27. Eva
EVA
Sitting still has never been my strong suit. And sitting alone in a remote cabin, away from the outside world while my brother’s life hangs in the balance is goddamn impossible.
I checked the operation files hours ago, right after Wolfe left because I couldn’t help myself.
I needed to read every word, multiple times, just to make sure every ‘i’ had been dotted and every ’t’ crossed.
Everything looked exactly the way he said it would.
The Thursday plan, who goes where, what gets hit.
Sal’s meeting getting rescheduled in the morning.
The plan is squeaky clean. I couldn’t find a single hole.
I closed the laptop and told myself that was enough.
But it wasn’t enough.
I tried to read again but couldn’t focus past the first page. I tried to sit on the porch, but the empty chair made my chest hurt. I tried to sleep in a bed that still smelled like him and lasted about fifteen minutes before the deafening silence drove me back to the kitchen.
It’s almost midnight now. The cabin is dark except for the glow of the laptop screen on the kitchen table. And I’m done pretending I can sit here and do nothing while the people I care about are forty miles away preparing for some mafia war.
So I sink back into the chair facing the laptop and start poking around. Not because I’m suspicious. Because I’m restless and scared and alone, and the man I want to talk to is forty miles away plotting an attack with his brothers to save me and mine.
Scraping a hand down the front of my face, I let out a deep sigh. I need to feel useful. I need to feel like I’m doing something besides staring at the walls and counting the minutes until I see Wolfe and Sal again.
The plan is solid. I can’t add anything to it.
But my brain keeps spinning and my hands need something to do, so I start going through the rest of his system looking for anything useful.
More data on the Albanian network. Dmitri’s communication patterns.
Financial records we might have missed. Anything I can dig into that might give the operation an edge.
I lean forward, my brows furrowing at the password prompt that flashes on the screen when I click on a different folder.
Nothing else on the laptop has asked me for a password.
He said I’d have full access. Everything I’ve clicked on has opened right up.
But this folder wants credentials I don’t have.
It’s probably nothing. Personal stuff, bank account information. Maybe tax returns. The kind of thing you lock because it’s private.
My fingers are already moving. Because a password prompt is a dare, and I’ve never walked away from a dare in my entire life.
Even though there are times I definitely should have, I’m not going to unpack that right now.
But I don’t guess passwords and I don’t brute force my way through encryption like some amateur. That would take days, even for someone with my skills, because Wolfe builds security the way he builds everything else.
He’s meticulous, layered, and thorough.
But I have something no other hacker on the planet has…experience and understanding. I spent weeks sitting next to this man and watching him work.
I know that he organizes really classified files three levels deep because I watched him do it when he was building the Dmitri operation folders.
I also know he uses dates as encryption keys because I saw him enter one when he thought I was looking at my own screen.
I know he keeps personal files separate from operational ones, but always stored in the same spot because his brain won’t let him put things in random places.
And when he’s protecting something that matters to him, he doesn’t bury it behind the most complex security he can build. He buries it behind something personal, something nobody would think to look for unless they knew him the way I do.
So I’m not hacking his system. Not really. I’m reading him. The way I’ve learned to read his face when he’s lying and his hands when he’s nervous and his breathing when he’s trying not to say something he’s feeling.
All that knowledge and understanding has me uncovering his secrets after twenty minutes. Not because his security is weak.
Because I know the man who built it.
And voila. The folder opens.
Within it are two subfolders. One with Friday’s date. One with a date from almost two years ago.
My gut tightens. I don’t know why. Nothing about two folders should make my stomach clench. But something about them sitting here, locked away, hidden behind a password-protected wall…something about that feels like a door I shouldn’t open.
This time I don’t listen to my gut.
I click the older folder first and open a document.
Blood roars in my ears. It’s a case file. My case file. Eva Moreno, Federal District Court, corporate data theft. It contains my trial details, the charges against me, my sentencing. All of it laid out in Wolfe’s clean, precise format with annotations and analysis running down the margins.
“What in the mother fuck?” I mutter, scanning the words on the screen.
He reviewed the prosecution’s evidence and flagged inconsistencies in their timeline.
