“We are going to get her back,” Adrian said. “But you must trust me.”

“He wants the keys,” I whispered. “I have the access codes in my master terminal. I can bypass the encryption.”

“No,” Adrian said. “If you give him the real keys, he has no reason to keep either of you alive.”

“Then what do we do?” I asked, tears finally spilling over my cheeks.

“We give him what he thinks is the key,” Adrian said.

He reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a sleek, black laptop.

He flipped it open, the blue light illuminating the sharp angles of his face.

“Marcus is working with the syndicate,” Adrian said, typing rapidly. “They do not just want the data. They want to humiliate me.”

“He has been planning this,” I said, remembering the threats Marcus had whispered to me before I escaped him.

“We are going to use that against him,” Adrian said. “My developers built a decoy key for emergency audits.”

He turned the screen toward me.

Lines of green code were cascading down the black background.