine still glowing in the dark. She stretches, tossing her hoodie over her shoulder and slipping her feet into mismatched slides.
“I’ll ping you when I’m back in,” she says.
I nod. “Be careful.”
“Always. You too.”
And then she’s gone, up the stairs, into the brighter world above.
I sit still for a moment, hands resting on the keyboard. The screen in front of me reflects a dozen little red flags. Suspicious transfers. Unanswered questions. An ugly, intricate web that stretches deeper than I ever imagined when I agreed to help Yuri trace a dirty fed’s finances.
I exhale slowly. Silence fills the pit. It’s colder now. Not just the machines, not just the basement. It’s something else. Something beneath the surface, circling.
Something has shifted.
And we both felt it.
I don’t move right away after Elena leaves. The silence feels unnatural without her music—no thudding bass, no low curses when a script fails, no furious tapping on the keyboard. Just the mechanical hum of resting machines and the faint buzz of my thoughts.
I scroll through what’s left of the transaction data. Most of it is noise—small, scattered sums threaded through anonymous accounts. But then one catches my eye. Twenty-two thousand eight-hundred dollars. Clean. Ordinary. Almost too ordinary. The date is February 2019 in Isla Verde Capital.
I don’t recognize the name, and that’s saying something. I’ve spent the last two weeks memorizing every alias and holding company tied to the Ivanov web and the known cartel fronts. This isn’t one of them.
I cross-check the entry with one of Elena’s older data scrapes—wire logs from a seized cartel node. It takes a minute, but then I see it, one line, nearly erased, marked “Colón Logistics,” and tagged to the same month.
A logistics hub in Panama.
I remember Yuri mentioning it in passing once, about how a shipment went dark there. It didn’t matter at the time. It wasn’t tied to any known threat. But now?
I highlight the record, heart beating faster. I should wait. Let Elena finish her end. Let it all line up before I throw it Yuri’s way.
But something in me won’t let it sit. Maybe it’s instinct. Maybe it’s the knowledge that we’ve already drawn attention. That someone saw Elena and locked her out. And whoever they are, they now know someone’s looking.
And if they know someone’s looking, the window is shrinking.
I stare at my phone, fingers hesitating over the keyboard. I could just flag the transaction. Send a note. Keep it dry, impersonal.
But I don’t want to.
This isn’t just data anymore. It’s the beginning of something that might’ve already cost people their lives. And Yuri deserves more than a spreadsheet with my initials in the corner.
I open a fresh thread and begin typing.
I think I found the first contact. February 2019. Isla Verde Capital. Transfer’s small, but it’s clean and quiet. Too clean. There’s a matching line in a cartel ledger from Colón. Could be nothing. But it doesn’t feel like nothing.
I hesitate, then type one more line.
We should talk. Tonight, if possible.
I hit send.
The screen glows softly in the darkness, throwing long shadows across the walls. I close my laptop and gather my notes, suddenly aware of how loud the quiet is now that I’ve made the choice.
Because that’s what this is—a choice. To bring it to him. Not just as someone helping on the edges but as someone in it.