Page 2 of Shadow Of Sin

I make it eleven steps before my knees give out. The marshal catches my arm before I crumple onto the floor.

“Easy,” she says.

I clench my teeth so hard my jaw pops. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth and I put one foot in front of the other because that’s my life now.

Sal is alone with no parents, no other family. It’ll just be him and whatever mess he’s about to make of his life while I’m locked up and can’t stop him.

That’s the sentence the judge didn’t give me. The one where my future is completely uncertain. And it’s the one that’ll actually break me.

The handcuffs dig into my wrists, my heart racing harder with each step toward my next destination. My temples throb like the hammer of the gavel.

I file everything away as I walk. All the shame, disgust, and fear. I shove it into the place where I keep the things I can’t afford to feel, right next to the image of Daniel on the witness stand lying through his teeth while I sat there in a cheap suit and watched my life swirl down the drain.

I had a clean record and a legit job. I had the skills to hack half the companies in Boston, but never crossed that line.

Turns out the line becomes invisible when someone drags you over it.

Fourteen months from now I’ll walk out of here. And whoever comes out that door won’t be the same woman who went in. Because that woman trusted people. That woman let someone get close enough to gut her.

As of now, that woman is dead. And whatever’s left of her is about to become someone that nobody…not Daniel, not the judge, not anyone… will ever be able to touch again.

WOLFE: EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER

I stare at her face on my monitor at four in the morning.

The image was attached to a payment trail I cracked twenty minutes ago.

Eva Moreno. Convicted of corporate data theft, served fourteen months in federal prison.

She was released four months ago and then dropped off the map.

Until three months ago, when someone very skilled started intruding in my family’s networks.

I’ve been hunting this ghost for weeks. Tonight, I finally found her.

And I know that face.

My mind trips back to the night that changed our lives. A gala was being held for Boston’s elite and my father wanted eyes on certain areas of the venue. I walked in with bullshit credentials and ran cable through a restricted area when a woman called me on it. She checked her tablet, didn’t buy my cover story, and moved on because she had bigger things to deal with than some guy with a random wire.

“Go left at the split,” she said. “Or you’ll get interference from the kitchen.”

She worked that out from a five-second look at my setup. Then she walked away without looking back, and I knelt there on the floor like an idiot trying to remember what I was doing with my hands.

I saved a screenshot of her, one I grabbed from the corridor later that night, after a group opened fire on the gala attendees. I’ve looked at it twenty-four times since. I told myself I save everything, which is true, but my brain doesn’t do this. It doesn’t hold onto people. It holds onto systems, patterns, problems it can’t solve.

She’s the first person it won’t let go of. I don’t know why. The gala attack was over two years ago, and my brain still won’t file her away. I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

Now she’s the ghost.

And forty-nine minutes ago, I was inside her system. I left a timestamp on purpose, because if she’s as good as I think she is, she’ll find it. She’ll have a choice…patch the hole in her security and disappear, or leave it open and wait.

She left it open.

I know what this looks like. I know what I look like…a man sitting alone at four in the morning, staring at a woman’s face on a screen. But this isn’t about wanting something from her. It’s about the fact that my brain chose her as the problem it can’t solve, and I’ve never been able to walk away from one of those.

She left the door open. For me.

So of course, I’m going through it.