“I’ve done worse,” she says, cutting me off. “It’s fine. This just means we need to hit pause. I don’t want to leave a trail in the middle of active tracing.”
I nod, though every inch of me resists. We were making real progress. The connections were finally clicking into place, but now, the door has been slammed shut. Was it because we were getting too close?
“How long will it take?” I ask.
“If I’m lucky? A few hours. Realistically?” She sighs. “A day. Maybe two.”
She exhales sharply, finally meeting my eyes. There’s still a spark of confidence there, but it’s dimmer now.
A beat passes. “You’ll get back in.”
“Damn right I will,” she says, trying to sound cocky. It almost works.
She pushes back from her desk, cracking her knuckles. “Alright. Let’s call it for now. I’ve got work to do that you don’t want to witness. You’d lose all respect for me.”
“Too late,” I murmur, then offer a grin.
She grins back, crooked, tired. “You’re a delight.”
“I try.”
Elena logs out of the system with a few quick keystrokes. The room dims as her monitors power down, leaving only mine still glowing in the dark. She stretches, tossing her hoodie over her shoulder and slipping her feet into mismatched slides.
“I’ll ping you when I’m back in,” she says.
I nod. “Be careful.”
“Always. You too.”
And then she’s gone, up the stairs, into the brighter world above.
I sit still for a moment, hands resting on the keyboard. The screen in front of me reflects a dozen little red flags. Suspicious transfers. Unanswered questions. An ugly, intricate web that stretches deeper than I ever imagined when I agreed to help Yuri trace a dirty fed’s finances.
I exhale slowly. Silence fills the pit. It’s colder now. Not just the machines, not just the basement. It’s something else. Something beneath the surface, circling.
Something has shifted.
And we both felt it.
I don’t move right away after Elena leaves. The silence feels unnatural without her music—no thudding bass, no low curses when a script fails, no furious tapping on the keyboard. Just the mechanical hum of resting machines and the faint buzz of my thoughts.
I scroll through what’s left of the transaction data. Most of it is noise—small, scattered sums threaded through anonymous accounts. But then one catches my eye. Twenty-two thousand eight-hundred dollars. Clean. Ordinary. Almosttooordinary. The date is February 2019 in Isla Verde Capital.
I don’t recognize the name, and that’s saying something. I’ve spent the last two weeks memorizing every alias and holding company tied to the Ivanov web and the known cartel fronts. This isn’t one of them.
I cross-check the entry with one of Elena’s older data scrapes—wire logs from a seized cartel node. It takes a minute, but then I see it, one line, nearly erased, marked “Colón Logistics,” and tagged to the same month.
A logistics hub in Panama.
I remember Yuri mentioning it in passing once, about how a shipment went dark there. It didn’t matter at the time. It wasn’t tied to any known threat. But now?
I highlight the record, heart beating faster. I should wait. Let Elena finish her end. Let it all line up before I throw it Yuri’s way.
But something in me won’t let it sit. Maybe it’s instinct. Maybe it’s the knowledge that we’ve already drawn attention. That someone saw Elena and locked her out. And whoever they are, they now know someone’s looking.
And if they know someone’s looking, the window is shrinking.
I stare at my phone, fingers hesitating over the keyboard. I could just flag the transaction. Send a note. Keep it dry, impersonal.
