Page 57 of Ruin My Life
Lee’s already set her laptop up on my desk. I lean against his while he guides her into the leather chair. His hands are braced on the backrest, and his eyes are sharp, fixed on her fingers as she signs in with anobscenelylong password.
Connor drops heavily into Lee’s usual chair beside me, while Chavez and Monroe take position at the door, arms folded, stone-faced.
Watching. Waiting.
Brianna scans the room with quick, calculating eyes. Then she glances back over her shoulder at Lee.
I watch her lips curl into a subtle smirk.
“Think you can keep up with me, Lee?”
Her voice is teasing, lilting just enough to bait a reaction.
But Lee doesn’t even blink. “You don’t get where I am by being slow,” he says flatly.
I almost smile.
Lee’s used to handling business behind a screen. He’s awkward around strangers, tense under pressure, and he usually fades into the background whenever we bring someone in he’s not familiar with.
But not this time.
This time, he’s locked in.
And I can’t help but wonder if it’s because he respects her skill—or because he trusts her about as much as he trusts an update not to bug his software.
She turns to the screen and starts typing, and the sound of her fingers tapping the keys fills the room.
I watch her. The way she leans into the work. The way she narrows her eyes when something interests her. The way her lips press together—tight and focused.
She’s fast—faster than Lee—but where his typing is sharp and aggressive, hers is light. Precise. Controlled.
Lee watches her closely as she shreds every file with my name attached. Then he runs a sweep to confirm it—no aliases, no metadata, no buried traces.
Gone—from everywhere but her pretty little head.
Once he’s satisfied, he gives her a nod. “Now track the number.”
She pivots like it’s nothing, cracking her knuckles before she starts to work.
Lee’s eyes narrow as he watches her fingers fly, and for the first time since I met him, I see something that almost looks likeaweflicker in his gaze.
She’s not just skilled—she’s elite.
There’s no name, address, or account attached to the phone number, but the message was sent over Wi-Fi, which required an internet connection. That means it left behind an IP and a timestamp, and in under ten minutes, she traces the origin of the text to an internet café.
She plugs the information into a program I’ve never seen before—one she clearly built herself.
The second it loads, my jaw tightens.
It’s a surveillance tool. One that pulls camera angles from across the city and pieces them together like a goddamn forensic mosaic.
She feeds it the café’s geographical data, and it spits out three separate angles showing everyone inside the café at the moment she got the message.
She narrows the parameters again, isolating people who accessed messaging apps during that timeframe. And then, without hesitation, she tilts the screen toward me and Connor.
“Any of them look familiar?”
Three faces stare back at us.
