Page 79 of Filthy Little Fix

This is useless, I think, for a second. This asshole can't even talk to Dante without stammering, let alonebetrayhim. He'd faint just from the thought.

But a job is a job. So I check.

Rutgers degree. An impeccable corporate resume before he took the mob's dirty money. Years in the Volkov orbit. Reliable. I dive into his digital life; not just the company logs,everything. Personal emails, browser history, encrypted calls, crypto wallets.

And there's the first weirdness.

His digital hygiene is immaculate. Annoyingly so. It looks like he knew someone would come looking one day, like the obsessive tidiness of a man pissing his pants in terror.

I move past his robust security protocols, the standard encryption. Ignoring the facade. I cross-reference the login records from his less-monitored servers. The archives. I compare the timestamps on data packets sent from his personal machine after hours. Looking for a nanosecond discrepancy. Aretroactive edit. I analyze the metadata of seemingly harmless images in his emails. Looking for hidden messages, for steganography. The tactic of an amateur who thinks he's smart.

It's with my eyes fixed on a line of hexadecimal code representing Sal's mouse movement—consistently, irritatingly human—that the low hum of the air conditioner falters. A light in the hall, visible through the crack in the door, blinks once. A nervous tic in the mansion's wiring.

I ignore it. Probably a faulty sensor the local IT team never bothered to fix.

I get into the debug logs of his home server. A small NAS. The place where a normal person gets sloppy. But not Sal. The logs are sterile. Not a single error flag. I run a checksum on the older media files, hunting for the ghost of a single altered bit. Nothing.

The light in the hall blinks. Again.

No. This house is a fortress. Redundant power, cascading firewalls, automated failovers. A power dip is impossible. It would trigger alarms.

But the only thing coming from the hall is silence.

I refuse to be sidetracked. If Sal is the rat, he's buried deep. I pivot to the reverse proxies he uses for external access. I analyze the packet latency to domains outside the Volkov circle.

A tiny, almost imperceptible flutter in the timing. A detour. Not random. Intentional.

I follow the trail. It leads to encrypted traffic with a known hub for digital mercenaries. My kind of people. And there, buried in thousands of seemingly innocuous data packets, is a whisper. A fragmented text. Obfuscated. Hidden in the data stream of a burner messaging app I know by heart. The kind you use when you're out of time.

I open a deobfuscation script. The letters flash on the screen. The words solidify.

They're goingto find out at any moment. You'll have a five-minute window.

Sal.The coward. Gnawing at the walls of his cage to warn his contacts.

I check the time logs.

…Two minutes ago.

A heavy, unmistakable thump echoes from outside the room. The sound of meat hitting meat.

I rip off the headphones. The ones I stole from Chad, in silence, just to have something blocking the real world. The flickering lights, the humming AC—all gone.

Dead silence.

A creak. A hurried whisper. Muffled sounds of a struggle.

Those aren't Volkov guards.

The door to my room splinters inward. A breaching charge. Thick smoke, stinking of gunpowder and burnt metal, pours through the gaps. Instinctively, I duck down in the chair, covering my face. The smoke burns my eyes, my throat.

Through the haze, I see silhouettes. Men in black. They're not Volkov muscles, they're not Dante's brutes.

In the same instant, the mansion's alarms shriek to life in a deafening wail. Shouts from the guards, gunfire, the eruption of automatic weapons.

Fuck, Sal, you screwed me.

The silhouettes cut through the smoke. Two of them. They move low and fast against the red strobe of the emergency lights, ignoring the firefight tearing up the hall.