Page 9 of Shadow Of Sin

Around 5:15, her light goes off. Five minutes later, she comes out the front door wearing a denim jacket and black boots, keys dangling in her hand.

She walks in the direction of Rosario’s. Once she steps inside, I start my car and drive over there to watch through the front window.

Her brother’s behind the bar. The second she walks in, his face changes. He flashes a wide smile and says something that makes her laugh. She drops onto a counter stool and leans on the bar and for a few minutes she looks like a completely different person than the one in the mug shot I saved on my phone.

I stare at her through that window and something curious sparks in my chest. Very different from the analytical interest I’ve developed over the past weeks. Something sharper. Unfamiliar. Something that has no business being in the same space as a surveillance operation.

Two men walk into the restaurant while she’s eating. Heavy builds, gold chain on one of them. They’re not there for the food. I watch the brother’s posture change. His spine straightens, his smile tightens, his hands clenching a glass. They talk for about a minute. Then they leave.

I grab photos from the surveillance cameras set up in the area and run their faces through every database I have access to. Nothing. They’re not Kozlov. They’re not connected to any network I monitor. Which means they’re outside my world entirely, and that bothers me because I don’t like variables I can’t account for.

Eva watches them leave. I can see the tension in her body even from here…the suspicious look on her face, the way her hand tightens on her coffee mug. She knows something’s wrong. But from the look of it, she doesn’t push her brother for answers. She just focuses on her coffee.

That pattern. The deliberate not-looking. I’ve seen it in her work, in the way she builds her systems, in the gap she left open for me. She sees things and she chooses to look away, because the last time she looked too close, it destroyed her life.

My brain trips back to her arrest record. Her case popped up as part of my routing threat scans. She’d been convicted of corporate data theft and served fourteen months in prison for hacking a company that was an associate of my family’s business network. Turns out, she took the fall for the whole operation. But it never sat right with me. The work looked like it was done by two people, not one. Half of it was clean and careful. The other half was sloppy as hell. But she was the only one who went to prison. We’d stopped doing business with this associate before the hack, so I made a note and closed the file because, at the time, she wasn’t my problem.

Now I’m parked outside her brother’s restaurant, watching her eat breakfast through a window, and the gap between who she is and what happened to her is making my pulse thrum in a way I can’t even begin to categorize.

She could have been out if someone had pulled that thread. If someone had looked at her case and pushed instead of filing it away. If someone had cared enough to ask the question that was sitting right there in the data.

Someone like me.

I let out a sigh then turn on the ignition and drive home.

Because I’m not going to her door at this ungodly hour of the morning. I’ll wait until later. And when I do show up, I’m not going to knock on her apartment door. I’m going to sit on her stoop and wait, because surprising a woman who spent fourteen months in federal prison is not the first impression I’m going for.

I’ve never not known what someone was going to do next.

I’ve also never wanted to find out this badly, either.

CHAPTER 3

EVA

I open the front door of my building and step out backward to lock it. Then I turn, almost colliding with the man sitting on the stoop. I choke on a gasp and reach for the handrail before I face-plant on the cracked concrete.

The plan was to go for a run. I haven’t really moved my body in days, and the restless energy crawling under my skin is making me twitchy.

My hand goes to the knife in my jacket pocket. I don’t pull it out, but my fingers close around the handle.

He looks up.

I’ve spent twenty-four hours imagining what the person who broke into my system looks like. To be honest, I saw him as the quintessential tech nerd — antisocial with longish, greasy hair in a ratty flannel shirt who lives in his parents’ basement, eats Hot Pockets, and probably hasn’t showered in a week or longer.

But the guy I’m staring at kind of blows my mind, if I’m being honest. He’s about my age with dark hair, glasses, and blue eyes sharp enough to cut glass. He’s wearing a faded Metallica t-shirt under an open jacket, which is interesting because the glasses scream professor, and the shirt says something else entirely. And the combination is messing with my ability to put him in a box, which I hate because boxes are safe, and this guy doesn’t fit in any of them.

He’s also hot as hell. Of course he is. Because that’s exactly what I need right now, to be standing here with a knife and sweaty palms, my heart going a hundred miles an hour, and my freaking brain decides this is the moment to notice he looks like Clark Kent’s edgier cousin.

And I swear to God, if my brain doesn’t stop noticing how attractive he is while I’m in active crisis mode, I’m going to lose it.

“You should go left at the split,” he says.

I freeze.

That line. My brain sizzles with memories. I’ve spoken that line before…

Suddenly, it hits me. The man in the hallway at the gala almost two years ago. I gave him a tip about bad wiring and walked away without looking back. Most people wouldn’t remember a throwaway comment from a random security worker at an event they were crashing. This man held onto it.