He did. The sedative had done its work; he'd be unconscious for hours, long enough for me to slip out and meet Gabriel, long enough for me to copy the files I needed from his laptop, long enough for me to advance the plan that would end with both brothers destroyed and their network in ashes.
But I didn't slip out. Not tonight. Tonight, I lay in the arms of the man who'd tried to own me, and I letmyself feel something that wasn't love but wasn't hatred either. Something quieter. Something closer to acceptance.
21
The Server Heist
The bank was a fortress dressed in marble and brass.
Mercy National occupied the ground floor of a century-old building in Boston's financial district, its facade all Greek columns and gilded accents, its security state-of-the-art beneath the neoclassical veneer. I'd spent three days casing it—noting the guard rotations, mapping the camera blind spots, memorizing the rhythms of the employees who streamed through its revolving doors each morning like blood cells through an artery.
Tonight, the artery was empty. Tonight, I was the surgeon.
I approached from the west, dressed in black tactical gear that had become a second skin over months of hunting. The mask over my face was more than disguise; it was armor, a second self, the face of the woman I became when I stopped performing for either brother and started acting for myself. Gabriel's intelligence had provided the vault specifications, the biometric vulnerabilities, the precise location of the server I needed to access. Everything else—the execution, the timing, the cold precision of the break-in—was mine.
The first guard went down at 2:17 AM, a needle sliding into his carotid before he could register my presence. I caught his body as it crumpled, lowering him silently to the marble floor, and moved on. The second guard was at the security desk, eyes on a bank of monitors that showed nothing but empty hallways and quiet corridors—the loop I'd installed earlier that evening, a gift from Gabriel's considerable technical arsenal.
He didn't even look up before the needle found his throat.
The vault was in the sub-basement, accessible only through an elevator that required both a keycard and a biometric scan. I had the keycard—lifted from Nathan's wallet while he slept, copied and returned before he noticed it was missing. The biometric scan was more complicated. Gabriel had provided a synthetic fingerprint overlay, crafted from a high-resolution image of Nathan's thumbthat I'd taken while he was unconscious from the sedative. It wouldn't pass a military-grade scanner, but the bank's system was commercial—robust enough to satisfy insurance requirements, vulnerable enough for someone with the right tools.
The scanner beeped green. The elevator doors slid open.
The sub-basement was cold, the air heavy with the hum of servers and the faint ozone smell of electronics. The vault itself was a steel door three feet thick, guarded by a retinal scanner that would require Nathan's actual eye to open. But I wasn't going through the vault door. I was going around it.
Gabriel's blueprints had revealed a maintenance access panel in the ceiling of the adjacent room—a flaw in the bank's design, a gap between the vault's walls and the building's original structure. It was barely large enough for a human body to squeeze through. It was exactly large enough for mine.
I pulled myself into the crawlspace and began the slow, agonizing journey through the dark.
The server was a sleek black monolith in the center of the vault, its lights blinking steady green in the darkness. I'd expected more security—laser grids, pressure plates, the kind of theatrical defenses that had become standard in Nathan's world. But the vault itself was the security. No one was supposed to get this far.
I plugged the portable drive into the server's access port and began the download. Gabriel's decryption software hummed to life, bypassing firewalls and cracking passwords with the efficiency of a tool designed by the man who'd built the original system. Nathan had taught his brother well, back before they'd become enemies. He'd probably never imagined those lessons would be turned against him.
The download took fourteen minutes. I spent them cataloguing what I'd done. Three guards neutralized. Four cameras looped. One server accessed. In and out in under an hour, if everything went according to plan.
But nothing ever went according to plan.
The alarm triggered as I was exiting the crawlspace—not the bank's main system, but a secondary protocol Gabriel's intel hadn't identified. A silent alarm, the kind that summoned private security rather than police. I had maybe three minutes before they arrived.
I ran.
The elevator was too slow. I took the stairs, my boots pounding against concrete, my breath ragged in my throat. The private security team was coming from the east entrance—I could hear their footsteps echoing through the marble halls. I calculated angles, trajectories, exit routes. The west service door was still clear. If I could reach it before they rounded the corner—
A bullet cracked the air abovemy head.
I dove behind a marble pillar, my heart hammering against my ribs. The security team was better armed than I'd anticipated. Military-grade weapons, tactical training. Nathan's people, probably—a secondary layer of protection he hadn't told me about, another secret in a relationship built on them.
"Drop your weapon and come out with your hands up!" The voice was male, authoritative, the kind that expected to be obeyed.
I didn't obey. I fired twice, heard a grunt of pain, and used the chaos to sprint for the service door. Another bullet grazed my arm—a hot line of fire that made me gasp—but I was through the door and into the alley before they could get a clear shot.
The night swallowed me whole. I ran until my lungs burned and my legs gave out, and then I ran some more. By the time I reached the safe house where Gabriel was waiting, blood was soaking through my tactical gear and the portable drive was still clutched in my hand like a heartbeat.
"It's done," I said, pressing the drive into his palm. "The server data. Everything he's been hiding."
"You're bleeding." His hands were already on me, checking the wound with clinical precision. "How bad?"
"Grazed. I'll survive." I pulled away from his touch, suddenly unable to bear it. "I need to get back to the apartment before he wakes up. He can't know I was gone."
