“Okay. January 2020. Legacy Holdings moved five million dollars through an SPV into an import company flagged by the DEA last year. In the same quarter, the cartel funded a side operation in Tijuana.”
“There’s a possible link,” Elena says, already flipping between screens. “Give me the transaction ID… yeah, there it is. Same routing chain bounced through a server in São Paulo. And guess what? I found an FBI login pinging off the same IP address forty-eight hours later. Guess whose badge ID.”
“Spalding.”
“Bingo.”
My heart kicks harder in my chest. “So they were circling each other that early.”
“At minimum. Could be even earlier. This is just the first one we can prove.”
I tap out a few notes, organizing the timeline into a visual graph. The connections are starting to sharpen. Legacy Holdings transfers feeding cartel operations, mirrored by Spalding’s sudden ‘assignments’ to regions where the money moved next. It’s like watching a pattern emerge beneath dust, horrifying and obvious.
“You’re good at this,” Elena says, eyeing my work. “Like, scary good. You ever think about going full dark-side? Cook some books, offshore a fortune, retire to Monaco? You’re part of the Bratva now. Might as well live the life.”
I snort. “You’re the one who gets off on cracking into sealed servers for fun.”
She grins. “That’s a valid lifestyle choice.”
“Let me guess, your retirement plan involves a villa in Spain and an extradition-proof VPN?”
“Obviously.” She smirks. “But don’t dodge the question. You’ve got the soul of a white-collar criminal who just needs the right excuse.”
I give her a long look. “Only if the law loses all meaning.”
“Babe,” she says, “have youmetlate capitalism?”
We both laugh, and for a second the air in the pit feels lighter, even warm. There’s something easy about Elena—sharp-edged, but disarming. Her mind moves like quicksilver, and even when I can’t keep up with the tech jargon, I can feel us syncing in rhythm, pulling threads together from different sides of the map.
I almost forget to be scared.
Then she stills. Her fingers pause mid-keystroke. Her expression flattens, and the light in her eyes snuffs out into something colder.
“Elena?”
She blinks once, then twice, and suddenly she’s typing again, frantic and aggressive. The rhythm is wrong. Desperate.
“Elena, what happened?”
“I just got kicked out,” she says. “From the Caymans archive. Vault server locked me out. Hard.”
A cold ripple slides through me. “Did someone see you?”
“Could be.” Her voice is clipped, low. “Could also be internal security protocols. Either way, I was ghosting that network for days, and now it’s acting like I never existed.”
She’s already rerouting, flipping into new screens, and killing processes, all while muttering under her breath. The EDM track looping in the background suddenly feels too fast, too loud. My ears ring.
“This a problem?” I ask quietly.
She doesn’t answer right away. Just types. Then leans back, jaw tight. “It’s not good. It means someone touched the system. Maybe someone high up. I need to come in sideways now through a different route, different cloak. It’s slower, more visible, but I’ll get us back in.”
I study her face. She’s trying to keep her expression neutral, but her foot is bouncing under the desk. Elena, cool as arctic glass, has been rattled.
“Are you worried?” I ask softly.
She hesitates. “Only slightly more than usual.”
“Elena—”