My jaw drops as my eyes try to absorb all of the details scrawled on the pages.
He did his own analysis on the data trail and found that the security breach originated from a different user account than the one they pinned on me.
He traced access patterns and identified a second perpetrator by digital signature.
Someone else was in the system. Someone else pulled the data. The trail pointing to me was built after the fact.
My chest constricts like it’s being squeezed by a vise. I press my hands to my flushed cheeks, the heat creeping up the sides of my neck.
He had enough here to raise reasonable doubt, or even trigger an appeal. Wolfe could have potentially gotten me out of prison months before my sentence ended with all this data.
I swallow hard, my heart pounding so hard my vision blurs as I try to read the lines at the bottom of the last page under the heading ‘Risk Assessment.’
Wolfe’s investigation thread connects a shell company to a firm that handles Molloy financial operations. I remember the company name from the work I did for Dmitri. I close my fingers around the edge of the table, my gut wrenching as I connect those final dots.
Pursuing my case would have pulled on a thread leading directly back to his family’s infrastructure. There are notes in his fucking handwriting.
Exposure risk: high.
Probability of federal scrutiny on Molloy operations: significant.
Recommendation: close.
One word at the very bottom of the document.
Closed.
Cold spreads through my insides. Not the metaphorical kind. The actual, physical, blood-leaving-my-extremities kind. My fingers are numb on the table. My feet are numb on the floor. The air in the cabin drops ten degrees and I sit there staring at that word, my eyes unwilling to move away from it.
He knew. Eighteen months ago. He didn’t know my name from a random person on the street back then. I was just a case number that popped up in one of his scans. But he still looked at the evidence, figured out I was innocent, and closed the file anyway.
While I was lying on a prison bunk counting ceiling tiles and trying to remember what freedom felt like, Wolfe Molloy had evidence that could have changed everything. He analyzed it. He understood it. He saw that I was innocent.
And he closed the file because saving me would have cost his family.
I sit there for a long time. I don’t know how long. The clock on the laptop says twenty minutes have passed, but it feels like those minutes have stretched into hours.
Then I open the second folder. The one with Friday’s date.
It contains a document. Clean, structured, and detailed, the way Wolfe builds everything.
Panic claws up my spine when I process the title.
Relocation Protocol — E. Moreno.
My vision tunnels. The cabin shrinks to the size of this screen and the words on it.
A plan. For relocating me to a new city, the timeline starting on Friday. The file contains transportation logistics, identity documents I would need.
And…contact termination protocols. That’s what really makes bile shoot up the back of my throat. Contact fucking termination, as in how to cut someone out of your life cleanly and completely without creating a security risk.
This isn’t a rough draft or a sketch. This is a finished, executable plan for removing me from Boston, from the Molloys, from his life, in seventy-two hours.
Starting Friday.
The day after the operation. The day he said he’d come back to me.
And that is a fact, the harshest one I can imagine.
My stomach heaves. I press a fist against my mouth and breathe through my nose until the nausea passes. My jaw is locked so tight that pain shoots up both sides of my skull.
And now that I’ve uncovered all of this, I keep snooping because if this plan exists, there’s a hell of a lot more behind it.
So I dig deeper until I find a bunch of texts from his communications archive. Texts between Wolfe and Ronan over the past few weeks.
The oldest one is from three weeks ago, right after the warehouse hit.
Ronan asked Wolfe what happens to me when my work is finished.
And each one of Wolfe’s responses drives a knife deeper and deeper into my heart.
Each one is colder than the last. Words I can’t imagine coming from the same man who held my hand on the porch last night.
I’ll manage the situation.
I’ll handle the logistics on her end.
She won’t be a problem.
I read that last line twice, then three times. Every muscle in my body goes rigid. My teeth clamp together. The taste of metal floods my mouth from biting the inside of my cheek so hard.
Not she’s staying. Not back off. Not over my dead body.
She won’t be a problem. I’ll handle it. I’ll manage the situation.
Three weeks of his brother pushing him to get rid of me, and three weeks of Wolfe responding like a man who’s stalling, not fighting against it. He fucking played me like a violin, and I let him. Hell, I gave him the goddamn bow.
