Page 71 of Run

Clad in an oversized tourist T-shirt, this one in pink, she left the room, taking her laptop and the dog tags with her. The only place in the house that didn’t have someone sleeping in it was the kitchen, so that’s where she headed, creeping through the house on quiet feet.

Hating to have to wait for anything but knowing it was necessary, Elle left her things on the kitchen table while she jumped in the shower. It was the fastest shower in the history of mankind, but at least she was clean when she returned to the kitchen. It was far too easy to forget things such as showering once she got sucked into a project.

She gently closed the door behind her, grabbed an energy drink from the stash Ryan had hidden at the back of the cupboard, and sat at the table. As soon as her laptop was up and running, she plugged in the flash drive.

Code scrolled across the screen instantly, and Elle almost fell off her chair. No. It couldn’t be. Energy drink forgotten, she started to type commands into the machine, opening files, reading through coding and notes. Finding everything Marcus had left behind—and there was a lot.

The sun had made an appearance by the time she’d gotten her head around the contents of the drives. After gulping down her abandoned drink, she shut the laptop and headed for the stairs, which she took two at a time.

“Hey, what’s going on?” Ryan called from the living room, where he’d been asleep on the couch. “Why are you running around?”

Elle didn’t reply, because she was already crashing through the door to the bedroom she’d shared with David. She found him sitting up in bed, the sheet gathered around his hips, his hair standing on end, and a gun in his hand.

“Elle,” he grumbled, putting the gun away. “Do you want to get shot?”

“They weren’t dog tags.” Elle jumped onto the bed and bounced her way to David. “They’re flash drives.”

“What the hell’s going on?” Callum demanded from the doorway. “Why are you shouting?”

“And running?” Ryan asked from beside their boss.

One by one, her team crowded into their room.

Megan pointed a finger at David. “You might want to pull that sheet up a teeny bit more.”

He slapped a pillow over his lap.

“What’s happening?” Joe asked as he arrived. Like David, he’d grabbed a gun at the first hint of a disturbance. It hung in his hand at his side.

“Right now?” Megan asked. “David hasmorning issues.And, apparently, Elle isn’t wearing any underwear.”

Elle looked down, noticed her T-shirt had ridden up and tugged it back down to modesty levels. “My bad.”

“Somebody get me bleach for my eyes,” Callum muttered.

“Amen,” Ryan said.

“Elle,” David said evenly, “can this wait until we’re all dressed and downstairs? With coffee?”

She shook her head, still bouncing on the bed because she couldn’t contain herself. “The dog tags Abasi gave me were actually flash drives. Marcus left me the key to their information vault.” She beamed at everyone. “With the information on these drives, I can access their secure servers and plunder at will. I have passwords, server locations, and the decryption code for everything they’ve saved.” She held up the tags. “Everything we need to bring the James Syndicate to its knees is on here. All we have to do is use it.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then the room erupted. Elle grinned at her teammates as David’s hand cupped the back of her head.

“You are a gift, Ellie Blue,” he said before kissing the living daylights out of her. When he stopped to take a breath, he ordered, “Everybody out.”

And then, as the door closed, leaving them alone, he pressed her back onto the bed, where they celebrated the good news in a way Elle very much appreciated.

28

There’s a scene that often appears in older Hollywood movies. It shows a guy pacing outside the delivery room, anxiously waiting to see whether he’s had a son or daughter. That’s exactly how David felt when Elle banished him from the bedroom so she could dig through the information Abasi had given her.

Worse, when she finally emerged—with manic eyes and wild hair—it was only to demand that they change location. Apparently, she needed more screens and faster machines, and the only place with both that wasn’t currently under police guard was Rachel’s pharmaceutical company.

After calling Rachel and demanding access to her building, Elle wanted to leave straight away. But Callum would have none of it. He stood his ground and told her they weren’t going anywhere unless she put on something more than a T-shirt. To which Ryan added that it would be nice if her hair didn’t look like she’d stolen it from a troll doll. At that point, Elle had threatened online vengeance on them all before stomping back upstairs—still hugging her laptop.

Two hours later, once David had managed to get some food into her that wasn’t stuffed with caffeine or sugar, a fully dressed Elle took over the tech lab at TayFor while her team waited in the conference room upstairs. Every now and then, David went down to check on her progress and feed her, only to be met with glazed eyes and a stream of excited jargon that went right over his head. Then, much to his amusement, she’d forget mid-sentence he was there and start working again.

Just as well his ego wasn’t fragile; otherwise, he’d have been in pieces. Instead, when she tuned him out, he kissed her on the head, took one last look at her tiny frame in front of the bank of computers, then headed back upstairs to tell everyone there was nothing to report yet. After the last update, he’d returned to the bowels of the building, to the room where Elle worked. Finding a comfortable chair, he’d stretched out in the corner to watch over her. And maybe doze some, seeing as Harvard was in charge of security for Rachel’s company, and it was airtight.