Chapter 1 #2
I go to work. Phone out, screen dimmed, and I shoot it from every angle the brief specified and a dozen it didn’t: the suspension geometry, the underside, the ducting, the places the money went where you can’t see it. Click. Click. Click. Click.
The flash is off; I’m working off the track lighting and a steady hand. Behind me I hear Dani’s fingers going like rain on the laptop, and then her little intake of breath that means she’s through.
“Server’s open,” she says. “Pulling the CAD files now. CFD data, the whole tunnel package. God, they’ve got everything in here, down to the engineer’s fingerprint.
Who builds a fifty-million-dollar program and uses password with a four-digit—” She stops with a sharp, frustrated exhale, as if she’s disappointed this wasn’t more of a challenge.
“Idiots. There, got it. It’s coming down. ”
“How long on the download?”
“Six minutes. Maybe seven, it’s a fat directory. Keep shooting, I’ll babysit the bar.”
I keep shooting. The garage holds its breath around us.
Somewhere a compressor cycles on, and we both freeze for half a second and then keep moving.
We’re two animals who’ve learned the difference between a sound that matters and one that doesn’t.
The download crawls. I get everything, twice.
By the time Dani says “done, it’s done, we’re clean,” I’ve filled a card with a constructor’s whole secret heart and my pulse is up and singing.
“All right, let’s cover them back up,” I say.
We do. Reverently, almost. The covers go back over the car corpses, and erase our presence one by one, until it’s a museum again with one single difference: somewhere under the white sheets, a hundred thousand dollars has changed hands and nobody’s signed for it yet.
That’s when I see the last car. Already uncovered, even though I haven’t touched it.
It’s at the end of the row, off by itself, and I realize I didn’t uncover it earlier because it didn’t have a cover—somebody drives this one.
Their actual baby. A roadster, low and long and the kind of silver that looks wet under the bright light.
Top down. The leather inside, onyx. Well, hello, sexy.
It’s not a museum piece. It’s a thing this richer-than-God garage owner has deemed worthy of use.
It’s personal, and that’s so much rarer than luxury.
So much so, that I stop walking. I can’t even help it.
The fact that it’s wanted, makes me…want it.
“Silver,” Dani warns because she knows me. “Sylvie, no.”
“Two minutes.”
“We’ve got a download to deliver and a man with a bag full of cash showing up in—”
“Forty minutes. We have ages.” I open the driver’s side door, and the hinge is so well made it doesn’t even whisper. “Let me live a little, Dani. You too. Get in.”
She sighs in defeat because there’s no way she’ll win.
Can’t beat me, so she joins me. Dani slides in behind me, into the back seat, because the passenger seat has a jacket on it and Dani’s surprisingly tidy about other people’s things in a way she’s never been about her own.
I drop into the driver’s seat and the leather morphs to my ass like it’s been expecting me.
I put both hands on the wheel and squeeze.
And for a moment—one stolen, precious moment—I let myself get lost. The fantasy comes in waves: top down, engine lit, some coast road at night with no destination and no rearview anxiety, no numbered accounts, no bag of cash walking through a door, no rule about betray-or-be-betrayed because there’d be nobody behind me to do either.
Just speed and salt air and the freedom of being a person nobody is looking for.
Not hiding. Not running. Pure freedom.
People always think the opposite of running is standing still. It’s not. The opposite of running is driving, aimless, with the windows down, because you can be seen, because no one’s chasing you. You’re not escaping because you belong.
Belonging.
I had it once. A family. A purpose. A second princess in a kingdom I didn’t have to rule…
only enjoy. And it ended in a massacre. Papa dead on the ground, my home in flames, my sister screaming at me to run.
I clamp my eyes shut trying to push out the memories before I can feel them, but they overcome me anyway.
The rage, the pain, the hurt…it overcomes me.
Fiona would love this car.
I picture her in the passenger seat before I can resist. She’d have one hand out the window the whole drive, palm cupping the wind, laughing at me for white-knuckling the wheel. Fiona would make me put the top down in the rain. My sister would—
Stop.
Your sister’s gone.
I should know. I searched to the ends of the earth and the truth is, the wrong sister survived.
Fiona was meant to carry the O’Leary name.
Not me. She was older, smarter, far more beautiful, though she’d argue that last point.
But that was the beauty about her—fully aware she was blessed, but incapable of flaunting it.
