“I did a summer gig for Western Bank during college. Wrote a hook for their PIN brute. Why?” I tried to sound casual, but truth be told, this was fucking exciting to me.
He grinned like he was showing off. “I’ve piggybacked their mainframe before, but whoever was doing this for Silas prior, maybe it was him, was running a deadman’s script that auto-wipes his burner accounts every twenty-four. He thinks he’s smart. He’s not.”
I leaned in, fingers itching for a keyboard. “Show me.”
He nodded and spun the monitor around. The code was familiar, but twisted—Wrecker had written his own protocol stack, a bastard child of C and Bash and something that looked homegrown. I could follow the logic, even as it wound through obfuscated jumps and dummy variables that would have thrown most white hats off the scent. Made me salivate.
He pointed to a highlighted section. “Your transfer payload gets wrapped here—see, it runs a checksum, then double-stamps the timestamp. You’d expect to see the confirmation ping on the return route. But if we reroute the payload to a cold wallet first, then pass a zero-balance packet to the log, you’ll never catch the lag.”
My brain caught up fast. “So you’re bottlenecking his own account against itself, so should he try to check his own balance, it’ll look clean—but in reality, the actual funds have already been moved?”
“Correct. And the best part? The confirmation string on his end gets spoofed by this—” he snapped open a side window and pulled up a fake UI that looked identical to the bank’s, but ran on a local host. “If you can access his dashboard even once, you can side load the Trojan and keep eyes on every transaction he does.”
I couldn’t help it. I smiled, sharp and real. “That’s fucking beautiful.”
He shrugged. “You’re the one who wrote the original logic. I just patched the holes you left on purpose.”
My heart did a weird little skip at that. I covered it by pretending to study the code. “So, what do you want me to do?”
He looked away, jaw tight. “You’re gonna have to load the Trojan on his laptop and set up some surveillance around his place.”
I tensed, but knew there was no other option. “I can do it. He’s given me access to his laptop before. But surveillance? Silas isn’t stupid enough to let outsiders wander around his HQ. If he catches me poking around, it’s over.”
He grinned again, bigger this time. “That’s where the fun comes in.” He opened a drawer and set down a tiny plastic case—inside, six motes of something gray and shiny, smaller than the head of a nail. “Micro-cams. They ride static charge, so they stick to any surface you touch. The battery life is shit, but the audio is good for a ten-foot radius.”
I picked one up, pinched it between thumb and forefinger. “These are illegal as hell.”
He nodded. “They’ll run a continuous loop, and the data gets dumped to a relay station I’ve got rigged to an ice cream truck two blocks from Greenbriar’s club. You just have to drop them. I’ll handle the rest.”
I tested one against the desk. It stuck, invisible unless you knew where to look. “Is it video or audio?”
“Both, but audio’s the gold. Silas is a crazy fuck. Talks to himself when he thinks nobody’s listening.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You ever think about using your powers for good?”
He gave me a shit-eating grin. “Oh baby, I am.”
We kept working, cross-checking logs and mapping out the path I’d need to walk in Greenbriar’s den. The longer we worked, the more I felt myself slotting back into place, like a bone that finally set after months of wrong healing. Working next to Wrecker felt natural. He was the only one on earth who saw the code in my head and didn’t treat me like a freak.
The silence was loaded. I picked up the micro-cam, just to have something to do. “What if Silas finds this?” I asked, rolling it across my knuckles. “Won’t he trace it back?”
“I doubt he’d even realize what it is. Anyway, they’re one-use only, and the firmware bricks itself after upload. If they got their grubby paws on it, it would likely be destroyed by their hands.” He reached out and took the cam from my hand, slow and deliberate. His fingers brushed mine, and my wolf yowled like a banshee, a shiver running down my spine.
He held my gaze, then placed the cam back in the case. “We’re going to take down Greenbriar. All of it. I want you to be the one to lead the charge.”
I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry. “Why?”
He didn’t answer right away. He just looked at me, his eyes so clear and pale it made my teeth hurt. “Because you’re theonly one smart enough to finish what you started. And because I know what it’s like to have the world pick you apart piece by piece until there’s nothing left but bones.”
His words set something off inside me—some strange, bitter pride, or maybe just the old ache of being the one nobody noticed until they needed something. I nodded once and locked the tech case shut.
“So I go in, plant these, load the Trojan, and act normal,” I said, pushing my stool back.
“Normal as you get,” he said, mouth twisting.
I picked up the case, stood, and squared my shoulders. “What happens if I get caught?”
He didn’t blink. “If you get caught, I come for you. And nothing on this earth will stop me.”
