Page 19 of Shadow Of Sin

I look at him across the table and let him see exactly what I think of that question. He holds my gaze and his smile doesn’t waver because Dmitri Kozlov has never been rattled by anything in his life, least of all me.

“Wednesday,” I say, shooting up from my chair.

“Wednesday,” he agrees.

I walk out of the café with my hands stuffed in my pockets. I don’t look back. My hands shake. They always shake after my meetings with Dmitri. Not during. Never during, because I refuse to give him that, but after, when I’m far enough away that he can’t see. The trembling starts in my fingers and works its way up my arms, and I walk three blocks before it stops.

I’ve been doing this for months. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.

You don’t get used to it. You just get better at hiding it.

Sal has no idea any of this exists. He thinks I do freelance computer work for small clients who don’t ask questions. He doesn’t know about Dmitri. He doesn’t know that the debt he can’t dig out from under is the same rope that’s tied around my neck. If he knew, he’d do something stupid and brave and it would get him killed, because that’s who Sal is. He’d rather burn than watch someone he loves get torched.

So I carry it. And I keep my mouth shut. And every time he asks me how things are going, I swallow the truth like glass and pretend everything is fine.

The job takes me six hours. I crack Meridian Capital from my apartment, pulling data in layers so the intrusion looks like routine network traffic. Client lists, internal emails, real estate holdings flow through my screen in clean, organized streams.

I encrypt it, route it through three countries, and send it to Dmitri’s secure drive. Done. Delivered. Another brick in whatever he’s building that I’m choosing not to look at.

Except now I have to look at it. Because that’s the deal I made with the stranger on my stoop.

I copy everything onto a separate drive, tuck it into my jacket pocket next to the burner phone, and sit there staring at it for a long time.

The last time I brought stolen data to a man, I ended up in handcuffs.

Daniel had the same energy. Not the same personality, though. Daniel was all charm and polish. But the same setup. The same “trust me, I’ll take care of you, just bring me what you’ve got.” I walked right into that, eyes wide open, because I was young and stupid, and I thought being smart with computers meant I was smart about people.

I wasn’t. And I paid for it with fourteen months of my life.

Now I’m about to walk across the street with a drive full of stolen data in my pocket and hand it to a man whose last name I don’t know. A man who broke into my system, showed up at my apartment, and moved into my neighborhood to stay close to his mission. And me.

The only thing separating him from Daniel is a pair of glasses and the fact that he hasn’t lied to me yet.

That I know of.

I check the go bag in the closet. Still packed. Still ready. I bite down on my lower lip.

Except I can’t leave Sal. I have to be smart about this.

So I put my hand on the doorknob and stand there for a full thirty seconds, debating my next move.

With a frustrated sigh, I pull open the door, because the alternative is sitting in this apartment doing Dmitri’s work until he doesn’t need me anymore and Sal pays the price. At least this way, there’s an ending. Maybe.

God, I hope I’m not being stupid again.

I don’t go straight to his apartment. I walk past the building first and check the street, the cars, and the windows around it. Nobody’s watching. There are no vans, no cameras I don’t recognize, no one sitting in a parked car pretending to look at their phone. Then I circle the block and come back.

Old habits. Smart habits. The habits that would have kept me out of prison if I’d used them with Daniel.

I text the burner.

I’m outside.

The door buzzes open thirty seconds later. I take the stairs, not the elevator, because elevators are boxes and boxes are traps.

Wolfe opens the apartment door wearing an AC/DC shirt and glasses that are slightly crooked on his face.

Sweet Lord. Clark Kent traded in Metallica for highway-to-hell vibes and somehow it works even better. I hate that I notice these things.