“Actually, she’s my wife.”
He shrugs, unbothered. “The wife and the specialist. Good to know.”
I’d called ahead to give him a rough idea of what we needed, but I left out most of the details. Maurice doesn’t need to know about the Ghost. Dinara does. I gave her the rundown in the car on the way over here. She can’t prepare to fight the Ghost unless she knows what we’re planning.
My brothers think I’m crazy for trusting her. Maybe they’re right. But I believe her because I’ve seen enough liars to recognize when someone’s telling the truth.
“Dinara,” she says, extending her hand. He shakes it, his massive palm swallowing hers.
“Kirill tells me you need to build something special.”
Dinara nods.
“I need to track an extremely sophisticated cyber threat,” she says, all business now. “Someone who’s been bypassing military-grade encryption, hijacking secure communications, and staying invisible across multiple networks. To catch them, I’ll need processing power that can handle real-time traffic analysisacross the entire city, pattern recognition algorithms running in parallel, and enough storage for at least six months of historical data.”
Maurice’s eyebrows climb toward his hairline. He looks at me like he’s trying to figure out where the hell I found her.
“That’s not a small order.”
“I know.” She pushes her glasses up her nose. “That’s why I need the best. I’m thinking dual Xeon processors, minimum sixty-four gigs of RAM, enterprise-level SSDs in a RAID configuration for redundancy, and at least four high-end GPUs for the heavy lifting on the pattern recognition.”
Maurice lets out a low whistle. “You know your hardware.”
“I’ve been building my own systems since I was twelve.” She moves deeper into the warehouse, running her fingers along a server rack with the reverence most women reserve for designer handbags. “This is nice. Pre-configured or custom?”
“Custom. I can build you whatever you need.”
They fall into a technical conversation I can barely follow, throwing around terms like bandwidth throttling and distributed computing architecture. I lean against a workbench and watch her work, the way her whole face transforms when she’s in her element.
She’s explaining some complicated concept about packet sniffing when she catches me staring. Her cheeks flush pink and she pushes the glasses up again, a nervous habit I’m starting to recognize.
Maurice pulls out a tablet, scribbling notes while Dinara rattles off specifications like she’s ordering coffee. This is her territory and she owns it, which is sexy as fuck. I’ve been with plenty of women, but I’ve never been attracted to someone’s mind before.
She glances over at me again, and this time she catches the heat in my gaze. Her lips part and the air between us shifts,charged with the same electricity that’s been crackling since the moment she walked into Velour.
“So.” Maurice’s voice breaks the moment. “I can have this ready in a few days. Maybe two if I call in some favors.”
“Call in all the fucking favors because we need it by end of the day,” I bark, still focused on Dinara. “You know money’s not an issue.”
Maurice sighs. “Never is with you. I’ll have it delivered to the penthouse.”
We finalize the details and head back to the car. She’s practically vibrating with excitement as she buckles in.
“That was incredible,” she says. “I’ve never had a reason to build something this complex. By the way, I’m going to need like five of your best tech people to help me get this up and running.”
“Whatever you need.” I pull out of the lot and head toward the highway.
When I first briefed her on the Ghost, she grilled me for an hour about our security protocols, network architecture, points of entry. By the end she announced she has some theories about how the Ghost exploited our system, but once her computers are set up, she’ll know a lot more.
“You were twelve when you started building computers?” I ask, looking over at her applying a deadly shade of red lipstick in the mirror.
She nods. “My father didn’t have money for expensive toys, so when I wanted one, I had to figure out how to build it myself. Started with scraps from a junkyard and a manual I found at the library. Took me three months, but I got it working.”
“Impressive.”
“Pavel noticed what I was doing and bought me my first real system. Nothing crazy, but a start. After that, he’d bring me broken laptops, damaged hard drives, anything he could find. I’d fix them up and sell them for parts money.” She’s smiling,lost in the memory. “Eventually he realized I wasn’t only good at fixing things. I could break into them too. Bypass passwords, crack encryption, find hidden files. That’s when he had one of his hackers teach me the real skills I was after.”
“Did he make you work for him in exchange?”
