Page 96 of Taken Off Camera
“How long?” I ask.
Sebastian’s fingers massage my spine as he leans closer to examine the monitors. “Most people panic within forty-eight hours when their money becomes inaccessible.”
I stare at the screen of code. “And then what?”
“Then we find him,” Sebastian says. “When he’s disoriented, isolated, and desperate.”
My stomach tightens further, a mixture of satisfaction and horror swirling inside me. Can I learn to do this? Do I want to?
Milo stands, the movement fluid as he crosses the room toward me. He assesses me with a shrewd stare as he slides a sleek laptop across the table. “You can ghost an IP through multiple proxies, right? Sebastian mentioned you have skills.”
The question catches me off guard. Until now,I’ve been a problem to solve, a victim to protect, not a resource to utilize. My fingers hover over the laptop’s smooth surface, not quite touching it.
“You want my help?” I ask, unable to keep the surprise from my voice.
I look up at Sebastian, who gives me an encouraging nod.
“We need someone who understands anonymous networking from the inside.” Milo tucks a strand of bright red hair behind his ear. “I’m still learning this stuff, so I don’t have any practical experience, only theoretical. My strength is more in strategy than tech.”
Sebastian’s hand shifts to my waist. “You don’t have to if you’re not comfortable.”
“But you could use the help,” I say, reading between the lines.
Sebastian doesn’t deny it, which tells me everything.
Milo taps the spacebar, waking the screen. “We need to force Travis to connect from a predictable location. Right now, he’s skipping between public networks, which makes physical tracking inefficient.”
My pulse quickens. They trust my abilities enough to incorporate me into their operation. Afterspending days as a helpless pawn, the shift sends an unexpected thrill through me.
My fingers uncurl, reaching for the keyboard. “What do you need me to do?”
Milo pulls up a chair beside me and opens several command windows. “We’ve created a digital mousetrap. A secure portal that mimics his company’s employee access system. The real one is offline for ‘maintenance,’ so when he tries to check his schedule or payroll, he’ll hit our replica instead.”
“And when he logs in, you can trace the connection,” I finish, already seeing how the pieces fit together.
“Exactly,” Milo says. “But we need additional layers of security to ensure he can’t detect the trap. That’s where you come in.”
The code on the screen speaks a language as familiar to me as breathing. Nested VPNs, redirects, and ghost protocols are all the tools I’ve used to protect myself and Saint over the years.
“You want me to build a one-way mirror.” I pull the laptop closer. “He sees what appears to be a legitimate connection, while we track everything flowing through it.”
Saint’s eyes lift from his own work, his expression unreadable as I slip into this new role. When hecatches me looking, a question and an offer pass between us. Saint has always been the one to protect me. The one to break bones while I look the other way. He’s still willing to be that for me, so I can keep pretending. But I’ve hidden behind him for too long.
I give him a subtle nod, and he returns his attention to his work.
The room fades into the background as my fingers dance across the keyboard, adding layers of redirects that will bounce Travis’s connection through a dozen servers before landing on our trap. Each line of code feels like coming home after being adrift for weeks.
This, at least, I understand. This space belongs to me.
“Add a timer trigger here,” Sebastian murmurs into my ear, his familiar rumble slipping in along my concentration without disrupting it. “When he connects, it’ll ping the nearest cell tower.”
I lean closer. “Clever. We can triangulate his physical location from the signal strength between towers.”
My typing falters as the reality of what I’m creating sinks in. This isn’t my usual tracking method, where I expose stalkers to social consequences, or point Saint in the right direction and wash my hands of the consequences.
The metallic taste of anxiety floods my mouth, and my heart pounds hard, the rush of blood in my ears nearly drowning out the tap of keys.
“Hey, are you okay?” Milo asks, his slender hand settling on my arm.
