Ava let her head drop back between her shoulders, her jaw tightening. “Really? We’re still doing this?”
“I can’t have you crawling around the internet, contacting people and letting them know you’re alive.”
“Oh, well, there goes my plan to post a new selfie that says hashtag back from the dead.”
“This isn’t a joke, Ava.”
“I’m not laughing, Sebastian,” she retorted. “Look, I’m serious. You clearly are overwhelmed. We have to start working together if we want to defeat The Board.”
He paced the floor in front of the cold hearth, running a shaky hand through his hair. “I just…”
“What?” she prompted. “Don’t trust me? Yeah, same. You’ve done very little to prove that I can trust you, but I haven’t left. Because I get it. They think I’m dead. And you’re right. We need to get rid of Chris before we can focus on the others. But we need Alex to do that.”
Sebastian heaved a sigh. “Fine, what do you want me to do?”
“Send another text to Alex. Tell him to meet you at theold resort because you’re two ships weathering the storm. He’ll know what that means.”
Sebastian began to type when he froze, glancing up at her. “What?”
“Just say it. He’ll know it.” She crossed her arms as he went back to typing. “I’m surprised you don’t get it.”
“I don’t.”
She shook her head. “The painting I bought. Your painting. Two ships weathering the storm. I told him it reminded me of us.”
He stopped typing again before he returned to it. “Done.”
“Also, please don’t drug him to bring him here. Alex is kind of delicate.”
Sebastian shifted his weight from foot to foot, his arms dropping to his sides. “Are you serious? And this is the man we’re pinning all of our hopes on.”
“He’s a genius. And he has tech skills neither of us can touch. He’s just not very physical, that’s all.”
Sebastian shook his head. “I don’t get it with you two.”
“You don’t have to,” she answered. “Now, give me a laptop, and I’ll get you the file you lost, and with a little more information, I probably can get you the decryption program from your compromised safe house.”
She held out a hand, wiggling her fingers.
With a heavy sigh, he said, “Wait here.”
He stalked across the room and disappeared through the front door, returning a few minutes later with a laptop in hand. “I still don’t understand how you’re going to get that file from Alex. I got into his messaging system at StoneCorp, but his laptop is a vault.”
Ava settled into the armchair as Sebastian leaned over her shoulder. She chuckled, turning on the machine and navigating to a program. “It is…unless you’re me.”
He glanced at her, his brow furrowing.
She tapped on the screen, hacking her way to Alex’s lock screen.
“You can’t hack past this. He’s got so much technology on there…”
“I don’t need to hack past it. I just need to login.” Her fingers flew across the keyboard as she typed in the password that she knew would work. Seconds later, she had access to his entire system.
“Voila,” she said with a grin before she began to navigate through the files.
“Seriously? He uses a password you can guess?”
“Alex and Ava nine twenty,” she answered. “Our wedding date. I never knew why until he finally told me how he felt.”
