Chapter 2
SpacePig: Really? You’ll have to do better than that, Walker.
PEPPER
I chuckle and cast the phone down onto my desk, the old cream leather chair creaking as I lean back and survey the wall of screens in front of me.
The line of code that continuously reroutes my IP through forty-seven different locations around the world still blinks at me. I wonder if he will even bother trying to trace it this time. He must have realized by now that it’s pointless.
Chase Walker is an arrogant ass, but he almost got me today.
Almost. The trap had been clever, so clever that I almost didn’t spot it, but the hairs on the back of my neck prickled of their own accord and that instinct I’ve always had took over.
Call it intuition, or fluke, whatever you like.
I call it survival. It’s the same prickle I felt a second before the lock clicked shut on that bathroom door all those years ago.
It had come too late to help me then, but I swore to myself that I’d never be caged in again in my life.
If that bastard intended to clip my wings ten years ago, he couldn’t be further from his intended goal.
I sometimes wonder where I would be if I hadn’t met Jeremy Rènir III.
Perhaps I would be studying for my doctorate by now, like a good girl.
It was the memory of hot, unwanted breath on my neck that spurred me to immerse myself in the underworld.
The blunt scrape of clipped nails around my throat as he held me down that kept my ass glued in a seat for hours learning to code.
And one day soon, it will all be worth it.
One day soon, I’ll have my revenge, and it will be sweet.
But for now, I bide my time by bringing some of the world’s other overprivileged assholes to heel. And my latest conquest? Chase Silver-Spoon Walker. Scratch that, Chase Diamond-Encrusted-Ladle Walker. King of the Manhattan social system and playboy Casanova to boot.
I can see why women are fascinated by his dark hair, strong jawline, and large stature. He’s classically handsome and then some, but he’s just another in a long line of rich, entitled jerks who think the whole world should take a knee every time they speak. And I despise him just like the rest.
My eye catches on the glowing numbers at the bottom of one screen and I curse. I’m meant to be at the foundation for my shift in an hour, which is optimistic at best with the morning subway crush. Snatching up my phone, I hook my jacket from the back of my chair and bolt for the door.
When my office locks automatically behind me, I’m greeted by the warm waft of buttered toast and the sound of pots and pans clashing together.
“Hey, heading out?” A flash of neon-pink collar-length hair pops up from behind the kitchen counter, a clean skillet in one hand and toast in the other.
“Yup, I’ll be back late.” I pluck the half-eaten slice from Sunny’s fingers as I breeze past and grin through a mouthful of buttery goodness when she protests.
“I was enjoying that.” She scowls, fisting both hands on her ripped-jean-clad hips, pan still in one.
“Get yourself to school, you’re going to be late!” I admonish before cramming the last bit of toast into my mouth and reaching for the boots that splay haphazardly by the door.
“If I’d have known you were going to be such a killjoy, I wouldn’t have let you become my legal guardian.” Her huff is swallowed by the eclectic apartment and swiftly followed by more clanging.
Once I’ve stuffed my feet into my botanical-print Doc Martens and laced them, I right myself and grin at the freckled fifteen-year-old reappearing after taking her frustration out on the cookware cupboard.
I take a look around at what I consider to be happy chaos.
Old magazines are stacked on the pine coffee table in the cramped open-plan apartment and colorful prints hang on the walls.
There is only one seat on the corduroy couch that isn’t piled high with laundry that I’ve been promising myself I’ll put away for days.
Why is it that the washing part is so easy, but the rest of the process feels like being stretched on a mediaeval torture rack?
But it’s clean and everything in this place is relatively new, which is more than Sunny and I could dream of growing up in the foster care system.
My gaze loops the room and ends up back on her, a little disgruntled still, but she knows what I’m thinking.
We’ve always been in tune, ever since she was dropped off on the doorstep of Aunt June’s one midsummer’s night by a social worker nearly a decade ago.
A tiny little thing she was back then, all knobbly knees and gap teeth, never having known love.
Looking at her now, makes my chest crack, warm emotion swelling.
I stride swiftly over, wrapping her in a tight hug that she doesn’t fight me on. “Looks like we made it, kid,” I whisper into her ear, blinking rapidly against the moisture in my eyes.
“Looks like we did,” she mumbles back reluctantly into my hair and I laugh, letting her go.
She might not be my blood, but as far as I’m concerned, she is my sister.
We found each other at a time when we needed love most and I thank my lucky stars for that.
After being bounced around from god-awful foster home to god-awful foster home, Aunt June—that’s what all her foster kids called her—kept me as long as she could.
Longer than Oregon state would normally mandate, but eventually I had saved enough money from waiting tables and had to concede that a young child needed her refuge more than me.
I went back every month to visit Sunny, to tell her about New York City and how much I wished she could see it.
When Aunt June died unexpectedly of a heart attack, it was a no-brainer to apply for guardianship. My wish was granted and, so long as I keep a good job and don’t get into trouble, nothing can take her away from me.
