1. Eva
EVA
I pick up my coffee mug and take a sip, the bitter liquid making my lips twist. It went cold two hours ago, but I drink it anyway because wasting things is a habit I trained myself out of while I was in prison.
I sit back and stretch my arms overhead, my back stiff from sitting.
It’s three in the morning. I’m running a data pull from a shipping company that Dmitri Kozlov wants access to.
Cargo manifests, port schedules, and customs contacts appear on my monitor.
I narrow my eyes at the screen. Dmitri doesn’t trust me with anything that matters, business-wise.
But he trusts me to be quiet. And he trusts that I’ll keep showing up because my brother Sal owes him more money than either of us can count, way more than he can ever earn from his small neighborhood restaurant.
The shipping company’s customs contacts are the same as ones I pulled from a logistics firm not too long ago.
Different company, same port, same contact names in the records.
It’s not a coincidence. It never is. It’s the same kind of data every time.
It’s a pattern, clean enough that I could follow it if I wanted to.
I don’t.
Yes, I can see loose connections between targets, patterns that look less like random jobs and more like someone building something. What, I don’t know, and I leave it at that.
My stomach tightens the tiniest bit, the way it always does when a plan starts forming in front of me.
But I don’t follow the details. I never do, not anymore.
The last time I got curious about the ‘bigger picture’, I ended up in a courtroom listening to a judge tell me how many years of my life I was about to lose.
There were parts of Daniel’s job that didn’t make sense to me. Gaps in logic, pieces that didn’t line up with what he told me. I mean, I saw them. I just didn’t push him for details when I should have.
Now the stakes are higher. The work I’m doing is illegal, and asking questions might have deadly consequences. So again, I keep my mouth shut and my head down and I just do the job. And so far, it’s kept me and Sal alive.
Here’s how you end up doing illegal work for a Russian criminal at three in the morning: First, you trust the wrong man.
Then you go to prison for a crime he helped commit and walked away from.
While you’re inside, your brother borrows money from people he shouldn’t have because your legal bills were drowning him and banks don’t lend to the family of a convicted felon.
When you get out, nobody legitimate will hire you because the world doesn’t care about your side of the story.
But as every criminal and crime boss knows, the dark web doesn’t check references.
And the man who owns your brother’s debt knows exactly how to find someone desperate enough to work without asking questions.
I wrap my arms around myself, my breath clouding as I heave a deep sigh.
The apartment I’m renting is a dump, but it’s my dump.
One bedroom, a kitchen the size of a closet, and a radiator that clanks all night but barely puts out heat.
I work at a secondhand desk I got off the sidewalk on trash day and sit in a chair that’s slowly destroying my spine.
The building’s wiring is so old I can’t run my full equipment setup without blowing a fuse, so I stagger my sessions and wear two jackets instead.
Sal kept my equipment in his closet while I was inside.
Laptop, drives, everything. He didn’t ask questions.
He just stored it and waited for me to come home.
Technically, my release conditions say I’m not supposed to touch anything with a computer processor, which means every time I open this laptop, I’m already breaking the law.
Dmitri knows that. It’s one more chain he’s got around my neck. If I don’t cooperate, he doesn’t just threaten Sal. He tips off my parole officer and I’m back in a cell before sundown.
My fingers are stiff from the cold and my lower back aches from this piece of crap chair, but I stopped complaining about lack of comfort a long time ago. You learn that fast in the clink. Comfort is a luxury, and you check that the minute they put the cuffs on you.
The data pull finally stops. I encrypt the data, export it, and route it through three countries before sending it to the secure drive Dmitri’s people check every Tuesday.
Then I wipe everything out from my session, eliminating all the evidence that separates people who get caught from people who don’t.
I’ve been on both sides of that line. I will never cross back.
Prison gave me a lot of things I didn’t ask for. Insomnia, a distrust of tight spaces, and the ability to throw a punch that lands hard.
Just as I go to shut my computer down, my eyes widen, breath hitching as my finger freezes on the track pad.
That’s when I see it.
