CHAPTER 13
Gemma
The local anesthetic wears off exactly three hours and forty minutes into the drive.
It doesn't fade gradually. It vanishes all at once, replaced by a sharp, burning agony that radiates from my lower ribs with every breath I take.
The heavy suspension of the Subaru isn't nearly as forgiving as the armored SUV, and every pothole on the rural dirt road we are currently navigating feels like a physical punch to my side.
I press my left arm tightly against the tactical jacket, trying to manually brace the stitches.
"We are almost there," Callum says.
He doesn't look away from the road. The dirt path is narrow, overgrown with thick brush and tall weeds that scrape against the sides of the car. We have been driving through deep, isolated forest for the last twenty minutes.
"I’m fine," I force the words out, though my voice is strained.
"You are sweating, your breathing is shallow, and you have been clenching your jaw for the last forty miles," he replies dryly. "You are not fine. But we are almost there."
I drop my head back against the headrest, closing my eyes.
I can still feel the ghost of his hand holding mine over the center console. He let go when we turned off the main highway, needing both hands to navigate the treacherous, unpaved roads, but the memory of his grip is burned into my skin.
It scares me more than the pain in my ribs.
I have spent my entire life building firewalls.
Digital ones to protect my work, and emotional ones to protect myself.
Pippa is the only person who has ever bypassed them, and even she only gets access to the outer layers.
But Callum Reed didn't even bother trying to hack my defenses.
He just walked right through them, trailing blood and gunpowder, and sat down in the middle of my life.
The car slows to a crawl, the tires crunching over thick gravel.
I open my eyes.
The trees clear abruptly, revealing a massive, sprawling property.
The farmhouse sits at the center of a wide, unkempt field.
It is a two-story structure with faded white siding, a wraparound porch, and a dark shingled roof.
It looks entirely abandoned. The grass in the front yard is knee-high, and the paint is peeling in long, sad strips.
"This is the highly secure fallback point?" I ask, staring at the sagging porch steps. "It looks like the set of a ghost hunting documentary."
"Camouflage," Callum says, pulling the car around the back of the house and parking it inside a large, dilapidated barn that looks structurally identical to the one where he stitched me up.
He kills the engine. The silence of the isolated property rushes in to fill the cabin.
"Can you walk, or do I need to carry you?" he asks, turning to look at me.
"I can walk," I say immediately. The thought of being thrown over his shoulder again, especially with a fresh laceration, is terrifying.
I unbuckle my seatbelt. The simple movement pulls the skin tight across my ribs, and I let out a sharp, involuntary hiss of pain.
Callum is out of the car and opening my door before I can even reach for the handle.
He doesn't offer me his hand. He simply reaches in, grips my right arm firmly, and helps me slide out of the passenger seat. My boots hit the dirt floor of the barn. My knees wobble slightly, the exhaustion finally catching up with gravity, but his grip keeps me upright.
"Slowly," he instructs, letting go of my arm once he is sure I have my balance.
He grabs his tactical bag from the backseat, retrieves the encrypted drive from his front pocket, and leads the way toward the back door of the farmhouse.
Up close, the house looks even worse. The wood of the back porch is soft and rotting in places. Callum steps carefully, avoiding the weakest boards. He reaches the heavy wooden door, pulls a key from his pocket, and unlocks the deadbolt.
He pushes the door open and steps inside, his hand resting instinctively on the grip of the Glock at his waist.
He clears the immediate area before looking back at me. "Clear. Come inside."
I step over the threshold, expecting the interior to match the rotting exterior.
I stop dead in my tracks.
The inside of the farmhouse is entirely modern.
The walls have been stripped to the studs and reinforced with steel framing.
The floors are polished hardwood. The kitchen is equipped with high-end stainless-steel appliances, and the windows—which looked like cheap, single-pane glass from the outside—are thick and heavily tinted.
"It’s a bunker," I whisper, looking around the pristine living space.
"It’s a functional workspace," he corrects, walking over to a digital thermostat on the wall.
He punches in a code, and the low hum of central heating kicks on instantly.
"The exterior is designed to deter trespassers and casual observation.
The interior is designed to sustain two people for up to six months. "
"Six months?" I look at him. "You built a doomsday prepper house."
