Kaz blinks once and tilts his head. He keeps his hands on the edge of the console and watches me without moving.
We’re rarely alone. I avoid him when I can. When I can’t, Thorn usually sits between us and tells us both to shut up.
“What’s your problem?” Kaz says, eyes still on me, voice rough from too much coffee and not enough sleep.
“I don’t like you, and I don’t like when you talk.” It is as close as I’ll give him to the truth. Sound grinds in my head when it comes out the wrong throat. His is the wrong throat.
“Your brother likes me just fine,” he says, rolling one shoulder as he drops into his chair.
“That’s because you’re the best computer programmer in the city. In the world.” Maybe Ella’s better. I don’t say that. “Did you find Ella Rendale?” My palm actually heats with the need to meet her ass. Hard. I can’t believe she ran away during a fucking firefight.
He mutters under his breath. I think about putting a bullet in his head. Thorn would be pissed if he came back and his top computer guy was a stain on the floor. Shit happens. Kaz catches the thought on my face or reads the angle of my shoulders and drops his gaze to the keys.
“She’s fascinating,” he says, fingers moving. He tilesfeeds across the far wall, pulls license plate hits, lights up a geofence, and pushes audio to my left. “She hotwired an older car outside the IHOP on Sixteenth.” He scrubs back, zooms, and tags the model.
She hotwired a fucking car? The woman who can hack into anything modern also has old school skills? I stand there shirtless, blood drying across my ribs, and shake my head. “Where did she go?”
“I’ve been searching all available cameras,” he says, softer now, voice leveled out for my ears. His hands blur. Window after window opens. He tracks alley cameras, pulls a private garage exit, sorts a license plate list, and kills three false positives. “She went south. No. Southwest.” He reads off street names and time stamps. He circles a frame. “Here’s the car.”
Good. Where the hell is she? “And then?”
“Then,” he says, typing hard. He flips to a city grid, overlays transit cameras, scrubs the stream, and tags motion vectors. “She’s gone.”
I still. “What do you mean, gone?”
“Her trail’s gone. Wherever she was, she avoided CCTV.” He taps the desk once and locks the view.
I hold still and listen past the fans and the hiss of the HVAC. Sirens skid across the edge of my hearing and fade away.
Kaz keeps working the computer. “I’m not finding her.”
Oh, I’ll find that brat. I drop into the chair at the console across from Kaz and start typing. I take his feed, pull street grids, then hack every CCTV endpoint within two miles. I strip out every camera cone and leave only the dead zones. I map each gap, block by block, alley by alley.I scrub the last fifteen minutes on every surviving feed. She never crosses a lens. She’s in one of these holes.
I reach for my phone and take it from my back pocket. The screen lights. No cracks. No bullet took it. “Any idea who attacked us?” I keep my eyes on the map and mark the dark pockets in red. I have to find her.
“No.” Kaz pushes his chair in and widens a grid. “We kept three attackers alive, but two are bleeding pretty bad. They’ve been taken to the Boathouse.”
The Boathouse sits in the cliff below Thorn’s place cut into the rocks above the ocean. I’ll head there after I find Ella Rendale. Two of the three captives will probably bleed out before I reach them. Not my problem. One talking mouth is enough.
I glance over at Kaz. “Call our competitors. I want a meeting sometime soon.” I send the search teams to the red blocks and tag a route I’d take if I were her.
“No problem.” Kaz pivots to the comms desk and starts dialing. He sounds cheerful, which grates on me. My head doesn’t like his register and never has.
I stand from the console and roll my shoulder. “Let me know if you find Ella. I’m sending teams to sweep each zone.” I mark assignments and set check-in times. If she never hits a camera outside these pockets, she’s staying inside them. My gut says southwest, so that’s where I’ll go. “Put out the word. If anybody lets Thorn know what happened this morning, they’ll die bleeding from the eyes.”
My shoulder now itching, I cross the room and ride the elevator up to my penthouse apartment. The doors open on clean tile and cold air, so I head straight to the shower and rinse the blood off until the water runs clear.Afterward, I pull on a dark shirt and jacket that will move with me, holster my Ruger and Glock, sheath the knives where my hands expect them, and load spare mags into an inner pocket.
Back in the elevator, I thumb the ops channel open on my phone. Ella Rendale and I are going to settle this today.
ELEVEN
Ella
Raindrops hang on the leaves, but the sky has somewhat cleared this morning. I grip the tree branch and let out the call in a sharp, high-pitched note, once, twice. A bird whistle. I do it again and then count to twenty in my head. That should be enough.
Dropping down, my mismatched tennis shoes smack the grass, and I force myself into a casual stride across the lawn, aiming for the main walkway. The building looms, brick and glass softened by the climbing ivy, but it’s the heavy door I want. I slip inside, head down, and sign the visitor log with a name I make up on the spot. No one’s at the desk. Figures. This isn’t the kind of place where the residents run off.
I hum under my breath, needing to steady myself. I should be freaking out after the firefight in the middle of Silicon Valley. Nope. My body still tingles from Justice, and that won’t do. He played my body like we’ve been together for years.
