Page 74 of Shadow Of Sin

She leans forward on the counter, covering her face with her hands. I let her process everything for a minute. She drags herself off the counter and straightens up. Then she walks back to the bedroom. Five minutes later, she’s back and fully dressed with her hair pulled back. She tosses me the Metallica t-shirt and I pull it on as she palms the knife and sticks it into her pocket.

The Eva from last night, the one who said “don’t go” and pulled me into her bed and fell asleep with her face on my chest, is now locked away behind the same wall she’s been building since she was taken from that courtroom in handcuffs.

I get it. That wall kept her alive for fourteen months. I’m not going to be the one who tells her she doesn’t need it now.

Even if watching her put it back up makes my heart clench and ache in a way it never has.

When we pull into the gate at my family’s compound, I already know the kind of chaos that waits for us inside. Eva didn’t say a word the entire ride, and I didn’t try to fill the silence. I know she’s torturing herself, and anything I say would just make it worse.

Because she’d know I don’t believe my own words.

And I’ve already lied enough.

We walk into the conference room. Lochlan is on the phone with Adriana’s security team. Ronan sits at the far end of the table with building schematics spread out in front of him. Gavin is pacing, which means he’s ready to hit something. Cillian stands by the door. He looks at me when we walk in and his eyes flick to Eva and back. He sees it. Whatever’s different about us this morning, he caught it in half a second.

“Sit down,” Ronan says, his eyes cutting to Eva.

She drops into a chair, her shoulders squared. I don’t think she has the energy to fight him on it today.

“The fire was contained.” Ronan looks between us. “But the data room was cleaned out. Hard drives, backup servers, physical files. Everything related to three active DiMicheli real estate projects is gone. So now Dmitri has operational data on three properties that are worth forty million combined. He has leverage. That’s what he wanted. That’s what he’s been building.”

Dead silence fills the room. Eva clenches her fists in her lap, her expression like stone.

“The trap was supposed to prevent this,” Ronan says. He’s not looking at Eva, but the implication is clear. We had the intel. We had the timeline. We weren’t fast enough.

“We were working on an eight-day window,” I say. “Dmitri moved early because he already had everything he needed. He told me on the phone. This was always coming. We just didn’t have the speed to get ahead of it.”

Eva pulls Lochlan’s laptop toward her. She stares at it for a beat. “He used the maintenance override window.”

Every head turns.

“Not the main security gap we were planning around. A smaller one.” Her fingers move fast across the keyboard. “We deprioritized it because the exposure was shorter. He didn’t care. He only needed forty minutes.”

She turns the screen toward Ronan. A timeline. The maintenance override, the access code cycle, the exact forty-minute window Dmitri’s people used to get in and out.

“We built the trap around the biggest gap,” she says. “He took the first one he could find. Which means he’s not being patient anymore. Something changed.”

Gavin stops pacing. Cillian’s eyebrows raise about a quarter inch. Lochlan puts his phone down. Ronan leans back in his chair.

We all look at her, waiting for more.

“You already have my job history from two days ago,” Eva says. “What you need now is the link between my data and this specific hit.”

She pulls Lochlan’s laptop toward her and starts working again. It only takes her five minutes to get the connection mapped.

“There,” she says, turning the screen toward Ronan. “That’s how he did it. That’s the exact data I gave him that made last night possible.”

Eva looks at him. “If we’re going to figure out his next move, you need to understand exactly how he used what I built. Every piece. Including the ones I wish I could take back.”

Ronan’s forehead pinches. “Fuck. Dmitri has leverage on three properties worth forty million. That’s not an endgame. That’s a starting position.” He looks at Lochlan. “He’s going to use it to force his way to the table. Either he trades the data back for a seat, or he uses it to burn everything down until someone gives him one.”

Ronan looks at me and lifts an eyebrow. “Your source just gave me a clearer threat assessment in five minutes than your two-hour briefing last week.”

“She’s not my—” I start to say.

“His source,” Eva says, still looking at Ronan, “is right here. And she’s not done yet.”

Ronan’s mouth twitches. The closest thing to a smile I’ve seen from him in months.