Page 3 of Fang

“Maybe I was bored.” She shrugs, but there’s something else in her expression now—a flicker of something that might be regret. “Maybe I was impressed by someone who actually noticed my work instead of just suffering from it.”

The admission hangs between us like a bridge neither of us wants to cross first. I study her face, looking for tells, forweaknesses, for anything that might give me an advantage in this conversation. Instead, I find myself noticing the way the monitor light catches in her eyes, creating depths that seem to go on forever.

“You said you’re not working for the cartel,” I say, keeping my voice steady. “So what’s your story? Freelance chaos artist? Digital Robin Hood with abandonment issues?”

Her laugh this time is different—bitter, sharp-edged, with no trace of silver bells. “Working for? Sweetheart, I’m owned.”

The word hits the room like a physical presence, changing the atmosphere from charged banter to something darker. I see it now in the set of her shoulders, the way her fingers unconsciously touch a spot on her wrist that’s hidden by her sleeve. The elegant code, the Spanish flourishes, the careful way she moves through systems—it’s not artistry for art’s sake. It’s survival.

“Owned,” I repeat, and the word tastes like ashes.

“Bought and paid for when I was sixteen.” She hesitates, making me think there’s a whole lot more to her story. “Turns out being good with computers makes you valuable to people who like to keep their business transactions off the books.” She turns back to her monitors, but I can see her reflection in the screens, and her expression has gone carefully blank. “I hack what they tell me to hack, steal what they tell me to steal, and in return… nobody dies.”

The heat in my chest shifts from anger to something more complex. I know about being trapped by circumstances beyond your control, know about carrying guilt for choices that weren’t really choices at all. The difference is that my prison is internal, built from memory and regret. Hers has walls and guards and very real consequences.

“Then why are you talking to me instead of calling for backup?” I ask.

She spins her chair to face me again, and this time there’s something different in her eyes, something that might be hope wrapped in layers of careful cynicism. “You don’t kill me, and I’ll show you what I’ve really been doing in here.”

“Which is?”

“Not what they think.” She gestures toward her monitors, where lines of code continue scrolling past in a three-language symphony. She’s coding in English, Spanish, and Portuguese without missing a beat. “They want me to break into FBI systems, steal classified data, make their lives easier. What my owners don’t know is that I’ve been documenting everything—every transaction, every operation, every dirty cop on their payroll—and I’m feeding it back into the FBI databases.”

I step closer to get a better look at her screens, and I can smell her perfume—something subtle and expensive that makes me think of naked skin and silk sheets. She’s built a digital surveillance network inside the cartel’s own systems, using their resources to gather evidence against them. It’s brilliant, dangerous, and probably suicidal.

“You’re building a case,” I realize.

“I’m building an escape route.” Her fingers dance across the keyboard, bringing up files that make my eyebrows rise. Names, dates, financial records, communication logs—enough evidence to bring down their entire Southern operation. “Problem is, I need someone who can get this data to the right people. Someone I can trust. I tried sending some of the info to the Feds, but they brushed me off because I refused to reveal my identity. They thought I was making everything up.”

“Feds are generally useless.”

“Right. So, I thought about leaking details about the cartel’s operations to the media, but there’s no guarantee they’d run the story, or even if they did, that anyone would care. Theworld is on fucking fire, and it feels like no one’s paying any attention to it.”

“Overwhelm. Apathy.” I nod in agreement.

“I need someone with connections to law enforcement, someone who won’t just bury the information in a bureaucratic maze.”

“Well, I can’t help you with that,” I quip, knowing that’s a lie. Thanks to my club’s Montana chapter, we’ve got a Fed on our side now. But I’m not about to reveal this to Mina. She could be lying about everything. Every word out of her mouth could be complete bullshit.

The screens blur slightly as my proximity triggers some kind of motion sensor, and that’s when I spot a small countdown timer in the corner of one of the side monitors. It’s running backward from what looks like five seconds.

“Mina,” I say, my voice suddenly tight. “What’s that timer for?”

She follows my gaze to the countdown, and her face goes white. “Oh, mierda.”

The timer hits zero.

The explosion rocks the entire building with the force of a small earthquake. The lights flicker and die, plunging us into the blue-white glow of battery-powered emergency systems. Somewhere in the warehouse alarms begin their electronic screaming, and the sound of gunfire erupts from multiple directions.

“The virus,” Mina says, her fingers clicking across the keyboard even as the building shudders around us. “I planted a virus in our systems six months ago, and made sure this place would burn to the ground if my bosses ever started snooping around in my files. I couldn’t afford to have them looking through these servers to see what I was doing behind theirbacks. I set up explosives to destroy everything, including these servers. Thought I had more time.”

Another explosion, closer this time, sends books tumbling from a shelf on the wall behind her. Through the walls, I can hear several people running and shouting in Spanish. Someone screams from the hallway, a sound of pure terror that cuts through the mechanical noise of dying electronics.

“Time’s up,” I tell her, reaching for her arm.

I grab Mina by the wrist and try to pull her out of the control room. Instead, she moves faster than I anticipated, her body fluid and responsive as she snatches both a flash drive and a compact pistol from her desk drawer in one smooth motion. The gun disappears into her hoodie pocket while the drive goes into something that looks like a waterproof pouch. I should have taken the gun, but there’s no time.

“This way,” she says, taking the lead before I can object.

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