Page 34 of One Second After Another

Keys chuckled deeply. “Thanks for the heads-up—Naz Donati’s son, right? He’s in that fancy fucking private school for gifted youth, huh? Smart kid.”

Luca tensed a bit at the hacker’s personal knowledge of a side of his life that he had never shared with the man.

Before he could even say anything about it, Keys added, “Sorry, I check out shit about everybody when I’m bored. Bad habit—you start to feel like you can just join in on people’s lives when they don’t even realize you’re a part of it. Know what I mean?”

“Not really.”

“It’s ... a hacker thing. Speaking of which—”

“What?”

“Just listen, things are looking up for you,” Keys muttered, making Luca remove one hand from the steering wheel to massage at the side of his temple where a headache was starting to form.

The thing about life lately? It was really testing his patience. In every single aspect—including people. He took a second to check on little Cross in the backseat, safe in his booster seat while he ate a cup of gelato and watched the city streets pass them by. At least, the kid was happy and unconcerned. But Cross always seemed that way. The people around him over the years had learned the boy was always listening.

Always.

And he heard what people thought he didn’t. He understood more than people could sometimes be comfortable with—honestly. Gifted didn’t begin to cover his nephew, but the way the kid’s eyes flickered back and forth at passing buildings told Luca he was distracted. The conversation happening between the hacker and his uncle didn’t interest him at all.

One thing to his favor.

Back to Keys, Luca said, “Things are going to be looking some way for you if you don’t stop wasting my time with this conversation, too.”

“Hey, be nice.”

“Keys.”

“All right—I was only trying to make conversation.”

“I don’t have time for conversation right now, man. I’m running out of time to find her here, remember?”

The hacker on the other end of the line cleared his throat, a more serious note taking a hold of his tone when he replied, “Shit, right, okay. Back to it, then?”

“Please.”

“You got it—was going to ease you into this, but that’s not going to work. So, I have a ... friend.”

Luca’s gaze narrowed. “Are you fucking with me again—”

“Nah, listen. I can count on one hand the number of times Marcel has called me in the last ten years. He’s an old friend, shit went bad years ago, and he got out. And I don’t know what happened to him, but sometimes I’d get a call. A friend in the business that started where I did—there’s a code, Luca.”

“Why am I getting an entire backstory here?”

Keys sighed so loudly the speakers crackled in the Bluetooth. “The point is—I never asked about what happened because it wasn’t on the table. The code. If you’re safe, that’s great. But he called again. I was over here minding my own goddamn business and checking up on that shit about the white ghost you sent me.”

“What does this have anything to do with—”

“He wanted to ask a favor—a million-dollar bounty to be listed in New York. He figured since the last known location was here, it’d be better to open the bounty here. Really get the underground moving here while the bounty spreads outside the state. The man isn’t wrong, and he wanted to go through my servers to do it because they’re the most secure in the state to do it remotely, but that’s not the good part.”

“What is?”

“Who the bounty is on.”

Luca blinked, finally catching up to speed. No, Keys hadn’t been wasting his time at all. “The white ghost.”

“Yeah, man. So—”

“Did he have her location nailed down within New York?”