Epilogue #3
“You want to help?” I asked. I couldn’t quite imagine Alice in her starched crinolines on her hands and knees with a drill.
“No,” she laughed. “Absolutely not. I just want to observe from afar. That seems like more fun. Like a home renovation video, except in real life. I’ll watch you do it. I get all the dopamine and don’t have to do any of the work.”
I laughed. I had an obsession with videos of people redoing their yards.
I hated yard work, but I loved a pretty yard, especially since I hadn’t had my own in years.
There was nothing like watching a two-minute video where someone else did all the labor and I still got to enjoy the gorgeous outcome, so I knew exactly what Alice meant.
“You can come supervise at every stage,” I said. “I just have to find the right one first.”
“Fingers crossed,” she said. “We’re leaving around twelve thirty if you decide you want to join in.”
“I’ll let you know,” I said as I headed down the hall.
The Sinclairs had said I could grab a desk wherever I wanted. A lot of the computers were open use; I just had to log in with my own code, and my desktop would pop up.
Today I headed for Hacker Central. I grabbed a seat at a cubicle next to Wren. She was hunched over the screen, her teeth buried in her lower lip, eyes narrowed.
“What?” I asked. “Did you find something?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “Just trying to figure out?—”
I waited, knowing she could be silent for thirty seconds or it could be ten minutes. I booted up a computer at my cubicle.
Finally, Wren said, “Someone’s been in here.”
“In where? Your files?”
“Kind of.”
She lapsed back into silence, and I let it go, pulling up my report, digging into the last bits of information I needed to finish it. Time slipped away as I clicked and typed, putting together the picture of someone I was very sure Knox would reject as a client.
Warm hands closed over my shoulders just as I hit save for the final time on my report.
“Ready for a break?”
Eli.
I spun in my chair. “I’m done. Just have to email this to Knox. Crazy question, but what do you think about going to the aquarium?”
“Random,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “But I’m not against it. When?”
“Alice is taking Petra this afternoon. We were going to go look at the van, but I haven’t made an appointment yet.”
“We could go before,” he said. “I’m flexible the rest of the day.”
“I cleared my schedule. Let’s do both,” I said, wishing we weren’t in the middle of our workplace and I could pull him into one of these empty offices. Maybe a midmorning break back at the barracks, I thought, mentally rearranging the day yet again.
“We could head over and see the van, then meet Alice and Petra there,” he said.
I looked up at him. “That might work perfectly.” A slow smile spread across my face. “We can stop by the barracks first. Do you have to do anything else around here?”
“One or two things,” he said. “Not much.”
Catching the meaning behind my smile, he grinned back. “I can go pretty much whenever you’re ready.”
“Sounds good to me.”
In my head, I was already kissing him, sliding my hands up the back of his T-shirt to spread my palms across his warm skin, holding on to all that was Eli. The more time we spent together, the more there was to love.
Wren turned and glanced at the two of us and made a face. “Ugh. You guys are so cute. It’s annoying, honestly. You’re glowing all over the place.”
“Sorry, not sorry,” I said. “I’ll get you some sunglasses.”
“Don’t bother. I could use the vitamin D. Anyway, it’s been so long, I can live vicariously th?—”
She cut off at the beep from her laptop and turned to squint down at the screen.
“What—”
That broke through Eli’s and my locked stare, and together we turned to look over Wren’s shoulder.
“What the fuck?” Eli breathed.
The three of us took in the words that had popped up in a box on the center of her screen.
Stop digging into Ghost Trace.
You’re in over your head.
Walk away while you still can.
Wren took a screenshot, then another. She was clicking the buttons for the third when the message disappeared with an audible ping. She began to type furiously, windows popping open and closing, a terminal window filling with code I didn’t understand as her fingers flashed over the keyboard.
“Fucking hell—where’s Mad?” Wren snapped.
“Still in the meeting,” Eli said. “He and Emmett wanted to run over something with Ryder and Cooper.”
“They got into our system here, obviously,” Wren said. “There’s no fucking trace. Not a goddamn thing. How? Fucking how?”
We stood, watching her type for another minute before she slammed shut the top of the laptop in disgust and spun around in her chair, shooting to her feet, her hazel eyes sparking fire.
Wren was usually the most relaxed, inclined to shrug and smile and let an obstacle roll off her shoulders. Her usual chill was nowhere in sight.
She glared back down at her closed laptop and then at the two of us.
“Are you going to stop?” Eli asked, curious.
“Fuck no,” she said. “But now I’m not just looking for Ghost Trace. Now I’m going to find the motherfucker who hacked into my laptop. And I’m not giving up until I do.”