Page 91 of Shallow Remains

“Who are you?” Maddy finally demanded.

“Don’t recognize me?” Lindsay’s face twisted into a sneer. “Well, you shouldn’t. Not after all the money I paid the plastic surgeon and the pain I went through to look like this.”

That still hadn’t answered her question. She tried another angle, desperate for information. “Why are you doing this?”

Lindsay’s eyes burned with pure hatred. “Because you took him from me.”

What? “Who?”

“Elliot.”

Maddy stared in disbelief as the pieces finally clicked into place. She hadn’t done anything to Elliot. But Elliot had done plenty to her. He’d reaped the consequences for his actions. “Eve?” Elliot’s girlfriend. They’d been so intense together, Eve had almost seemed obsessed with him.

“Eve’s dead. She died the same day he did.”

My God. She’d done this for revenge? Jealousy? Somehow tracked her all the way across the world to Skeleton Island of all places, to get even? “But you—he said⁠—”

“He said what? That we were done? Ancient history?” She gave a bitter laugh. “Not even close. What else did he tell you? That you were special? That you were the only one who understood him? You’re pathetic. He played you like a fucking fiddle to lure you into the trap we set together. He was my world, and he died because of you.”

The words hit Maddy like a kick to the gut, Elliot’s betrayal as fresh as if it had just happened. But the pain in Eve’s voice was real and raw, her thirst for vengeance evident after everything she’d done to plan and carry this out. “What do you want with me? I gave you the drive.” Why Eve wanted it, she still had no idea.

“You’re going to give me what should have been mine all along.” Eve plugged in the thumb drive, shoved Maddy into a chair and slid a laptop in front of her. “You’re going to find that passkey and access whatever software you need to decrypt this piece of code.”

She pulled out her phone and showed Maddy several lines of what looked like encrypted code. “And you’re going to do that now.” She jammed the pistol into the middle of Maddy’s back. “Get to work.”

Maddy hesitated, unsure where to begin, still in shock and scared out of her mind as she began typing. It was so hard to think as she scanned what popped up on screen. “The software I need is behind a firewall. It’s all encrypted. I need to find an existing weak point like misconfigured rules and unencrypted traffic⁠—”

“I don’t give a fuck what you have to do, just do it.” She shoved the muzzle of the pistol harder into her spine.

FORTY-SEVEN

Maddy’s fingers were clumsy from fear and cold as she typed. She could barely think through the haze of fear clouding her brain. No one knew she was missing or where she was. And as soon as she gave Eve what she wanted, she was dead. “Put the gun away. I can’t work like this.”

Eve made eye contact with her for a moment and shoved it harder into her, the hatred in that stare turning Maddy’s stomach. But after several tense seconds she relented, lowering the weapon.

“Try anything funny, and you’ll regret it.” The fervent gleam in her eyes was terrifying. “But by all means, feel free to try. I’m ready for it.”

Fighting to conceal the terror choking her, Maddy looked away and focused on the screen as she typed. She pulled up a program she’d used frequently in the past while working on projects for Blaine. A new burst of fear made her brain short-circuit when the firewall came up, demanding username and password.

“Problem?”

“I—I can’t remember the…”

“You’d best figure it out in a hurry.”

Maddy’s mind raced. None of her former passwords would work. To get in, her only option was to find and exploit a weakness.

Blowing out a shaky breath, she got busy hunting through pages of code while Eve watched her every keystroke. The relief that rushed through her when the program finally opened made her light-headed. But it also put her one step closer to Eve having no further use for her.

She had to get a message out somehow. Blaine was on the mainland but always had his phone on him. If she accessed a program they used together, she could trigger an alert and that would automatically send him a notification. If she could get an SOS to him, maybe she could stall the rest of this process long enough for a rescue to happen.

It was her only hope of surviving this. But she had to be smart.

Pure determination fueled her as she opened another window, minimized it, and started typing what looked like more code. In reality, she was sending a message to Blaine, giving bare details about what was happening.

Base64 string was a common coding language. The messages looked like a routine file upload — gws was a real CLI tool people use daily. The message decodes inline, so the file appears in a shared Drive folder as readable text for whoever found it. One line, no obvious red flags on screen.

She toggled back and forth between it and the larger windows she had open, hoping Eve didn’t notice what she was doing. And that Blaine was getting her messages in real time.