Page 1 of Ruthless Scar
1
ISABELLA
Thirty-seven hours. The coffee went cold. I drank it anyway.
Focus.
My algorithm is running. Six hours chewing through the encrypted Benedetti files I spent three weeks cracking. The trafficking operation sprawls across four screens like a disease. Routes and connections threading through the Port of New Orleans and spreading outward. Safe houses. Buyers. Money that doesn’t officially exist.
The photo on my wall says it anyway. School picture, eighth grade. All braces and attitude, wearing the shirt I told her was ugly. She wore it anyway. Stubborn. Loud. Mine to protect.
Was.
Her name is a variable I keep isolated. Run it too often and the whole system crashes.
The brownie box on the stove. Same brand they always bought. She burned them every single time, set off the smoke detector, laughed so hard she snorted when the alarm screamed. The last time she got batter on my sweater and wiped her eyes and said, Izzy. Your face. You should see your face.
I haven’t moved that box. Can’t throw it away. Can’t open it.
Focus. Focus.
The algorithm hits 87 percent.
“Come on,” I mutter. “Come on, come on.”
Years of building this. Of becoming Ghost. The untouchable presence in the forums where information trades like currency, where they assume I’m male because women in those spaces don’t stay women long. They become product. So I built a man out of nothing and disappeared inside him. Isabella Vitale doesn’t exist in those rooms. Ghost does. Ghost has been mapping the Benedetti operation for eighteen months, pulling threads from servers I was never supposed to touch, assembling a picture one stolen fragment at a time.
90 percent.
“Don’t choke on me now.” My thumbnail is raw. I’ve bitten it to nothing. My hands won’t be still.
93 percent.
The screen flickers. Data cascades down in columns, sorting itself into something legible. Something that reads like geography instead of noise.
And there it is.
“Found you,” I whisper.
The Benedetti intake compound. Near the Port. The processing point where girls come through before they’re moved into the staging network. I’ve been circling it for months, tracking the edges of it without being able to confirm. Now I have confirmation. Activity logs. Transport schedules. Proof that they bring them here first.
Sof came through here. Maybe recently. Maybe she’s still in the system.
A sound tears out of me that I don’t recognize as my own voice. My hands fly across the keyboard. Satellite images, shipping manifests, cross-referencing and reconfirming because I’ve been wrong before. I’ve followed false leads into deadends, and I know what hope feels like right before it becomes something else.
But this is real. The data is solid. The next transport window is twelve days out.
I press my palms against my eyes until I see stars.
Twelve days. I have an intake point and a timeline and no staging warehouse. The Benedettis use multiple locations. Without knowing which one they’ll move her through, I’m still guessing. Still circling. Still alone with a keyboard and a ticking clock.
I shove back from the desk. “Found the door,” I say to the empty room. “Can’t kick it down alone.”
Whoever’s been watching me has resources. Reach. The kind of power that makes problems disappear.
Including people like me.
The forums have been buzzing for weeks. Someone powerful has been squeezing the Benedetti operation. Resources and reach I don’t have. Pressure I can see the effects of even if I can’t identify the source. Scared men make mistakes. Whoever they are, they’ve been useful without knowing it.
