Page 81 of Black Ledger

And so that’s what we did. Keira, the Morozovs, and I went to watch the footage.

We crowded into the tiny security room. It was so cramped, someone’s elbow dug into my side.

The monitors hung on the wall. Nika cycled through the feeds and checked the metadata and code. Keira leaned over her shoulder, muttering advice under her breath, which only fueled the tension between the two.

“Nothing is altered,” Nika said, pulling up another screen before returning to the footage.

Dimitri rubbed his face. “It cannot be an actual ghost.” His Russian accent thickened. It was usually so light you couldn’t even tell he had an accent. But right now, it was thick.

The footage came back up. Letter by letter, the message appeared on the wall, but no one was there writing it: no hands, no body, no lipstick tube. Not even a shadow.

“Is it possible that it’s time-activated paint?” Nika asked. “I read a book once where that happened. Someone paints it, and it appears hours later.”

I cocked my head. The footage played on the screen again and again. “Anything is possible.”

“But it’s lipstick, not paint.” Keira straightened, no longer hovering over Nika’s shoulder. “I touched it, I smelled it. It wasn’t paint.”

“Could the footage have been edited?” Ilya asked.

“No,” Keira and Nika said at the same time.

“The metadata is intact,” Nika stated right as Keira said, “The timestamps all match and haven’t been altered.”

“Then how the fuck is this possible?” Ilya asked, scratching his five-o’clock shadow.

“I think the better question is, why is someone targeting you?” Keira faced me, and confusion had burrowed into her expression, along with a little accusation.

Fuck. I hadn’t told her any of this, and now she was thrown into the center of it and possibly also a target.

“We don’t know,” Nika said, pushing her chair back and standing, nearly in Keira’s face.

Keira eased back and studied us one by one. Suspicion sharpened her expression. “What’s going on?”

My shoulders stiffened. It was probably not the best idea to tell a woman I had just met about the ghost. But then again, I had asked that same woman to hack into my systems and find my rat… what more danger could there be in letting her know about a vigilante hunting me and all of my men?

She might become a target, too.

So I started to explain it all, but Dimitri warned, “Are you sure you want to read her in?”

No. A chill chased down my spine, but I tilted my head and continued to tell her everything, from the gifted penis—at that, she snorted—to all of the notes and photos I had found the other day. Throughout my explanation, she remained still.

I didn’t go into any of the whys or hows. Mostly because I didn’t know them. I just gave her the facts from the last couple of months.

“So, in summary, a vigilante, who might be an actual ghost, sent you your father’s penis and is hunting you and all of your men down?” she asked in a tone that was both amused and colored with concern.

“Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.”

“Lovely.” Her attention drew back to the cameras. “And what do you intend to do about it?”

“I’m going to find her and kill her,” I said coldly.

“Great. How can I be of help?”

“You can’t,” Nika said sharply, and every eye in the room landed on her. “He shouldn’t have told you any of that.”

“But now he has.” Keira’s tone was calm and almost unconcerned. “So I can just go on pretending as if I know nothing, or I could help.”

“Then pretend like you know nothing.” Nika crossed her arms.