Page 107 of The Honeymoon Hack

“I’m not sure.” I knew her favorite coffee order, the way she fiddled with anything nearby when she was thinking, and theexact tone of her laugh when she found something genuinely funny. The soft sounds she made when I kissed her.

But her Mnemis employee number?

“Try her name.” I darted around to the security terminals with him, every muscle in my body wound tight with the need to act, to move, to do something other than stand here while she was in danger. “What did you find in the break room?”

“What we expected.” Rav slid an ID card through a slot on the side of the terminal, then clipped its retractable cable to his vest. The badge wasn’t his picture, and it was smeared with blood. “Lark killed his partner, then the three guards who worked here.”

The database loaded with agonizing slowness. Each second that ticked by felt like an eternity. Brie could be hurt. Could be dying. Could already be?—

No. Stop. She’s brilliant. She’s resourceful. She’s hiding somewhere. That’s all. She hasn’t texted you back because she dropped her phone. That’s all.

Rav scrolled through employee entries, and I wanted to rip the mouse from his hand and do it myself. Faster. Anything faster. He pulled a phone from his pocket and handed it to me. “I think this is Brie’s. She must have left it behind.”

I immediately unlocked the phone in case she’d left me a message. I checked every app I could think of, but found nothing. They must have confiscated it when they took her to the room.

“There.” Rav pointed at a map of Mnemis on the screen. A single red dot pulsed in the Atlantic section.

“Cluster fifty-seven.” Where I’d kissed her against the server rack just hours ago, and lost my will to continue lying to her and myself.

Where she’d accessed the Meridian server.

The Fenix server.

Had she snuck back after Lark killed the guards? Why would she do that? With a killer on the loose!

Rav switched to the camera feeds.

The monitor flickered to life, and my heart stopped. Blue light from the equipment cast everything in an otherworldly glow, broken by the strobing red of emergency signals.

And there was Brie.

She stood in front of the KVM terminal.

A man stood behind her, his body pressed against hers, his knife at her throat.

All the oxygen flew from my lungs, and I gripped Rav’s shoulder just to keep myself vertical. She was trapped. Terrified. One second away from having her throat opened.

No. No, no, no.

“We have to get to her,” I wheezed more than said. “We have to?—”

“Will.” Rav grabbed my hand and forced me to look at him. “Breathe.”

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t think past the image of the knife at her throat. The woman who’d whispered ‘I love you’against my chest, who’d chosen to risk her heart to be with me, was?—

Percival pressed his push-to-talk button. “Bobcat, are you seeing this?”

While Percival stepped away to coordinate with his team, Rav said, “Percival couldn’t tell me much, but?—”

“Can we trust him?”

“With our lives, yes.”

I pointed at the break room door. “Couldthey?”

“His team—and Claire—work for a defense contractor called Pendragon Security. They’ve been on a three-year mission to track down some dangerous research.” Rav turned back to the screen. “Lark had only been with their team for six months,and Percival confided they’ve had a string of bad luck since he joined.”

“He was a mole all along?”