I don’t have that curse. I use everything I have to get exactly what I want. And I know she’d be ashamed of me. Of what I’ve become. Of what I did to survive.
My hand goes instinctively to my sternum.
The scar’s there under the fabric, a small, puckered knot just left of center, the entry; there’s a bigger one on my back where it left.
Sixteen years old. A bullet that went in clean and came out clean and grazed my heart on the way through without quite tearing it—close enough to kill, a half centimeter shy of doing it.
The surgeon who patched me up later told me I shouldn’t have survived.
At least we agreed on that.
It still aches in cold weather. Or warm weather. Or whenever I have the wrong thought at the wrong moment, like my sister’s ghost in a stolen car. Just like that, the old wound lights up like it’s brand new, like the bullet’s still in there, like the thing that nearly stopped my heart actually did.
You’d think a near-miss would heal cleaner than a direct hit. It doesn’t. The almost is the part that won’t close. What could’ve been. What should’ve been.
Stop, Sylvie. Enough wallowing.
I breathe out. Let go of the wheel.
And that’s when, behind me, very softly, I hear the click of a hammer thumbed down.
The barrel touches the back of my neck. Cold. A small precise ring of cold, right where my skull meets my spine, the spot a professional picks for a clean kill.
“I’m so sorry, Sylvie.” Dani’s voice is wrecked.
“I’m so sorry. They promised me double if I took you out.
Double, Syl. You know who I owe money to.
It’s my life or yours,” she blubbers like a fucking fool.
“I couldn’t say no—I’ll give you a minute.
To make your peace. You should at least get a minute. Pray to your god.”
My pulse throbs like a metronome commanding a steady adagio. I’m at ease. That should be her first sign that she’s in trouble.
“Pray to my god? Fuck, you’re dramatic.”
I don’t move fast. There’s no reason to move fast now; fast is for when you have options.
I turn my head, slow, until I can see her in the dim light over my shoulder.
She’s got both hands on the gun to keep it steady and it’s not working, the muzzle’s trembling against my skin, and her face is wet.
Genuinely wet. She’s crying and she’s still going to do it, and somehow that’s the part that doesn’t surprise me at all.
Of course they offered her double. Of course.
“Don’t cry,” I tell her, gently. “Tears will fuck with your aim.”
“Silver, don’t think—”
“Shut up and do what you must. I’m ready.” And I mean that too, which surprises me a little. “I’ve been ready a long time. I’ll get to see my family again. That’s more than I usually get offered on a Tuesday.”
She shuts her eyes. That’s her tell, she always shuts her eyes—she did it the first time I watched her drop a man, four years ago, like she could keep her hands and her conscience clean if she just didn’t look. Her finger whitens on the trigger.
The hammer falls forward.
Click.
Empty.
Her eyes fly open in putrid horror. She pulls the trigger again—click—and again—click—staring at the gun like it’s betrayed her, which, is unfair, because it was me. I hoped for true friendship but still prepared for a spineless bitch of a traitor.
I watch her get there on her own. It only takes a second. She calculates the math behind her eyes. She knows her number is up.
Here’s the thing about a voice on a numbered account that offers you double to kill your partner: it’s not a clever plan.
It’s an obvious one. And a cheap voice that’ll offer me double to put down the only other person who can place me at this job will offer the exact same deal, word for word, to her.
Same script. Same number. Two killer-thieves, one car, and a paymaster who’d very much like to drive home with zero witnesses.
I figured that out three days ago, when the brief came in too sweet.
So last night, while Dani slept in the next bed with her new haircut fanned out on the pillow, breathing the slow breath of the only person on this earth I’d take a bullet for, I sat on the bathroom floor and filed down the firing pin.
An old trick I learned from my time with the Romani tribe.
The weight of the gun doesn’t change, the bullets stay in place, it feels exactly like the real thing.
I’m the triggerwoman for this mission; she’s the hacker.
She wouldn’t know her gun was useless unless she pointed her weapon at me and tried.
She’d have felt nothing wrong. Right weight in the magazine.
Brass in the chamber if she checked. Her reflexes wouldn’t clock it.
The gun would betray her exactly once, and only because she betrayed me first.
I disarmed my best friend. The same night I planned to stay true to her.
“You set me up,” Dani whispers. It’s not even a question. It’s almost admiration.