"I built a contingency plan." He drops his tactical bag onto the kitchen counter. "Sit down before you fall down."
He points to a heavy leather armchair in the living room.
I don't argue. I walk over to the chair and sink into it. The leather is cold, but the chair is deep and supportive. I lean back, closing my eyes, letting the pain in my ribs settle into a dull, manageable ache.
I hear the sound of water running in the kitchen, followed by the clatter of glass.
A moment later, Callum is standing in front of me. He is holding a glass of water and two small, white pills.
"Take these," he says.
I open my eyes, looking suspiciously at the pills. "What are they?"
"Ibuprofen and a mild muscle relaxant," he replies. "It won't impair your cognitive function, but it will take the edge off the pain so you can focus on the drive."
I take the pills, tossing them into my mouth, and drink the water.
"Where is the terminal?" I ask, handing the glass back to him.
"In the basement."
I groan, letting my head fall back against the leather. "Why is it always a basement? Can’t we hack the global financial system from a room with natural light?"
"Natural light requires windows. Windows are a tactical vulnerability." He sets the glass on a side table. "Rest for ten minutes. Let the medication work. I need to check the perimeter sensors and power up the servers."
He walks away before I can complain about the lack of sunlight again.
I sit in the quiet living room, listening to the heavy tread of his boots as he moves through the house. The heating system is slowly warming the air, chasing away the deep chill I’ve had in my bones since the power went out in the glass house.
I pull the edges of the tactical jacket tighter around my chest.
I am exhausted. I am bleeding. I am actively being hunted by a criminal syndicate.
But for the first time in forty-eight hours, I don't feel like I am going to die.
I look at the doorway leading to the basement.
Callum Reed is a terrifying man. He is violent, obsessive, and entirely comfortable with murder.
But he is also the man who cleaned the dirt off my face, gave me his sweater, and threw away his only chance at freedom just to hold my hand in a stolen car.
I press my fingers against my eyes, trying to stop the sudden, overwhelming wave of emotion building in my chest.
I can't fall apart now. We have a bank to rob.
Exactly ten minutes later, Callum returns to the living room. He has taken off the dirty, blood-stained t-shirt and replaced it with a clean, black long-sleeve henley. His dark hair is slightly damp; he must have washed the plaster dust out of it in the bathroom.
He looks entirely refreshed, which is deeply annoying.
"The servers are online," he says, stopping in front of my chair. "Are you ready?"
"Born ready," I lie, pushing myself up.
My ribs protest, a sharp twinge of pain shooting up my side, but the medication has definitely dulled the worst of it. I can stand up straight without gasping.
I follow him down the hallway and through a heavy door that leads to the basement stairs.
These stairs are concrete, not wood. The basement of the farmhouse is much smaller than the one in the glass house, but the setup is nearly identical. A massive server tower, dual monitors, and a mechanical keyboard sit on a heavy steel desk.
I sit down in the mesh chair.
Callum places the encrypted drive on the desk next to the keyboard.
"The connection is routed through a decentralized VPN," he explains, standing behind me. "It bounces your IP address across fourteen different countries before it hits the primary server. They cannot trace it back to this grid."
"Good." I plug the drive into the secure port.
The monitors wake up. The directory tree I unlocked hours ago populates the screen.
"Okay," I say, cracking my knuckles. "Let’s see how much money Marcus Thorne was hiding for his bosses."
I open the folder labeled Offshore_Routing .
A massive spreadsheet loads onto the screen. It is filled with thousands of rows of data—account numbers, routing codes, bank names in the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, and Cyprus. Next to each account is a numerical value.
I stare at the screen, my brain struggling to process the sheer volume of zeroes.
"Callum," I whisper, my eyes scanning the total sum at the bottom of the spreadsheet. "This isn't millions."
He leans over my shoulder, his hands resting on the back of my chair. I can feel the heat of his body, the solid, immovable weight of him right behind me.
"No," he says, his voice a low rumble near my ear. "It’s billions."
"Four point two billion dollars," I say, reading the exact number. "This is the entire operational budget for the syndicate. Payroll, bribes, weapons procurement, logistics. Everything."
"If we drain it, they cease to exist," he confirms.
"And if I mess this up, they trace the hack, find this farmhouse, and we cease to exist."