My pulse kicks before my brain catches up.
And that’s not typical for me.
I stare, open-mouthed, at the timestamp in my connection logs.
Not the shipping company’s logs, mine. There’s a forty-nine-minute window where something accessed my network, something I didn’t see.
It got into my personal network. The one I’ve spent every free minute building since I got out of prison.
The one thing in my life that was supposed to be untouchable.
I clench and unclench my fingers. Then the rest of me follows, plunging into a deep-freeze.
I learned it my first week inside. When you don’t know what’s coming next, you stay as still as possible.
You don’t react. You wait and let the fear pass through you instead of making impulsive decisions for you.
It’s not a skill I picked up easily. But I found out very quickly how important it is.
I go through lines and lines of code, sweeping my eyes over every single one, my pulse hammering so hard I can feel it in my fingertips.
Shit, shit, shit.
Someone was in my system for forty-nine fucking minutes.
They didn’t take anything. They didn’t plant anything.
They just looked around, browsed like it’s Prime Day on freaking , opening and closing files, scouring data like it’s my resume.
And the fact that they chose what to look at and what to leave alone tells me this wasn’t a random break-in.
This was someone with a plan and the patience to stick to it and find what they were looking for.
Then they made a clean exit. No damage left behind.
No virus. Just that one damn timestamp sitting there like an anonymous calling card. They knew exactly what they were doing.
My breath hitches, and I hate that because it makes me feel even more out of control than I am at this second.
I inhale for four seconds, hold it, then let it out for six.
The cold helps. It’s hard to spiral when your fingers are numb and the radiator’s given up for the night.
But there’s a sick feeling spreading through my chest that I haven’t felt since the day Daniel’s name showed up on the prosecution’s witness list. That feeling of finding out you’re not as safe as you thought you were.
I tug the ends of my hair. The way they got into my network is the part that makes my skin crawl. They didn’t force anything. It wasn’t a true intrusion. It was actually my oversight…a gap between two of my security layers. I had no idea it even existed until now.
With a grunt, I slap my palm against the desk.
I built this system. I should know every inch of it.
Whoever found that gap took the time to study how I build things, learned my habits, and found the one place where I got comfortable and stopped checking up on myself.
Someone out there has been watching me long enough to know how I think, and that thought twists in my gut like a jagged blade.
I think about the front door that’s ten steps behind me.
My go bag is in the closet—cash, burner phones, three USB drives with different identities.
I’ve run once already since I got out. Not that I got far.
After all, Sal is here and I can’t leave him.
That’s the leash no one had to put on me. I slapped it on myself.
But if I had to, I could be someone else by tomorrow afternoon, and right now every nerve in my body is screaming at me to move, to run, to get the hell out of here before whoever this is comes back.
Except…if they found me here in this shitty apartment, they’ll find me in the next spot too. Running doesn’t fix the problem. It just moves it. And I’m so tired of running that it almost outweighs the fear.
Almost.
I pace the length of my apartment, going through the short list of people who’d want to find me. Dmitri already knows how to reach me. He doesn’t need to break in when he can just call. The shipping company doesn’t know I exist. Law enforcement?
I doubt it. In my experience, Feds grab everything and sort it out later. This person was careful, selective, almost respectful about it, which is a word I never thought I’d use for someone who just violated the only safe space I have left in the world.
That bastard Daniel is in Singapore. Last I checked, he was working for a cybersecurity firm and posting pictures of his lunch online like a man who’d never ruined anyone’s life.
But Daniel doesn’t have the skill for this.
He was always better at talking people into things than doing the actual job, which is how he got me to do his dirty work and let me take the fall.
I press my fingertips to my throbbing temples.
Fourteen months in federal prison.
People probably think I wish him dead during every one of my waking hours.
But I don’t. The rage has fizzled. Now it’s my own stupidity that drives me batshit crazy.
When I think about him, I remember how it felt to stand in that courtroom while I was being sentenced.
I filed that feeling away so I’d never forget what trusting the wrong person costs.