Page 68 of Filthy Little Fix

Nothing.

There's nothing here.

Military-grade encryption. Content that's trash. Data structure impeccably clean, not a single byte out of place. No hidden code, no image, no coordinates. Just… emptiness.

There's no message. And that is the message.

The person behind this used the best available encryption to create an impressive, empty vault. The sequential IDs in the fragments weren't for the message to be reassembled; they were to make itseemlike it.

They wanted to buy time. They wanted the Volkov elite to occupy themselves with a complicated and useless task.

And the sophistication…

The sound of the room door being unlocked cuts short my reasoning.

I don't need to turn around. I feelhispresence.

The door opens.Him, and a soft floral scent—Svetlana.

"Leonel," Svetlana says. "I apologize for entering without knocking at this hour, but the time you requested has expired."

Polite, but her voice makes it clear that if I have nothing to deliver, I'll lose a limb.

I turn in the chair to face them. Svetlana has her arms crossed, the personification of corporate frustration. Dante is right behind her, his eyes fixed on me.

I smile. "Oh, you're going to like this."

I spin the chair back to the computer. I open the massive text file—our intercepted Moby Dick.

"Here's your little rat's message."

They exchange glances. Too much text. Svetlana takes out round glasses, dangling from a metallic chain at the ends of the frame, and fits them onto the bridge of her nose. She leans closer, and Dante watches, maintaining his distance—a silent wall exuding strength and impatience.

Svetlana's impassive face contorts. She frowns and purses her lips. "What the hell is this?" She murmurs.

"What you intercepted were fragments of Moby Dick. Have you read it?"

Svetlana shakes her head. "Moby Dick?" She repeats, incredulous. "Did you find anything in the middle? A… message, an acronym, a name…"

"Just good old Moby Dick." I smile at her.

I feel Dante's irritation radiating from him. He takes a step closer, narrowing his eyes at the screen.

"This is idiotic," he growls.

"Did you check everything?" Svetlana turns her face to me, holding the temple arm of her glasses.

"I ran some scripts that checked—they're direct inserts. Compared with the original book file, there's no difference. I looked in the metadata, possible hidden images… All the information was intercepted—the IDs have no missing numbers, so, in the end, all the rat wanted was to share a little literature."

Svetlana's face hardens. She looks like a woman who optimizes every second of her life, and the idea of having her resources wasted on a literary joke is surely a personal insult.

"Don't come at me withliterature, Leonel," she says. The polite facade transfigures into the glacier of her impatience. "This is an insult. If there's nothing in the text and nothing in the metadata, it means you failed. What did you miss?"

Dante growls behind her. Just that nickname, "Nyx." Just a warning.

As much as I like the idea of him taking all this frustration out on me, I raise a hand to him, pretending not to see Svetlana's confusion as I address Dante instead of her.

"No,thisis the message," I say. "I can explain all the checks and run them in front of you if you wish, mister."