Page 8 of Double Down

Maverick grins, and I fight the urge to punch him in the face. His smile is all white teeth and empty thought, only I know he’s not stupid.

I slide my chair back and head to the bar. The bourbon in its cut-glass decanter looks far too tempting, but it’s too early for that and I have too much to do. Instead, I pour water, then take an Adderall from the bottle I keep in the second drawer of the liquor cabinet. I eye the Zavegepant inhaler, then grab it and shove it into my pocket after taking the required quick puffs.

Hopefully Conrad and Maverick calm the fuck down, and I won’t need it, but if this migraine gets worse, I don’t have time to rest. Sleep is a luxury we can’t afford, but pharmaceuticals aren’t, thank the pill gods.

Conrad is back to pacing. Maverick is still being a smart-ass. Neither of them is asking the right questions. No one’swondering how she crossed our threshold with none of us knowing about it.

The priority isn’t how to get the body out of the room. It’s how the fuck it got in here in the first place. Doors, cameras, staff—something gave away and the wrong people got access.

I down the water, leave the glass on the counter, and walk past both of them without another word.

My bedroom is through the far set of double doors, but I don’t stop there. I head straight to the second door on the right: my office. My little kingdom of monitors and gear.

The lights come on with a low flicker, and a cool white glow fills the space—clean, minimalist, and designed to let me focus on the task at hand. I turn them off, though, choosing the dimmer light bars mounted above and below my three-screen array to diffuse the room. Harsh light distracts; soft light lets the data speak.

I pull up everything that can help me find this motherfucker, starting with the elevator logs, then the hallway cameras. Then I pull the lobby feeds, the service doors scans, and even the delivery bays for good measure. Every single one scrolls on its own screen.

There’s nowhere to hide.

I scrub every feed from four-thirty a.m. to ten-thirty a.m. They all show the same thing.

Nothing.

No movement. No audio. No footage. Each feed shows a blip at 4:39, then a frozen frame until about six a.m. A hiccup and then a held breath.

I narrow to just our hallway. Those cameras are on a separate server—something I set up when we turned eighteen and our parties started attracting DEA hobbyists who wanted a headline at the poor little rich boys’ expense. I was determined not to give it to them.

These cameras, on my private server, should have been untouchable by anyone except me.

And yet they all have the same blip, followed by a still frame.

My heart pounds in my ears, and my breathing goes shallow. The cursor blinks on the screen, but I don’t. I stare, unseeing.

No. There is no way.

I run a diagnostic, even though I know what it’s going to say.

The footage is gone. All of it. Even the rooftop cameras.

There’s no trace of the intrusion. No user shells. No ghost processes. There’s clean fucking glass where there ought to be fingerprints.

I was hacked.

They didn’t just delete footage. They wiped it clean, as if it had never existed. And they didn’t even leave a smear in the buffers.

From the moment Phoenix left last night to the second we walked back in this morning—exhausted and half-drunk and fucking proud of ourselves for cleaning up another loose end—it’s all gone.

Like it never happened.

I sit frozen.

Not because I’m shocked someone got in. That part was expected. I would’ve been disappointed if it had been as simple as checking a feed. A decent enemy shows their wit, after all.

We make enemies all the time. I know what to look for and how to be prepared.

That’s what pisses me off. Not that they hacked me, but that they didn’t trip a single one of my security measures. They got through me, and I didn’t even know it. No alarms, no lag, no heat spike—nothing.

I am Atticus motherfucking Vale. The youngest winner of the Las Vegas Def Con hacking competition three years in a row. I have had offers to build secure systems for everything from nuclear warheads to treasury departments. On more than one occasion I’ve had to hack government systems to erase the stupid shady shit our parents have done to keep the entire Titan Wynn empire from burning.