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“I need a laptop,” I say, eyeing up the case filled with them to my left. “For research.”
“I can find it for you,” she says, pushing her sliding glasses higher up her nose. “I’ll be able to find anything you need much quicker.”
Time for me to bullshit.
“It’s not just a matter of finding information,” I explain. “I’m doing an interrogation, and I want to show him pictures of certain places to really get into his head. I don’t need to do anything sophisticated.”
“Oh, you’re talking abouthim.” Her body language changes. Her shoulders tense, and she’s hissing more than Pepper. “If you must.”
“Is everything okay?” I ask. “You seem a little… on edge.”
She spins around in her computer chair so quickly that she’ll be lucky not to get whiplash. “Am I good at my job, Ivy?”
“The best,” I reassure her. “You know you are.”
“I thought so too,” she says victoriously as if she’s making a point and winning an argument in her head. Maybe I should speak to her more often. She wheels herself over to the stack of laptops and hands me one. “Here you go.”
“Thanks,” I reply, still confused by her outburst. Alaric needs to give her more credit. We can’t lose someone like Penelope.
She turns her back on me, giving me my cue to leave.
“Thanks, Penelope.”
“Bring it back when you’re done,” she snaps, then proceeds to take her pent-up anger out on the keyboard, smashing the keys and writing a string of code that makes zero sense to someone like me.
Maybe I’m mad for letting Bram’s words get to me. I should trust Alaric, but creeping doubt tells me I’ll regret it if I don’t find out for myself.
CHAPTER27
BRAM
Ivy’s purposeful, heavy footsteps wake me from my broken sleep. She’s on the warpath. I’ve been finding myself looking forward to her visits, but I shrink back against the wall now. The last time I saw her this mad, she stuck a branding iron in my chest. My nail beds have only started to heal over…
She opens the hatch and steps back against the wall so that I can see her from the middle up. My chest constricts. Her red hair is piled on top of her head in a messy bun with a few loose tendrils hanging out, letting me look at her face properly. Her full lips look so soft, and… nope.Don’t fucking go there.She’s beautiful, but she’s fucking deadly.
She pulls a chair from further down the corridor and balances a backpack on it. She unzips it to pull out a laptop.
“I tried, but I couldn’t find anything,” she says in exasperation. Her eyes are ringed with black circles. She must have stayed awake all night looking for answers.
I shake my head.Do you think they’d leave confidential client records lying around for anyone to find?
This is a step forward, though. She listened to what I said and is questioning the Killers Club. Alaric was right to question her loyalty after all.
“You’re supposed to be a computer guy,” she says. “Tell me what to do.”
How do I know this isn’t Alaric testing me like he’s testing Ivy? He could be double-crossing us both. But if he’s not, this could work to my advantage. If she learns the true nature of the people she’s working for, I could persuade her to set me free.
I make a swivel motion with my finger, signalling for her to turn the screen around. The opening is too small to pass the laptop through or for me to type. I look at the operating system and write exactly what sequence she needs to put in.
“None of this makes sense,” she grumbles as she types in the code, then turns the screen around again for me to check. I give her a thumbs-up. “It’s like speaking a whole robot language.”
I write:
This could take a while.
“Do you have something better to do?” Her head snaps up. “It doesn’t look like you’re going anywhere to me.”
I crack a smile.
