5. Eva
EVA
Dmitri texts at midnight because men who control your life never respect your sleep schedule.
Like I could sleep anyway.
The message is short—a location, a time, and a company name I’ve never heard of. No context. No explanation. That’s how it always works with him. He feeds me just enough information to do the job, never enough to understand why.
I stare at the text for a minute, then put my phone on the nightstand next to the knife.
Tomorrow I’ll do a job for the man who owns my brother’s debt. And then I’ll bring every piece of it to the stranger who lives above the dry cleaner.
My life has taken a real interesting turn.
I meet Dmitri at ten in the morning at a café in Back Bay. It’s the kind of place that serves twelve-dollar lattes and puts foam art on top, which tells you everything about the man’s taste and nothing about his black soul.
I do a quick scan of the room before I sit down. There are two possible exits…the front door and a hallway past the restrooms that probably leads to a kitchen. The corner table is occupied. Four other customers are in the café, none of them looking at me.
You never know where a threat might be lurking.
My need to scout a room is a prison habit. It’ll never go away, and honestly, I don’t want it to.
He’s already there, dressed in an expensive coat that fits him like it was custom-made, which it probably was.
He’s got a coffee in front of him that he hasn’t touched judging by the foam.
He never touches it. The coffee is just a prop, part of the performance of being a normal man in a normal café instead of someone who could have my brother killed with a phone call.
“Eva.” He gestures to the chair across from him. “Sit.”
I sit. A waiter appears and I order a black coffee.
“How are you?” he asks, like we’re old friends catching up.
“Fine. What’s the job?”
He smiles. He always smiles when I skip the small talk, like he finds my rudeness charming. That makes my skin crawl.
“A company called Meridian Capital Partners. It’s a mid-size investment firm. I need their client list, internal communications for the last six months, and any files related to real estate holdings in the Boston metro area.”
“That’s a lot of data.”
“You have until Friday.”
“I’ll have it later today.”
The smile widens slightly. “That’s why I like working with you, Eva. You don’t waste my time.”
I don’t waste your time because the faster I finish, the faster I can stop being in the same room as you.
But I keep that behind my teeth.
“Anything else?” I ask.
“Just one thing.” He picks up his coffee and takes a sip. “How’s Sal?”
The air leaves my lungs. He asks about Sal the same way every time, like we’re discussing a mutual friend. And every time, I feel the leash around my neck tighten.
“He’s fine,” I say, balling my fingers into tight fists in my lap.
“Good. The restaurant is doing well?”
“It’s doing fine.”
“I’m glad.” He sets the coffee down. “Family is important. Don’t you think?”
I look at him across the table and let him see exactly what I think of that question. He holds my gaze and his smile doesn’t waver because Dmitri Kozlov has never been rattled by anything in his life, least of all me.
“Wednesday,” I say, shooting up from my chair.
“Wednesday,” he agrees.
I walk out of the café with my hands stuffed in my pockets.
I don’t look back. My hands shake. They always shake after my meetings with Dmitri.
Not during. Never during, because I refuse to give him that, but after, when I’m far enough away that he can’t see.
The trembling starts in my fingers and works its way up my arms, and I walk three blocks before it stops.
I’ve been doing this for months. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.
You don’t get used to it. You just get better at hiding it.
Sal has no idea any of this exists. He thinks I do freelance computer work for small clients who don’t ask questions.
He doesn’t know about Dmitri. He doesn’t know that the debt he can’t dig out from under is the same rope that’s tied around my neck.
If he knew, he’d do something stupid and brave and it would get him killed, because that’s who Sal is.
He’d rather burn than watch someone he loves get torched.
So I carry it. And I keep my mouth shut. And every time he asks me how things are going, I swallow the truth like glass and pretend everything is fine.
The job takes me six hours. I crack Meridian Capital from my apartment, pulling data in layers so the intrusion looks like routine network traffic. Client lists, internal emails, real estate holdings flow through my screen in clean, organized streams.
I encrypt it, route it through three countries, and send it to Dmitri’s secure drive. Done. Delivered. Another brick in whatever he’s building that I’m choosing not to look at.
Except now I have to look at it. Because that’s the deal I made with the stranger on my stoop.
I copy everything onto a separate drive, tuck it into my jacket pocket next to the burner phone, and sit there staring at it for a long time.