My mind trips back to the conversation I overheard at the house the night before we came here. His voice through the door. It was tight and defensive. I thought he was fighting for me. I thought the strain in his voice meant he was pushing back against his brother.
But these text messages don’t sound like a man who’s pushing back. They sound like a man who already agreed and is just working out the timing until he can deliver.
The relocation plan. Starting Friday. The day after tomorrow.
The case file. Closed eighteen months ago, all because his family mattered more than my freedom.
He’s the same man running the same math and getting the same damn answer.
Every time the equation is me versus the Molloys, the Molloys win.
I sit in the silence of his cabin. The cabin he said nobody else had ever been to. The cabin with the two chairs on the porch. The cabin where he laid me down on his mother’s quilt and touched me like I was the most important thing he’d ever held.
Was any of it real? Or was all of it just the long version of a goodbye he didn’t have the guts to say out loud?
I shut down the laptop. The screen goes dark.
My reflection stares back at me from the black glass and the woman looking back is someone I recognize from a long time ago.
The woman who sat in that courtroom. The woman who festered in federal prison.
The woman who learned that trusting people is the fastest way to lose everything you have.
I thought I’d left her behind. I thought the woman in Wolfe’s bed and Wolfe’s cabin and Wolfe’s life was someone new. Someone who could trust again. Someone who got a second chance at being a person instead of a tool.
I was so fucking wrong.
I stand up on shaky legs, walk to the bedroom, pack my bag, and walk back out.
In a daze, I slip my feet into my sneakers, pull on my coat, and grab the keys where Wolfe left them.
Because I’m not leaving you anywhere without a way out. That’s not protection. That’s a prison.
He gave me the keys because he wanted me to feel like I had a choice. But according to the plan on his laptop, the choice was already made for me.
Friday. Seventy-two hours. Contact termination.
I lock the cabin door behind me. I don’t know why I bother, but I guess it’s just a force of habit. The same survival instinct that kept me alive in prison, kept me sane working for Dmitri, and kept me from falling apart every time a man I trusted turned out to be someone else.
The car starts on the first try. The headlights cut through the dark trees.
A long dirt road stretches ahead, leading back to the highway, back to Boston, back to a city where my brother doesn’t know he’s in danger, and the man I trusted just turned out to be exactly like every other man I’ve trusted.
Useful until I wasn’t. Wanted until I was inconvenient. Kept until the possession got too expensive.
Daniel didn’t plan it. Daniel was a coward who panicked and let me take the fall. That was sloppy and selfish and pathetically human.
But Wolfe planned it. Every step. Every detail. With the same focus and care he used when he touched my face and told me he’d be back on Friday. He was thorough about loving me, and he was thorough about getting rid of me, and I can’t decide which one is worse.
I wasn’t his person. I was his project. And I just found out that the project has an end date.
Friday.
I pull onto the highway. Boston is south. Sal is south.
Sal, who doesn’t know about Dmitri or the operation or the meeting that’s supposed to happen tomorrow night. Sal, who trusts me the way I trusted Wolfe. Completely, without question, and without considering that the person he loves most might be lying to his face.
If Wolfe was planning to ship me out on Friday, was saving Sal ever the real priority? Or was it just the thing he said to keep me quiet long enough to get me to this cabin?
I grip the wheel until my knuckles ache, blinking fast to hold back the tears that threaten to fall. I don’t have the answers. I don’t have anything except a car that isn’t mine, a bag I packed in under two minutes, and the address of the one person in this city who has never lied to me.
I’ll go to Sal. I’ll figure out the rest when I get there. I always do.
Even when the rest is the wreckage of everything I thought was real.
Eva Moreno does not cry while driving.
She saves that for later. When nobody’s watching. When nobody can use it against her.
The highway stretches ahead. My eyes are dry, my jaw clenched.
I don’t look in the rearview mirror. There’s nothing behind me to dwell on. Not the cabin or the quilt or every lie he whispered against my skin that made me believe I was worth staying for.
How fucking na?ve.
Nobody ever stays.