Page 31 of The Foreman
She turned, smug despite the danger, and whispered, “Thirty seconds. New record.”
“Good girl,” he murmured.
The praise landed hard in him. He had kept those words locked down for years because it bound more than obedience. It bound trust. If he took that trust and failed her, the break would not be hers. It would be his.
Her breath hitched, a flicker of nerves she buried beneath a practiced roll of her eyes. Her pulse thudded in her throat, a mix of adrenaline and the heat Trace stirred in her, but she masked it with sass. “Stop distracting me. We have evidence to steal, and I’d rather not get caught because you can’t keep your mouth shut.”
Inside, the air carried the sting of recycled ductwork, antiseptic, and a metallic tang that clung to the back of his throat. Trace didn’t have a name for it, but he knew the type—sterile, chemical, the kind of bite that spoke of wires stripped too hot, circuits burned, things pushed past their limits.
He glanced at Macy. "Did it always smell like this?"
She nodded. "Yes, it clung to everything—clothes, hair... like a shroud."
Experiencing the scent for the first time, he could understand. It unsettled him with its strangeness, twisting in his gut, a reminder of just how deep she’d been in this place—and how much she risked walking back into it.
She moved ahead with determined strides, ponytail swinging, confidence cutting a path through service halls only someone who had lived and worked here would know. Trace shadowed her, Glock low but ready, every muscle strung tight. His gaze swept doorways, corners, shadows, every nerve on high alert for the ambush he knew could come at any second.
.
“You sure this is the right floor?” he asked.
“Positive. Chet kept his shadow ledger in the R&D wing, piggybacked on secure servers. Nobody thought to check there because they were too busy drooling over prototypes.” She pointed toward a frosted window as they passed. “That’s where the team built the drone swarm project—twelve-hour days, half the budget wasted because the flight AI kept crashing. I pulled three all-nighters trying to fix a bug that turned out to be a lazy line of code in firmware. I thought that mattered then. Funny, isn’t it? A million-dollar problem felt bigger than my life… now it’s just another locked door.”
Trace scanned a corner mirror, then nodded. “Move.”
They slipped into a records alcove thick with the sour bite of toner, stale coffee, and old carpet. Trace’s gaze swept the space, cataloguing details, searching for threats. A corner desk sat bare, stripped of life; he could imagine it once cluttered with someone’s plant and mug, laughter or humming filling the air. Now the silence pressed in like a ghost of everything ordinary that had been scrubbed away.
Macy dropped into a crouch beside a locked cabinet. Trace watched her closely, noting the tight line of her mouth, the sweat collecting at her temple. For a heartbeat her hands shook, nerves bleeding through before she stilled them with a sharp breath. Fear shadowed her eyes, but defiance flared brighter, sparking like a live wire in the dark.
“Give me a minute,” she whispered.
“You’ve got thirty seconds,” Trace answered, voice even but edged with steel.
She cut him a look, wicked and teasing despite the tension. “You really enjoy timing me, don’t you?”
“Motivates you.”
Her laugh was soft, edged. “Motivates me to imagine what happens if I miss the mark.”
Trace leaned close, his tone rough against her ear. “That imagination will become reality if you’re not careful.”
Her fingers faltered for an instant, then flew faster, urgency in every movement. The lock snapped open with a click that sounded too loud in the tight alcove. She slid a drive into the port, and the monitor flared, code cascading across the screen in a pale glow.
“Got it,” she whispered, adrenaline tight in her voice. “Pulling metadata. Ghost signatures are intact.”
“Talk simple, Macy.”
“They rewrote the logs, but the prints don’t match. I can prove tampering.” She glanced up at him. “This clears me.”
“It helps. Now hurry.”
Trace’s jaw set as he scanned the data rushing by. Beneath layers of fronts and blind transfers, one name surfaced again and again—Kells. Always hidden, always pulling strings.
“It’s Dorian Kells,” Macy breathed. “He’s been behind it from the start.”
Trace gave a grim nod. “Then he’s the one we burn next.”
Bars pulsed across the screen, steady until one froze jagged, the glow painting Macy’s face. Her breath hitched.
