The dent in his cheek becomes an apostrophe.
“Nothing. We’re done here. Get out.” My voice is empty of all emotion. My eyes unflinchingly meet his.
For a moment, his mask slips. I see disappointment. I see frustration. I see something that might be defeat. But he quickly gathers himself, pushes off the counter, runs a hand through his dark hair. He shakes his head like a dog shaking off water and huffs a short breath through his nose. To himself, he mutters, “Roger that. We’ll get Maelstr0m some other way.”
He looks up at me, gives me a tight smile along with a curt salute. “See you in another life, maybe. Sorry to have wasted your time.”
He moves past me, graceful even at his size, his step improbably silent against the floor, but I can’t focus on the elegance of his movement because I’m too busy rewinding and replaying what he just said.
“Wait!”
In the doorway, Connor pauses. He looks at me over his shoulder.
With my heart in my throat I whisper, “Did you say…Maelstr0m?”
Connor frowns. “Yeah. Some hacker who goes by the alias Maelstr0m, with a zero for the ‘o.’ He’s Miranda’s situation.” A heartbeat, and then, sharper, “Why?”
I inhale. It’s like trying to breathe underwater. The room seems too warm, too bright, too close.
“I hope you’re prepared to go to war, Connor. I’m in.”
Five
Connor
The trendy French restaurant Tabby insists I take her to before she’ll talk is way too froufrou for my taste, but I have to admit the food is incredible. And the pair of young, hot chicks at the bar who’ve been staring at me since we got here are incredible too.
Not because I’m interested. Because Tabby’s noticed the way they’ve been looking at me and is making a valiant effort to pretend not only that she hasn’t, but that she doesn’t care.
It’s fucking beautiful is what it is. This is my new favorite place.
I say, “Enough with the suspense. Tell me what you know about this Maelstr0m.”
Tabby delicately licks her fingers clean of truffle salt from the pommes frites she’s been scarfing down. I shouldn’t be surprised that she could make such a simple act look sexy as fuck, but she does. And she’s not even trying.
I shove aside the picture that pops into my mind of my hard cock in place of her fingers. Unfortunately, the big guy downstairs has already started to react to the brief but incredible illusion and twitches against my thigh.
I don’t know what it is about this woman—bad-tempered, foul-mouthed Hello Kitty fiend with a constellation of tattoos on her body and a mind like a maze—but she really does it for me.
“I was living in Boston, in my third year of college—”
“MIT,” I clarify, just because it’s incredible to me that any person would be smart and self-confident enough to graduate high school at fifteen and go right into the most intellectually rigorous college in the nation.
She glances at me with a wry smile. “I take it you’ve been reading about me in a file.”
“It’s my business to know things about people I work with. Information is power. You know that. Although I have to admit I was surprised there was any information to be found at all after how perfectly you scraped Victoria’s past clean.”
Tabby’s smile falters. When she looks away, I know I’ve hit a nerve.
Victoria Price was Tabby’s best friend and a Bitch with a capital B. She had more skeletons in her closet than shoes. Until a few years ago when Victoria’s past finally caught up with her and she fled to Mexico, Tabby’s existence revolved around erasing information about Victoria, hiding her past, making sure no one discovered her entire identity had been manufactured. Tabby did her job so well, even I couldn’t find anything on Victoria, and that was unprecedented.
Tabby says in a hollow voice, “I don’t have anything interesting enough to hide.”
“This from the woman who single-handedly shut down the government’s space program for three weeks.”
She dismissively waves her hand. “I meant personally. My hacks are another story, but Polaroid can’t be traced back to me.”
Polaroid is her hacker alias, so named for her photographic memory. She’s infamous in hacker circles, revered not only for the brilliance of the jobs she pulls off, but also for never getting caught. She went legit after her time with Victoria, started doing white hat corporate jobs for guys like Roger Hamilton, and Polaroid went dark.
Curiosity prompts me to ask, “You still talk to Victoria?”
Toying with her fork, Tabby shrugs. “Yeah. I saw her a while back too. Darcy and Kai honeymooned in Mexico, and we all got together. It was fun.”
I sense the sadness behind her words. “But?”