Which brings me back to the fact that I am going to be insanely late to work. “Right, gotta go, squirt.”
“I’ll see you later.” Sunny waves me off, already turning back to her five-course breakfast—no one ever warned me how much it would cost to feed a growing teenager.
Being that I’m technically a cyber-criminal, one might expect me to have a pot of looted crypto currency stashed somewhere on the ether web.
However, I’m not in the business of stealing or blackmailing money from people.
I break and enter, digitally speaking, but it’s in the interest of information sharing and the greater good.
America’s echelons are polluted with greedy criminals who push radical politics to serve their own agenda—both ways, I might add—and typically line their own pockets too.
I think the public deserves to know that.
There isn’t a Wall Street banker, high-flying lawyer, or tech bajillionaire I’ve come across who doesn’t have his finger in at least one spoiled pie.
The old front door rattles on its hinge slightly when it slams and I cringe when I spot my incredibly rude neighbor ambling slowly down the hallway.
I’m met with heavy grey eyebrows pulled into a scowl, wrinkle-lined lips, and a few flyaway grey hairs on the top of his shiny old-man head. He’s dressed smartly, in an outdated type of way, but his tweedy three-piece suit is slightly crumpled in places.
He opens his mouth, but having learned from experience, I don’t give him an opportunity to speak. “Good morning, Mr. Clay! Can’t stop, late for work,” I say loudly, walking briskly past and sliding into the singular elevator at the end of the small corridor, pressing the button.
Mr. Clay shuffles slowly around in his dull dress shoes to look at me. I paste a deranged smile on my face and subtly stab the ground floor button repeatedly.
“Come on, come on, come on,” I mumble through the smile.
“You had another parcel delivered to my flat today.” The words in a gruff British accent are hurled out with all the finesse of a barely leashed bark.
Shit. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Clay. I’ll ask Sunny to swing by and grab it from you before she goes to school.
” Which will serve her right for not double-checking that our deliveries have express instructions not to be left with neighbors after the last rant we had on this subject from our not-so-friendly corridor marshal.
“That’s not the bloody point!” Mr. Clay bellows and lifts a knobbled walking cane to shake at me menacingly.
My brows rise and I stab the button a few more times in desperate hope.
“I understand, sir. I apolog—oops!” The doors ping and slide jaggedly shut whilst I make an apologetic face and indicate to the closing steel doors to demonstrate I have no choice but to leave this conversation half-cut.
In all fairness, the sensors on them are dodgy enough that I wouldn’t trust them to put my hand out to stop them, even if I had wanted to.
A grumble escapes me as I start the clunky decent.
That man never misses an opportunity to moan.
He took one look at me when he moved into the building, with my pink pearlescent hair, and decided that I was trouble.
Lord knows what he would do if he ever saw my tattoos.
Call the cops, presumably. The elevator rattles to a halt and the doors ping and clunk slowly open.
“And another thing!”
My eyes fly wide with alarm as Mr. Clay appears at the threshold, his cheeks mottled and that walking cane shaking in my face.
“How the—” I trail off, utterly perplexed.
“That son of yours keeps treading mud onto the hallway carpet and—”
I peer around him as he rants, checking that we are in the cramped ground-floor lobby area of our apartment building. How the ever-loving shit did this octogenarian with a cane shuffle down two flights of stairs so quickly?
“Mr. Clay—” I begin to tell him that Sunny is not my son, but he cuts me off.
“It’s simply not acceptable to—”
“Mr. Clay!” I yell, distantly aware that the entrance to our building buzzes open behind him. The old man is shocked into silence. “I really am sorry for any—”
As if summoned by my earlier thoughts, two tall male NYPD officers loom at the old man’s back, a wall of navy blue blocking us in. I blink up in surprise. Has this asshole seriously called the cops over some redirected mail?
“Miss Quinn?” the older officer of the two asks as Mr. Clay realizes our company and moves to one side, his bushy brows hiked.
“Er, yeah?” My mouth runs dry, something cold and heavy plunging into my gut. It suddenly occurs to me that even if Mr. Clay had called the cops, they wouldn’t have arrived this quickly. Not only that, but he looks almost as shocked as I feel.
The younger officer steps forward, one hand reaching back for the cuffs on his belt. “You’re under arrest.”
“What?” I croak, taking a stuttered step back, my synapses rapid-firing to catch up.
“Thief!” Mr. Clay cries by my side, followed by a torrent of raving, righteous exclamations that I don’t follow.
I feel cool metal click around one wrist, and before I know it, I’ve been twisted around and have a cheek pressed against the rigidized metal elevator wall.
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you do say, can and will be used against you in a court of law.”
Panic explodes into my frontal lobe, adrenaline spiking out in all directions, a faint ringing in my ears droning out any further sound. Through the fog of disbelief and shock, I can think of one thing and one thing only.
The fifteen-year-old two floors up cooking breakfast, wholly unaware that life as she knows it is about to be snatched away forever.