Chapter 302
“Your team is IT. They follow protocols. This needs creativity,” Eliza said. “And I need to be there to supervise. My contact needs direct access to the local server to patch the data.”
Dallas clenched his jaw. He hated this. He hated her being in that building without him.
“Take Zane,” Dallas said. “And two guards. If Cathey comes near you, Zane has permission to remove her. Physically.”
“Deal,” Eliza said, and turned and left without another word.
The S&D building was eerie at night. The cleaners were working through the corridors, the hum of their vacuums echoing through the empty halls.
Eliza set up a command center in Bella’s office. Her contact, a scruffy man named Leo with intense, focused eyes, was already typing furiously across three open laptops.
“It’s messy,” Leo muttered, working a toothpick between his teeth. “She yanked the drive right during the write sequence — the header is garbage. But there’s more. A fragment of malicious code was executed just before the pull. This wasn’t carelessness. It was deliberate.”
“Can you fix it?” Eliza asked, handing him a Red Bull.
“I can get you eighty percent,” Leo said. “The rest you’re going to have to rebuild manually.”
“We can do that,” Bella said, looking exhausted but resolute. “I have the raw data in my notes.”
For the next six hours, they worked. Eliza, Bella, and Zane — who was, surprisingly, excellent at proofreading — rebuilt the presentation slide by slide.
By four in the morning, their eyes were burning. But the file was whole.
“We did it,” Bella whispered, slumping back in her chair.
“Not yet,” Eliza said, standing and stretching. “Now we protect it. Zane, put this on an encrypted drive. No one touches it but you until the meeting starts.”
“On it,” Zane said, taking the drive.
Eliza walked to the window and looked out at the sleeping city. A surge of quiet adrenaline moved through her. She wasn’t just the wife waiting at home. She was part of the machine. She was protecting him — protecting what was theirs — even if he didn’t want her anymore.
The city air was cold and damp as Eliza’s town car pulled away from the S&D building’s main entrance. She had sent Zane back upstairs to get coffee for the exhausted team. A single bodyguard sat in the passenger seat.
As the driver approached the first intersection, a black sedan with tinted windows swerved from a side street and pulled alongside them at the red light. The bodyguard tensed immediately, his hand moving toward the inside of his jacket.
The back window of the sedan slid down. Anson Hyde sat in the shadows. He looked tired too — his eyes rimmed with red.
“Working late, Eliza?” His voice was a low purr that barely carried over the city hum. “Fixing the mess my little friend made?”
“It’s fixed,” Eliza said, her voice clear and cold. “You’ll have to try harder than a corrupted USB drive.”
“It wasn’t about the drive,” Anson said, his eyes fixed on her silhouette through the bulletproof glass. “It was about seeing if you’d come running. You’re playing the dutiful wife perfectly.”