Focus. Bellandi. Email.
“Touching base on next steps,” he murmurs, reading the subject. His breath brushes my ear as he reads over my shoulder, and I hate that I feel it like a touch.
“Should I open it?” I whisper.
“Not yet,” he says and pushes away from the table. Much to my regret. “Let me make sure.”
He crouches by the duffel and pulls out a second laptop—older, thicker, nothing like the sleek one he has sitting on the coffee table—along with a short cable and a small black dongle.
“This one doesn’t touch your network,” he says, businesslike. He sets it on the table and sits next to me, opens it, and the screen boots into a plain interface that looks nothing like a normal desktop.
I stare. “What is that?”
“A clean sandbox,” he says, fingers moving fast. “Isolated environment. If there’s a malicious attachment or a booby-trapped link, it tries to bite this machine, not yours.”
He glances at me. “And before you ask—yes, Bellandi can absolutely put a payload in a ‘harmless’ PDF or hide it behind a link. So we don’t click it without precautions.”
He taps a fewkeys, then points at my laptop. “Forward it to this address.” He rattles it off once, then adds, “Don’t open it. Don’t preview it. Just forward.”
My hands hover over the keyboard.
“Once it’s in here, I’ll pull the headers, see where it actually came from. Then I’ll detonate any attachments in the sandbox and run a scan. If it tries to call out to anything, I’ll see it.”
My fingers tremble as I hit Forward, too careful not to let it open or preview.
“Done,” I say, and my voice comes out too thin.
Antonio doesn’t answer right away. He’s already typing, jaw tight, gaze locked on his screen like the rest of the apartment has ceased to exist. A few lines of text flash. He makes a low sound under his breath.
“Okay,” he says finally. “I’m pulling the full headers first. This tells me the real route it took—what servers touched it, whether the ‘from’ address is real or spoofed, and if it’s bouncing through something dirty.”
He clicks once, then again, and a window fills with dense, ugly metadata.
I shift in my chair, trying not to track the movement of his forearms as he leans closer. “And if it’s… bad?”
His eyes flick to me, then back to the screen. “Then we treat it like something meant to get inside your life.” He types another moment. “Which is exactlywhat it is.”
This time, I’m out of my chair and leaning over him. “What do you mean? What is it?” My eyes scan the screen full of things I don’t understand.
“See this?” he says, tapping a line with his finger. “It’s not just an email. There’s a hidden payload attached to it—think of it like a little program wearing a costume.”
I lean closer, putting my hand on his shoulder.
“Is it a virus?” I ask quietly.
“A remote-access implant,” he corrects. “If you open it on your laptop, it can give them a way in—full access to your machine. Whatever permissions it can claw.”
My throat tightens. “But Northstar—”
“Northstar’s IT probably has safeguards on the corporate network,” he says. “But that doesn’t protect everything you have open. Email. Notes. Drafts. Anything synced locally. And it doesn’t protect you when you’re on your home Wi-Fi. Once they’re inside your laptop on your Wi-Fi, they can start sniffing the rest of what’s connected. Any device on the same network.”
“What would they want with that?” I ask.
“Anything they can use against you. Blackmail you with or hold against you,” he says coldly.
My blood turns cold.
“Like what?” I ask, my voice rising in panic. “Like, like nudes? I don’t have anything like that on myph—”
