She rolled her eyes and retaliated by stealing one of his fries. “Fair warning—I will absolutely judge you if you drip ketchup on your sheets.”
A smirk tugged at his mouth. “I live dangerously.”
She glanced at him as he took a bite of his burger, a little sauce at the corner of his mouth. Without thinking,she reached over and wiped it away with her thumb.
The look he gave her afterward wasn’t about food.
Dinner turned into shared bites and quiet laughter, her crisp romaine and tangy dressing mixing with his salty fries and smoky burger, the ordinary act of eating in bed feeling unexpectedly intimate.
Eventually, he set their empty containers on the nightstand, and she curled back against him.
His arm tightened around her waist, and his mouth found her shoulder—he seemed to like kissing her there, and she didn’t mind at all.
“Can you stay a while?” The huskiness in his voice told her exactly what he had in mind, and she was completely on board with it.
“Round two?” she asked while yanking the sheet from his body.
His answer was a low, satisfied sound as he pulled her closer.
Chapter 25
Andy didn’t answer the phone when it lit up with a local number he recognized, even though it said “Unknown Caller”and wasn’t in his contacts.
He’d been hunched at his desk for nearly an hour, staring at the new Ghost Thread: Echo devlog without processing a single frame of it. The video played on—graphics demos, commentary, ambient music—but his mind kept looping back to the moment he’d done Diego’s job. The sick rush of adrenaline. The guilt that crawled under his skin afterward. And what he hated most—a flicker of pride he couldn’t smother, the part that craved being good at something, even for the wrong person.
The phone rang again—same unknown number.
His stomach bottomed out.
He knew who it was. And he knew answering was the wrong move. At this point, he wasn’t sure he wanted the money he’d been promised. Diego hadn’t contacted him since the other day, and part of Andy was relieved. But it looked like he had to deal with the asshole again.
The call went to voicemail a second time, but his phone immediately jolted to life again. It wasn’t for another call, but a text.
Unknown:
Answer Bing
When the next call came in, he forced himself to pick it up and swipe the screen.
“Yeah?” His voice cracked. Of course it did.
“Dude, next time, don’t make me call more than once. How’s my star hacker doin’?”
That voice—smooth, sly, like every word slid out around a wicked grin he couldn’t see but definitely felt—sent a cold prickle down Andy’s arms. Diego always sounded like a cat toying with a mouse that hadn’t realized it was cornered yet.
Andy pushed his chair away from the desk until it bumped the edge of his bed. “You don’t have to call me that.”
“Sure, I do,” Diego said. “It’s who you are. Smart kid. Quick fingers. Useful.”
Andy clenched his fist. That word—useful—shouldn’t have made something warm and ashamedtwist in his chest. But it did. And that’s what scared him.
“What do you want?” Andy asked. “I did that thing for you already.”
“Mmh. You did,” Diego said, sounding pleased. “Good work, by the way. Clean. Efficient.”
Praise shouldn’t have landed the way it did—sharp and electric—but it crawled right under Andy’s skin. He hated that he reacted to it at all. He had fun testing himself by hacking into websites, but that’s as far as he ever went. He just looked around before retreating and wiping out any evidence that he’d been there. No harm. No foul.
“You said you’d give me the money,” Andy said. “That’s why you’re calling, right?”
