Page 81 of Ruthless Scar
She’s a hacker, Renzo.
“Marco.” I grab for my comms, but they’re dead. Fried. I pull out my phone. Cracked screen, but it powers on. “Marco, come in. Status report.”
Static.
“Marco.“
He breaks through, strained. “Renzo. Thank God. We saw the explosion on satellite, we thought?—”
“Status on the compound. Status on Isabella.”
“Hold on, let me pull up the panic room feed.” A pause. Keyboard clicking. Then silence. Too much silence. “That’s not right.”
My lungs stop. “What.”
“The door’s open. The panic room door is open.” More clicking, frantic now. “I’m checking the timestamp. She overrode the lock over an hour ago. She looped the perimeter cameras from the panic room terminal before she walked out. Our guys at the gate never saw her leave.” His voice cracks. “Renzo, the compound security feed was on a loop too. Someone else looped it. Not her. A separate breach. I’ve been watching a recording this whole time and I didn’t know.”
Over an hour. She was out before we even reached the site.
“Where.” I’m moving now, toward the SUV, brothers falling into step behind me. “Track her phone. Track everything.”
“Already pulling it up. She headed toward the Benedetti location. Toward you.” Marco’s voice drops. “But her signal cut out. About twenty minutes ago. GPS just stopped. Right at the edge of their surveillance perimeter.”
Twenty minutes ago, I was walking through those rooms. Clearing them. Finding the laptop.
Twenty minutes ago, she drove straight into whatever net they had waiting. Because I locked her up. Because I took away her choice.
“Her last known location. Send it now.”
“Already sent. But Renzo.” Marco hesitates. “If they have her?—”
“She could have ditched the phone. Gone dark on purpose. She’s survived on her own longer than most people last in our life. She can disappear.”
But even as I say it, I don’t believe it. Isabella wouldn’t go dark. Not when she was this close to finding Sofia. Not unless she couldn’t.
Did you really think we didn’t know?
Goddamnit. They had her photos. Surveillance from weeks ago. They tracked who she was and what she meant to me. This whole thing was never about killing us. It was about drawing her out. The Benedettis didn’t loop our feeds to watch us. They looped them so she could leave.
“Get in.” I yank open the SUV door. “We go to her last known location. We find her trail. We findher.“
Dante and Nico pile in without argument. Dante takes the wheel. The engine roars to life. I pull up the coordinates Marco sent, my hands locked on the screen even though everything behind my ribs is tearing loose.
“Marco. Every camera in a five-mile radius of that location. Every traffic light, every security feed, every doorbell camera you can access. I want to know every vehicle that passed through, every person on foot.”
“On it.”
“And trace how they looped the feed. Not Isabella’s spoof on the perimeter cameras. The other breach. Someone else got into our system. I want to know who and how.”
Marco built our system. Isabella reinforced it. To breach both without triggering an alert would take a team. Resources we couldn’t have expected.
“Renzo, I—” Marco’s words are thick. “I should have been watching closer. I should have?—”
“Later.” I can’t comfort him right now. Can’t afford anything except the cold focus that’s kept me alive this long. “Just find her.”
The line goes quiet. Dante drives. Fast. The fire shrinks in the rearview mirror, replaced by dark highway and darker thoughts.
I did this. She went after Sofia alone. The same choice she’s been making since she was nineteen years old. And now she’s out there in the dark, and I don’t know if she’s hiding or running or captured or worse.
