Page 69 of The Honeymoon Hack

“An excellent suggestion.” Scarlett huffed, straightening her jacket aggressively.

Malcolm’s eyes met mine and flicked upward.

I stood.

Scarlett spun on her heel—slamming directly into me. Far harder than I’d expected. I went down hard, and Scarlett’s handbag spilled across the tile floor. My phone skittered toward the counter.

“Oh my god!” Scarlett’s hand flew to her mouth, her New York accent thick with concern. “I am so sorry! I didn’t see you!”

The older guard immediately darted out from behind the counter. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, but I—” I stayed down, making a show of holding my head and playing the victim.

“Let me help you.” The guard crouched beside me, picking up my phone while Malcolm collected Scarlett’s things, everyone apologizing profusely.

At the desk, Rav continued working, barely glancing at the chaos on the floor. He grabbed a blank ID card and placed it in the encoding machine, his movements speeding up during the distraction. The soft click-click-click was barely audible over Scarlett’s continued apologies and the guard’s concerned questions.

“I’m so clumsy,” I said, accepting items from the guard’s hands. “Totally my fault for standing there.”

“No, no, entirely mine,” Scarlett insisted, her performance flawless. “I should have looked where I was going. Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine, really.”

Malcolm moved closer to me, pointing at where Scarlett’s lipstick had rolled at least fifteen feet away. To the guard, he said, “Could you grab that for us?”

The guard, on his hands and knees now, crawled over to Scarlett’s lipstick.

Malcolm retrieved a compact from the ground next to me, nearly colliding with me. He whispered in my ear, “Be careful of Claire. She’s got gaps in her background Gideon can’t explain.”

By the time the guard turned around with the lipstick, Malcolm was back to collecting items, as though nothing had happened. The whole ordeal had bought Rav maybe twenty extra seconds, but it wasn’t only about the card. It was also to get me their intel about Claire.

What did it mean? What could I even do about it?

When the guard returned to his position, Rav was already attaching my new ID badge to a fresh green-logoed lanyard.

“Tremblay, you’re finished with that ID already?” the guard asked, his brows turning down slightly.

“Yes, sir,” Rav said calmly. “Standard Bridge access package with probationary restrictions.”

The guard nodded distractedly, then turned to Scarlett. “Ms. Parker, let me call the head of our security. He’ll be able to authorize your assistant.” To me, he said, “Be more careful with this one?”

“I will,” I said, my fingers trembling slightly as I took the new card from Rav.

But the trembling wasn’t from nerves about the mission. I’d helped them fake an accident. Lied to a security guard’s face. Pretended to be more hurt than I was when I hit the floor.

The role was so different from my normal one. But I’d done it, and we’d gotten what we needed.

“You have everything you need,” Rav said. “Be careful.”

I nodded quickly and slipped the lanyard over my head, heart thundering in my chest. None of my teammates acknowledged me as I left, each of them perfectly maintaining their respective cover.

As I left, Scarlett’s voice pierced the air. “How long do we have to wait? Perhaps you’re not aware, but there’s a hurricane on the way, so I don’t have all day.”

The walk back to the data center checkpoint felt like the longest of my life. I’d always been the one who used vulnerabilities in code, not in people.

It hadn’t just been easy… it had been exhilarating.

As I neared the security checkpoint, my worries shifted. What if the system flagged the discrepancy between my apparent status and actual access level? What if there was someverification protocol I didn’t know about? What if the encoder had failed to write the permissions properly?