"You won't mess it up." The absolute certainty in his voice is staggering. He isn't offering empty encouragement. He is stating a fact. He believes in my competence as much as he believes in his own.
I take a deep breath, letting the steady rhythm of the cooling fans anchor me.
"I need the routing numbers for your ghost accounts," I say, opening a secondary terminal window.
Callum reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small, folded piece of paper. He sets it on the desk next to the keyboard. It contains a list of twelve alphanumeric codes.
"I’m going to write a script that breaks the total sum into randomized micro-transactions," I explain, my fingers already flying across the keys.
The familiar, comforting logic of code takes over my brain.
"If we try to move four billion dollars in one lump sum, it will trigger an international banking freeze.
But if we move it in increments of fifty thousand dollars, bouncing through shell companies, it will look like standard high-frequency trading. "
"How long will the transfer take?"
"To move it all? Four hours." I hit Enter , compiling the first sequence of the script. "But the moment I initiate the transfer, the syndicate’s financial monitors will see the accounts draining. They won't be able to stop it, but they will know it’s happening."
"Let them watch," Callum says, his tone completely devoid of mercy.
I spend the next forty minutes writing the most complex, aggressive routing script of my life. I build redundancies. I build false trails that lead to dead IP addresses in Russia and China. I create a digital labyrinth designed to trap anyone trying to trace the money.
My side aches. My eyes burn. But I don't stop.
"Done," I finally say, leaning back in the chair.
The primary monitor displays a single, blinking prompt.
Execute Transfer? Y/N
I look at the screen. Pressing 'Y' is the point of no return. It is the moment we officially declare war on an empire.
I look up at Callum. He is still standing behind me, his eyes fixed on the monitor.
"You’re sure about this?" I ask quietly. "Once I hit 'Yes', there is no negotiation. There is no walking away. We are stealing their entire world."
Callum looks down at me. His dark eyes are calm, resolute, and entirely focused on my face.
"I walked away from their world the moment I carried you out of your apartment," he says. He reaches down, his large hand covering mine as it rests on the keyboard. "Execute it."
I turn my hand over, lacing my fingers through his for a brief, grounding second.
Then, I press 'Y'.
The screen explodes with activity.
Lines of green code scroll rapidly down the terminal window as the script engages. On the secondary monitor, the spreadsheet updates in real-time. The massive balances in the offshore accounts begin to drop, the numbers spinning backward like a slot machine in reverse.
Four billion. Three point nine. Three point eight.
"It’s working," I breathe, a wild, euphoric rush of adrenaline hitting my system. "The money is moving into the ghost accounts."
Callum watches the screen, his expression unreadable. He doesn't smile, but the hard tension in his jaw finally relaxes.
"Good," he says softly.
He steps back from the chair, the loss of his body heat immediately noticeable in the cool basement air.
"The transfer will run automatically," I tell him, turning the chair to face him. "I just have to monitor it to make sure the connection doesn't drop."
"Monitor it," he says, turning toward the stairs. "I am going to make something to eat."
"Wait."
The word leaves my mouth before I can stop it.
Callum stops at the bottom of the stairs, looking back at me. "Is there a problem with the script?"
"No. The script is fine." I grip the arms of the mesh chair, suddenly feeling incredibly exposed. The adrenaline of the hack is fading, leaving me alone with the reality of what we just did, and the reality of the man standing in front of me. "I just... I don't want to sit down here by myself."
Callum stares at me.
He knows I am not afraid of the dark. He knows the house is secure. He knows exactly what I am asking for, even though I am too much of a coward to say it out loud.
I am asking him to stay.
For a long moment, he doesn't move. The silence in the basement is heavy, thick with the unspoken tension that has been building between us since last night.
Slowly, he turns away from the stairs.
He walks back across the concrete floor, pulls the secondary chair away from the wall, and drags it over to the desk. He places it directly beside mine, close enough that our knees are almost touching.
He sits down, leaning back, his dark eyes locking onto mine.
"I’m not going anywhere, Gemma," he says quietly.
I let out a breath I didn't realize I was holding. I turn back to the monitors, watching the syndicate’s empire burn to the ground, line by line.
And for the first time in my life, I don't feel the need to build a firewall.