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1
FREYA
I’ve always lovedthe dark.
The glow of the laptop bathes the room in a cool blue light, casting shadows along the faded, high ceilings of the Chelsea Hotel. These days, the once-infamous playground of artists, poets, and rock stars is now a luxury boutique hotel, nothing like it was back when Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen prowled the halls.
It’s quieter now; morerefined. But the ghosts of its history still cling to the walls. It’s almost as if I can feel them watching me as I work, their restless energy crackling and humming just beneath the surface.
I fit in here—hiding in plain sight, playing in the dark.
As usual when I’m periscope-down in work like this, I’ve got my big clunky headphones on. Tool’sSchismbleeds into Nine Inch Nails, blocking out the whole world around me. My fingers dance across the keyboard, tapping and clicking rhythmically, pulling me deeper into the task at hand.
I’ve been at this for hours, tracing barely-there digital footprints, looking for a thread to pull on.
Kir, of course, wouldn’t tell mewhyhe needs the financial records of a corporation that’s been dead and buried for over a decade. He never does. But it’s not like he’s ever “keeping” information from me. He just doesn’t “volunteer” it. And honestly, I don’t always care to know, anyway. My job is to hunt. To seek out. To uncover things that people think are lost and gone forever.
But nothing’s ever really gone from the internet.
That’s where I come in.
My job is to find the information; Annika’s is touseit. Together, we make sure Kir stays one step ahead of whatever company he’s acquiring…or whatever person he’s crushing.
At first, we were his employees. Now, after all these years, my best friend Annika and I are essentially his family. Same goes for his nephew Damian.
Annika and I come from families and pasts we had to run from. Damian’s was taken from him. Kir never had one.
Now we all have a new one together.
My eyes flick to the clock in the corner of the screen. Objectively, 2:13 a.m. is late for most normal people, even in New York.
But—spoiler—I’m not normal. Two in the morning is basically my lunch hour.
When your body hates sunlight…or is it that sunlight hates me?...the dark becomes your friend. Night becomes your day.This is where I live: in the middle of the night, safe from the sun, from normal people, and from the demons chasing my heels.
My eyes focus sharply as I stop typing.
I think I’ve found something.
Again, I don’t ask Kir questions, I just do the work. If it’s harder because there are walls up I didn’t see coming, all the better. I love a challenge. But tonight is proving to be a little outside the norm.
Kir only said that the financial information he was after was—possibly—sitting on a server belonging to Orlov Financial Solutions. He never mentioned that Orlov Financial Solutions is a massive front for the Grigorov Bratva family, one that they use for money laundering and predatory loans. But again, that only makes this more fun for me.
Annika likes to say it, and she’s probably right: there’s a massive,massiveadrenaline junkie in me, and shit like this just feeds it.
I scowl at the screen again.
Shit.
I thought I had something there, but it’s another dead end. Unless…
It takes me a second of wondering why the root folder is pointing toward files that don’t exist on the system before it hits me: theydoexist, just not on this network.
AKA, the files are on a computer or server at their offices that isn’t connected to the internet.
Fuck.
I lean back in my chair, frustration bubbling in my chest. I’ve come too far to stop now. If the data I need isn’t in the network I’ve hacked into but in the physical hardware itself, I’m going to have to go out there and get my hands on it the old-fashioned way: by breaking and entering.
