He nodded, the faintest tug pulling up his smile.
Fleeting conversations like that always made me realise how far we’d come as a company. Thinking back to how this whole operation used to just be me, Oscar, the spare room of our apartment, burner phones, and tampered home security systems made pride buzz through my spine.
Speaking of the devil, the steel elevator doors opened and revealed Oscar.
He looked almost out of breath, his hand resting against the wall. “We have a problem.”
I huffed, rolling up the sleeves of my shirt because I could just feel it was going to be one of those days where formalitywould be out the window soon enough. “I figured,” I groaned, walking toward my office. “What now?”
He fell into step beside me, his hands—tattoos peppering them like they did mine—running through his dark brown strands. “Security breach with the Alcott files. The shit we had on the guy running opposite her is gone.”
My brows barely lifted as I gripped the glass handle and walked into the icy breeze of the office. “What about the offshore files?”
“Gone.”
My steps faltered as I reached my desk, my eyes barely roaming over the box with the pink ribbon tied around it. I looked back at Oscar, noting the slight sheen of sweat on his forehead and the panic blurring his dark brown eyes. “What do you mean they’re gone?”
He walked toward me, a deadly, kind of terrified hesitation in his steps.
I’d only seen him like this at three points in his life: when the feds caught onto his illegal hacking, when I called him into my office to shout at him about it, and after what happened to Lana.
“I mean, they’re gone,” he stuttered, his hands tugging at the dark strands of his hair before dropping his arms hopelessly, frustration seeping from him. “Same thing happened with the profile we had on Amber Westbrooke.”
Amber was a new client of ours. Actress. A-list. Only seeking our services after disappearing off the acting scene out of theblue and being tracked down almost instantly by some deranged fans.
I shook my head, laying my palms flat against my desk and leaning back. It made no sense for Amber’s files to go missing. She was so new that she had our best measures in place. Same with the Alcott files. Every copy of them was protected by technology that not even the government had access to yet.
Thanks to the man now sweating before me.
“But that’s—”
“Impossible?” Oscar nodded. “Yeah. I’ve been through every stage of grief trying to figure out what the fuck happened.” Something that looked like guilt shone in his eyes as he wandered toward the window; the eight-foot-high panes that surrounded the office gave me a 270-degree view of the city. He placed a hand on the glass, sighing before he looked back at me. “There’s no trace that anyone ever came in or left the sites, no evidence that anyone broke into them.” He shrugged. “They just aren’t there anymore.”
Oscar Romano wasn’t a stranger to a data breach. Doing the job that we did, they were almost always guaranteed to be a monthly pain in the ass. But growing up with him, watching him master his skills—although they were onlysemi-legal—was what made me sleep easy at night knowing if anyone tried to take us down, they’d give up eventually.
But seeing him like this for the third time in a month didn’t sit well with me. I hated that look in his eyes that thought he’d let me down. He could never, by the way. We were a team. His fuck-ups were my fuck-ups.
“I’m sorry,” he sighed, heading over to my desk. “Usually I can snuff out who did this with a few clicks, but this time there’s nothing. Not a fucking breadcrumb.”
I spun around to catch him fiddling with the bow on the box that I knew contained some of the best cookies the world had ever known, before clapping a hand down on his shoulder. “You don’t need to be sorry.” His eyes were on me. “We’ve dealt with shit like this before and we’ll do it again.”
Although I meant that, I was starting to get suspicious about the goings-on. Data breaches were common, but not so common that they were happening on a weekly basis with our most high-profile clients. And the fact that Oscar—Mr. I Can Hack into the FBI’s Database with Three Clicks—couldn’t find a single clue leading to the assholes who’d stolen from us was what worried me more.
Three quiet knocks sounded on my door.
“Yeah,” I sighed, before the door opened and revealed Margaret.
Her smile emerged as she did. “Sorry to bother you, Marcus, but Meghan says she needs you in training. One of the ex-cons is giving her a hard time.”
I groaned as my palms slid across my face, the stubble I’d forgotten to shave digging into my skin. I was in no mood for anything else to go wrong today.
“Okay.” I smiled, though it lacked any humor. “Tell her I’ll be there in five.”
She nodded, pushed her glasses up, and slipped out. The door clicked shut. My shoulders dropped—then stiffened again, Oscar’s warning echoing back, sharper than before.
“I can go back through the records and see if anything else was tampered with, but it’s as if this guy blinded us and took anything he deemed valuable enough to either sell or destroy us.”
Those two words had my eyes bolting to his.
