Ruthless Scar (The Ruthless #2)

Chapter 1

ISABELLA

Thirty-seven hours. The coffee went cold. I drank it anyway.

Focus.

My algorithm is running. Six hours chewing through the encrypted Benedetti files I spent three weeks cracking.

The trafficking operation sprawls across four screens like a disease.

Routes and connections threading through the Port of New Orleans and spreading outward.

Safe houses. Buyers. Money that doesn’t officially exist.

The photo on my wall says it anyway. School picture, eighth grade. All braces and attitude, wearing the shirt I told her was ugly. She wore it anyway. Stubborn. Loud. Mine to protect.

Was.

Her name is a variable I keep isolated. Run it too often and the whole system crashes.

The brownie box on the stove. Same brand they always bought. She burned them every single time, set off the smoke detector, laughed so hard she snorted when the alarm screamed. The last time she got batter on my sweater and wiped her eyes and said, Izzy. Your face. You should see your face.

I haven’t moved that box. Can’t throw it away. Can’t open it.

Focus. Focus.

The algorithm hits 87 percent.

“Come on,” I mutter. “Come on, come on.”

Years of building this. Of becoming Ghost. The untouchable presence in the forums where information trades like currency, where they assume I’m male because women in those spaces don’t stay women long.

They become product. So I built a man out of nothing and disappeared inside him.

Isabella Vitale doesn’t exist in those rooms. Ghost does.

Ghost has been mapping the Benedetti operation for eighteen months, pulling threads from servers I was never supposed to touch, assembling a picture one stolen fragment at a time.

90 percent.

“Don’t choke on me now.” My thumbnail is raw. I’ve bitten it to nothing. My hands won’t be still.

93 percent.

The screen flickers. Data cascades down in columns, sorting itself into something legible. Something that reads like geography instead of noise.

And there it is.

“Found you,” I whisper.

The Benedetti intake compound. Near the Port.

The processing point where girls come through before they’re moved into the staging network.

I’ve been circling it for months, tracking the edges of it without being able to confirm.

Now I have confirmation. Activity logs. Transport schedules. Proof that they bring them here first.

Sof came through here. Maybe recently. Maybe she’s still in the system.

A sound tears out of me that I don’t recognize as my own voice.

My hands fly across the keyboard. Satellite images, shipping manifests, cross-referencing and reconfirming because I’ve been wrong before.

I’ve followed false leads into dead ends, and I know what hope feels like right before it becomes something else.

But this is real. The data is solid. The next transport window is twelve days out.

I press my palms against my eyes until I see stars.

Twelve days. I have an intake point and a timeline and no staging warehouse. The Benedettis use multiple locations. Without knowing which one they’ll move her through, I’m still guessing. Still circling. Still alone with a keyboard and a ticking clock.

I shove back from the desk. “Found the door,” I say to the empty room. “Can’t kick it down alone.”

Whoever’s been watching me has resources. Reach. The kind of power that makes problems disappear.

Including people like me.

The forums have been buzzing for weeks. Someone powerful has been squeezing the Benedetti operation. Resources and reach I don’t have. Pressure I can see the effects of even if I can’t identify the source. Scared men make mistakes. Whoever they are, they’ve been useful without knowing it.

Use the chaos. Use whatever help comes. Get her out.

I’m reaching for the cold coffee when the alert sounds. Soft chime. The kind most people would dismiss. But I built this system from the ground up, and this particular tone means my perimeter has been tripped. Someone is probing my network.

My fingers go numb on the keys. I’m already in the security logs, tracing the intrusion before the adrenaline has fully hit. Muscle memory.

The probe is sophisticated. Careful. Not amateurs. Not even close. Professional. Targeted.

A second wave hits my firewall. Not probing anymore. Pushing. They want in. I’m the only thing between them and everything I’ve built.

My defenses peel back one by one. Three gone. Four.

“No, you don’t.”

I reroute. Throw up decoys. Patch the breach. They punch through the first decoy in two seconds. Faster than they should be able to. Faster than anything I’ve seen short of a state actor.

Five walls down. Two left.

I kill the connection. Full blackout. Screens dark. Count to thirty. Fists white on the desk. The walls press in.

I reconnect through a clean route. They got close. Too close. Too close.

“Trace it.” My voice sounds strange in the silence. “Trace it, trace it.”

I run the trace before they can regroup. Bouncing the signal, fighting back. Forty-seven seconds. The origin point materializes on my screen. Just an IP address. Meaningless until I run it against everything I’ve collected.

I stop typing.

I’ve seen this signature before. Brushed against these servers while mapping New Orleans. Pulled fragments from infrastructure I had no business touching and filed it away as background noise. Powerful. Private. Careful.

Someone noticed.

I check my physical security without thinking about it. Cameras. Motion sensors. Stair alerts. Nothing triggered. They have my digital signature but not my location. Not yet.

I dig into the logs. Scroll back through weeks. Months. There. And there. And there. Subtle touches I dismissed as noise. Patterns I was too focused on the Benedettis to read.

Fuck. Sloppy. I was so goddamn sloppy.

I’ve been monitored. By someone with reach. Resources. Whoever has been squeezing the Benedettis has also been watching the person watching them.

I could run. Pack the drives, burn the apartment, become someone else in another city. Ghost can be rebuilt anywhere.

But she can’t run. Not locked in a warehouse with twelve days on the clock.

I didn’t go back for her the first time. I told myself I needed one more year, one more semester, one more thing to carry when I came back for her. I was wrong. I was eighteen and scared and wrong, and she paid for it.

I’m not leaving her again.

Which means I can’t run.

The trace blinks on my screen. Patient. Circling. A predator with more resources than me. And now they know exactly where to look.

On the wall, she’s still smiling. Braces. That ugly shirt. Attitude I couldn’t argue with even when I tried.

Okay. I crack my knuckles. Pull the keyboard closer.

“Let’s see who you are.”

I start hunting back.