“He won’t,” Adrian interrupted, his voice firm. “The decoy is designed to look like it is slowly decrypting the first layer of the archive. It will take his system thirty minutes to realize the data is corrupted.”

I swallowed hard, looking at the blinking cursor on the laptop.

My hands were still shaking, but I forced my fingers onto the keyboard.

I logged into my secure secretary terminal, pulling up the decoy file Adrian had indicated.

The file was labeled *ROMANO_ARCH_MASTER_v4*.

I attached it to the email and sent it to the address Marcus had provided.

“It is sent,” I said, my voice barely a whisper.

Adrian closed the laptop halfway. “Now we wait for the ping.”

We sat in the dark garage, the sound of water dripping from the pipes overhead the only noise.

Every second felt like an eternity.

I kept seeing Clara’s terrified face behind the gray tape.

She was innocent. She had nothing to do with my past, or with the corporate war between Adrian and the syndicate.

Adrian reached over and placed his hand over mine again.