Page 2 of The Honeymoon Hack

“And you’re not even a tiny bit jealous?”

“Why would I be jealous?” I took her offered hand this time and stood. “Will and I are friends. Nothing more.”

Her eyebrow rose higher, but she didn’t say anything else.

The accusation was obvious. She wasn’t the first to ask if Will and I were something more than besties. She wouldn’t have even been the twentieth.

Ten years ago, it might have been a valid question?—

Don’t think about that, Brie.

Will and I had grown up together. He’d been there for me through every hard time, every sad day, every curveball life threw me since my family moved to Halifax. He was my best friend, the most important person in my life.

The past year was rough, with him living in London, but his mother had needed him.

Now he was finally coming home.

Ash hummed something aloud, something my older sister did all the time. She wasn’t buying it. Not that it mattered. She hefted the bin and said, “I’m going to take this downstairs.”

I nodded and moved out of her way. She still had a couple more trips to do. We’d made a minor mess while prepping for the Mnemis job.

My cave was quiet after she left. The large open space had belonged to Will and me since Mum had leased the office. Room for our computers and an array of monitors, shelves for his printers and tools, worktables where we’d spent countless hours assembling his tech. A half-wall separated our mezzanine from the office below. Twenty desks sat in the main area, and beyond them, the glass walls at the front surrounded the main door.

He’d come through that door eventually, and I’d… what?

Excited butterflies fluttered around inside my stomach. Life would return to normal once he was back at that desk again.

So get Ash’s stuff out of the way.

She’d been respectful of Will’s space, keeping his potted plant alive and leaving his framed photos alone on their little shelf, but her laptop and notebooks were spread across the surface.

I turned back to my screen, pulling up the latest satellite imagery of the Mnemis facility. At least, the imagery of the resort above the facility. It was a clever deception. Most of the chatter on the dark web said the data center was in the Arctic, so I’d been looking in the wrong area for months.

The chatter had also included guesses about its name. The owner had confirmed Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, inspired it.

“Nem-iss,” I murmured, letting the final letter hiss out. “How does the dark web have so little information about you?”

Staff would have signed nondisclosure agreements, and the pay was phenomenal, but still, why was it so mysterious? I’d read about the island paradise above the facility while I was researching, including about the massive effort to construct it. The owner must have launched a serious disinformation campaign to misdirect people who wanted more info.

In two short days, Will and Ash would walk into one of the world’s most secure buildings, posing as newly hired support staff on a two-week rotation. And I still wasn’t happy with how blind they were going in.

At least the mission objectives were clear. The shadowy organization that had been haunting us for six months had a server inside the data center. Once Ashley found it, she’d extract intel about Fenix’s operations, destroy the blackmail photos they had of Scarlett, and find any evidence to prove they’d framed my father.

The first two objectives were simple—the sort of thing we did daily, other than the part about breaching an unbreachable data center.

But the third? If my father had been wrongfully imprisoned twenty years ago, it would change everything.

The butterflies gained speed, trying to upset my stomach.

Change was never good.

But after a year of working remotely on hardware designs while I built the software counterparts, at least Will and I could finally get back to our normal routine.

Would it be normal? Would it be weird? The last time I’d seen him, both of my siblings had been single, and I’d been the only one in a relationship. Now my sister was engaged, my brother was living with someone, and my ex had decided all of my video calls at odd hours with Will were more than he could handle.

Focus, Brie. I nestled into my big ergonomic chair and woke my computer, returning to Rav’s email.Focus on the mission; worry about the rest later.

I forwarded the email to my sister. Maybe she’d pick up on something, since Rav was one of her closest friends.