Chapter 57: I was bored

Inside was a laptop, sleek and unfamiliar, the kind of machine that didn’t belong in a house like this. The screen woke at her touch, but only enough to show her a single locked prompt encrypted, sealed tight.

And something about the way the cursor blinked told her this wasn’t the first attempt. Someone had tried before her. Tried hard. The kind of hard that left traces, a faint scuff of frustration in how carefully the case had been closed again afterward.

A small line of text sat beneath the password field, almost an afterthought: One incorrect attempt remaining. Further failure will permanently erase all data.

Sienna stared at it for a long moment, the quiet of the house pressing in around her.

Whatever was on that machine, someone wanted it badly enough to risk losing it forever rather than let it fall into the wrong hands.

Boredom did what nothing else had managed to all afternoon it pulled her in. Sienna cracked her fingers, settled in front of the laptop, and let muscle memory take over.

She’d told Viktor once, early on, that she was a hacker that she’d be far more useful to him sitting behind a screen than standing beside him as a trophy with a ring on her finger. He’d laughed it off. Hadn’t believed her for a second.

Fine. Now she’d prove it on her own terms, and if it cost him something in the process, that was just a bonus. Get into the files. See what he was so desperate to hide. Delete it all, if it came to that. A small, private kind of revenge.

Her fingers moved fast, code unspooling across the screen in clean, practiced lines. Layer after layer peeled back under her hands.

It was good work, whoever had built it had genuinely done a good job, the kind of encryption that would have stopped most people cold. She smiled faintly at that, almost approving. Complex. Not hard. Not for her.

She was nearly through, the last barrier thinning out under her fingers, when she heard it tires crunching on gravel outside, then footsteps, fast and heavy, coming toward the house.

No time to close the laptop. No time to close anything.

She bolted, slipping into the shadow of the next room just as the front door opened and Viktor’s voice carried in ahead of him.

"So, where do you think we can find this Invisible Shadow hacker?" His tone was sharp, edged with something close to panic. "We need to get into that thing if we don’t, all those young girls are in danger."

"I know." Manuel’s voice was tighter than usual. "I left him a message on his dark web contact. He hasn’t answered yet."

"Damn it." A fist hit something, a wall, a table, she couldn’t tell. "We don’t have time for this. And who the hell calls himself Invisible Shadow and makes himself impossible to find?"

Sienna pressed herself into the dark, heart hammering, the laptop still open behind her with her own work glowing on its screen, work that, she was starting to realize, might be the very thing they were standing in this room cursing about.

She hated him. She’d hated him from the very first night, from the moment he’d taken a choice away from her and called it a marriage. But sitting there in the shadows, she felt something else creep in alongside the hatred, something almost like relief.

Whatever Invisible Shadow’s work had just done, it had pulled a handful of girls back from whatever fate waited for them on the other side of that locked file. That part, at least, was good. Clean. Hers, and no one else’s.

What she couldn’t make sense of was Viktor. A man who killed without blinking, who’d just threatened a stranger’s entire family over money, wanting to save those same girls.

The two things sat wrong together in her mind, like puzzle pieces forced into a shape they didn’t belong in. She had no plans to tell him the truth. Whatever pride she felt in the work, she’d keep it to herself. He didn’t get to have that, either.

Then Manuel’s voice cut through her thoughts.

"Boss, someone’s been here." He was staring at the laptop, screen still glowing, files still open exactly the way she’d left them.

Marco and Manuel drew their guns in the same motion, weapons sweeping the room. Viktor didn’t reach for his. He didn’t need to.

The house was rigged there were mines laid out across the grounds in a perimeter only he knew the shape of. Anyone coming in from outside would have been blown apart before they ever reached the door, or at the very least left some trace, some disturbance. There was none. Which meant only one thing.

Whoever had opened that laptop was already inside. And the light was still on. The files were still open. They hadn’t left.

"Sienna." Viktor’s voice dropped, slow and certain, carrying through the house like he already knew exactly where to aim it. "I know you’re here. Come out."

She bit her lip, back pressed to the wall, willing herself smaller.

"Come out already." There was almost amusement in his voice now, low and unbothered. "I wonder why you bother hiding when you know I’ll find you anyway. I can hear you breathing. I can smell you from across the room."

She let out a short, humorless laugh, caught between irritation and something close to admiration for how absurdly confident he was, and stepped out of the shadows.

Viktor’s eyes locked onto her the second she appeared, and he didn’t move.

"Boss." Marco was already at the laptop, scrolling fast, eyes darting across the screen. "The file’s open. We’ve got the locations. All of them."

Viktor’s gaze stayed on Sienna even as the words landed. "Did you open this?" He asked it slowly, deliberately, the kind of question a man asks when he already knows the answer and only wants to watch how the lie comes out, if it comes at all.

"I was bored." Sienna shrugged, as if it cost her nothing. "Got lucky."