"Yeah, well, this is how I see us surviving."
Black Obsidian's real name was Elizabeth Pemberton. She was a hacker by trade. The woman knew the ins and outs of acomputer like she knew the palm of her hand. She could open back doors to banks, create new identities, and had access to any surveillance camera in the world.
The Turks liked to use women to handle their most private affairs.
Why?
Because we were considered expendable and easy to kill. We also scared easy, in their eyes. So both Elizabeth and I were used as pawns with a target on our heads when things went wrong. The only problem with that, was that they didn't know who they had hired. I was rebellious as fuck and grew up knowing how to work my way around men like Caleb Killic and the Turks.
When I first met Elizabeth, she had been afraid to speak to me. I couldn't blame her. They'd been tracking and molding her since she was sixteen. But as time passed by, we grew closer, until we both realized we were in the same boat with no escape. We were both under the watchful eye of the Turks and there was no way out. At least that's what they made us believe.
But Elizabeth was smart. Smarter than any Turkish mobster, and she had all sorts of tricks up her sleeve that helped to make sure our conversations always remained confidential. Her apartment was a fortress of surveillance cameras and noise canceling equipment. She was the only one of us who could actually become invisible, yet she was too afraid to. The Turks had her little brother threatened and she would do anything to keep him alive. If we were gonna do this, then I needed to convince her that he'd be safe.
"You're fucking insane!"
I nodded. "Yeah, well, it comes with the job. And it also comes with dating a douchebag who left me with nothing. Everything is right here in this damn laptop, Obsidian, and you're the only one who can help me. Are you in or out?"
"I'm not like you, Stephanie. I don't have a family who has the firepower to watch my back. I've got a little boy who's counting on me."
"And he'll be safe. I promise I will keep him safe. But I need your help right now. You're the only one with the access. This can't wait. Right now, Killic is trying to figure out what the hell Alan was hiding. All we need to know is hidden in here. We have twenty-four hours tops before he catches up with me."
“How can we trust that he hasn't already found you?”
“Because he let me run,” I said quietly. “He likes the chase.”
“What he likes is your curvy ass. If you're not careful he may just catch you one of these days.”
“Over my dead body.”
She shrugged. “He may just enjoy that.”
She gave out a nervous laugh before s he placed a hand on her forehead and plopped down in her chair behind her desk. LED lights coiled across the ceiling in shifting violet and red tones, casting her leather-strewn desk in a surreal glow. A pair of old-school speakers flanked her triple-screen monitor setup, low techno beats thrummed through them like a steady pulse.
Obsidian curled herself into her purple game chair, dark hair piled up in a messy twist, glasses sliding down her nose as she cracked her knuckles and cracked her neck like she was about to dive into a cage fight.
Sighing, she turned to me. "My brother's life depends on you."
I nodded. "You can trust me.”
“I hope so,” she whispered.
I placed a hand on her shoulder, squeezing it reassuringly. “Do it."
The moment she plugged in, a cascade of encrypted prompts lit up the screen. She muttered something about dead-man switches and foolproof firewalls, but none of it stopped her.She was a codebreaker. And Alan’s so-called secure files never stood a fucking chance. I watched as she worked her magic. Her manicured fingernails danced across the keys as each stroke brought us closer to finding out his secret.
Hours passed.
Her muttering turned into a slew of curses in not just one language. I was pretty sure I heard Russian and Spanish there as well. She shouted at one point, flipped the bird at the screen, then downed a shot of something clear from a flask she kept in a lit up skull-shaped cup. I sat across from her on a battered leather couch, picking at a tear in my jeans, watching every tic in her body. I could tell she didn’t like what she was finding. Her jaw was tight, her back stiff.
“What is it?” I asked nervously.
Slowly, she leaned back, shoving her glasses up and pinching the bridge of her nose. Her dark eyes found mine and they looked sharper than the knife I kept strapped to my thigh.
“I’ve secured it,” she said, voice raspy from too much caffeine and not enough air. “Now what do you want to know?”
I stood, stretching the tension out of my shoulders, and walked to the screen. “Those surveillance stills. The ones Alan had hidden. Can you tell me where they came from?”
Obsidian cracked her knuckles again and began hammering the keys. The glow of the screen flared brighter, lines of code racing faster than I could read. Her fingers paused, clicked, and a new window opened. The screen flickered once… twice… and then a satellite image popped up.
