Page 113 of Shadow Of Sin

I closed the laptop and told myself that was enough.

But it wasn’t enough.

I tried to read again but couldn’t focus past the first page. I tried to sit on the porch, but the empty chair made my chest hurt. I tried to sleep in a bed that still smelled like him and lasted about fifteen minutes before the deafening silence drove me back to the kitchen.

It’s almost midnight now. The cabin is dark except for the glow of the laptop screen on the kitchen table. And I’m done pretending I can sit here and do nothing while the people I care about are forty miles away preparing for some mafia war.

So I sink back into the chair facing the laptop and start poking around. Not because I’m suspicious. Because I’m restless and scared and alone, and the man I want to talk to is forty miles away plotting an attack with his brothers to save me and mine.

Scraping a hand down the front of my face, I let out a deep sigh. I need to feel useful. I need to feel like I’m doing something besides staring at the walls and counting the minutes until I see Wolfe and Sal again.

The plan is solid. I can’t add anything to it. But my brain keeps spinning and my hands need something to do, so I start going through the rest of his system looking for anything useful. More data on the Albanian network. Dmitri’s communication patterns. Financial records we might have missed. Anything I can dig into that might give the operation an edge.

I lean forward, my brows furrowing at the password prompt that flashes on the screen when I click on a different folder. Nothing else on the laptop has asked me for a password. He said I’d have full access. Everything I’ve clicked on has opened right up. But this folder wants credentials I don’t have.

It’s probably nothing. Personal stuff, bank account information. Maybe tax returns. The kind of thing you lock because it’s private.

My fingers are already moving. Because a password prompt is a dare, and I’ve never walked away from a dare in my entire life.

Even though there are times I definitely should have, I’m not going to unpack that right now.

But I don’t guess passwords and I don’t brute force my way through encryption like some amateur. That would take days, even for someone with my skills, because Wolfe builds security the way he builds everything else.

He’s meticulous, layered, and thorough.

But I have something no other hacker on the planet has…experience and understanding. I spent weeks sitting next to this man and watching him work.

I know that he organizes really classified files three levels deep because I watched him do it when he was building the Dmitri operation folders. I also know he uses dates as encryption keys because I saw him enter one when he thought I was looking at my own screen. I know he keeps personal files separate from operational ones, but always stored in the same spot because his brain won’t let him put things in random places.

And when he’s protecting something that matters to him, he doesn’t bury it behind the most complex security he can build. He buries it behind something personal, something nobody would think to look for unless they knew him the way I do.

So I’m not hacking his system. Not really. I’m reading him. The way I’ve learned to read his face when he’s lying and his hands when he’s nervous and his breathing when he’s trying not to say something he’s feeling.

All that knowledge and understanding has me uncovering his secrets after twenty minutes. Not because his security is weak.

Because I know the man who built it.

And voila. The folder opens.

Within it are two subfolders. One with Friday’s date. One with a date from almost two years ago.

My gut tightens. I don’t know why. Nothing about two folders should make my stomach clench. But something about them sitting here, locked away, hidden behind a password-protected wall…something about that feels like a door I shouldn’t open.

This time I don’t listen to my gut.

I click the older folder first and open a document.

Blood roars in my ears. It’s a case file. My case file. Eva Moreno, Federal District Court, corporate data theft. It contains my trial details, the charges against me, my sentencing. All of it laid out in Wolfe’s clean, precise format with annotations and analysis running down the margins.

“What in the mother fuck?” I mutter, scanning the words on the screen.

He reviewed the prosecution’s evidence and flagged inconsistencies in their timeline. My jaw drops as my eyes try to absorb all of the details scrawled on the pages. He did his own analysis on the data trail and found that the security breach originated from a different user account than the one they pinned on me. He traced access patterns and identified a second perpetrator by digital signature.

Someone else was in the system. Someone else pulled the data. The trail pointing to me was built after the fact.

My chest constricts like it’s being squeezed by a vise. I press my hands to my flushed cheeks, the heat creeping up the sides of my neck.

He had enough here to raise reasonable doubt, or even trigger an appeal. Wolfe could have potentially gotten me out of prison months before my sentence ended with all this data.