The last time I brought stolen data to a man, I ended up in handcuffs.
Daniel had the same energy. Not the same personality, though.
Daniel was all charm and polish. But the same setup.
The same “trust me, I’ll take care of you, just bring me what you’ve got.
” I walked right into that, eyes wide open, because I was young and stupid, and I thought being smart with computers meant I was smart about people.
I wasn’t. And I paid for it with fourteen months of my life.
Now I’m about to walk across the street with a drive full of stolen data in my pocket and hand it to a man whose last name I don’t know. A man who broke into my system, showed up at my apartment, and moved into my neighborhood to stay close to his mission. And me.
The only thing separating him from Daniel is a pair of glasses and the fact that he hasn’t lied to me yet.
That I know of.
I check the go bag in the closet. Still packed. Still ready. I bite down on my lower lip.
Except I can’t leave Sal. I have to be smart about this.
So I put my hand on the doorknob and stand there for a full thirty seconds, debating my next move.
With a frustrated sigh, I pull open the door, because the alternative is sitting in this apartment doing Dmitri’s work until he doesn’t need me anymore and Sal pays the price. At least this way, there’s an ending. Maybe.
God, I hope I’m not being stupid again.
I don’t go straight to his apartment. I walk past the building first and check the street, the cars, and the windows around it.
Nobody’s watching. There are no vans, no cameras I don’t recognize, no one sitting in a parked car pretending to look at their phone. Then I circle the block and come back.
Old habits. Smart habits. The habits that would have kept me out of prison if I’d used them with Daniel.
I text the burner.
I’m outside.
The door buzzes open thirty seconds later. I take the stairs, not the elevator, because elevators are boxes and boxes are traps.
Wolfe opens the apartment door wearing an AC/DC shirt and glasses that are slightly crooked on his face.
Sweet Lord. Clark Kent traded in Metallica for highway-to-hell vibes and somehow it works even better. I hate that I notice these things.
I stay in the doorway. I don’t walk in.
“You going to stand there all night?” he asks.
“I’m deciding.”
“Deciding what?”
“Whether this is the second worst decision I’ve ever made.”
He doesn’t try to reassure me. Doesn’t say “you can trust me” or “I’m not going to hurt you” or any of the things Daniel would have said, smooth and warm and completely full of shit. He just steps back and leaves the door open, giving me the choice.
I hate that that’s the thing that makes me walk in.
Behind him, his apartment looks like someone crammed an entire office into a studio. There are monitors, cables, and a desk that takes up half the living room. And on the kitchen counter, a single box of Honey Nut Cheerios is lined up with the edge perfectly.
“Is that your dinner?” I ask, pointing at the box.
“My needs are pretty simple.”
“Just Honey Nut Cheerios?” I put the drive on his desk, but I don’t sit down. Not yet. “Not every night, right?”
He nods. “Every night.”
“That’s depressing. Also not exactly the dinner of champions.” I waggle my eyebrows at him.
“I’ve never been a fan of Wheaties. And cereal is efficient. I don’t waste time deciding what to eat. I spend that time on things that matter.”
“And Honey Nut Cheerios is where you landed for ‘most efficient meal’?”
“They’re a perfectly balanced cereal.”
“They’re what you feed toddlers.”
He looks at me over his glasses and I swear there’s the tiniest flicker of amusement in those blue eyes, gone so fast I almost miss it. “Do you want some or not?”
“I’d rather eat the box.”
He doesn’t smile, but his mouth does the thing. The quick sideways twitch that I’m starting to catalog against my better judgment.
I sit down. Not because I trust him. Because I need to see what’s on that drive more than I need to protect myself from another bad decision.
“What’s on the drive?” he asks, pulling it into his system.
“Meridian Capital Partners. Client lists, six months of internal comms, real estate holdings in the Boston area. Dmitri wanted it by Friday. I gave it to him by tonight because I don’t like owing him extra days.”
“Smart.” His fingers are already moving across the keyboard at that superhuman speed. “What else did he ask for?”
“Nothing. Well, that’s not true. He asked about Sal. The way he always does.” I lean against the wall and fold my arms. “Like he’s asking about a pet he’s thinking about putting down.”
Something in Wolfe’s jaw tightens. It’s barely noticeable, but I’ve been reading faces for a long time now.
“Tell me about the meeting,” he says.