Nala Henkel-Aislinn

If the Darwin Award existed as an actual trophy, I’d bet my favorite PS5 controller I’d win it. The dedication would read, To Lena Kozek, for bravely—and idiotically—holding a mob boss at gunpoint in a public library.

Because that’s exactly what I’m doing, and it’s making my upper lip sweat like a shot glass of Fireball on a humid summer’s day.

I make it a point to avoid stressful situations like this one. It had been easy, back when I didn’t have a clue about who I was, who the guy on the other end of my gun was, or who the other people in the room—all holding guns—were. But now that I’m in this situation, I feel myself hovering above it, as if someone knocked me out of my body to float above the library’s reading room.

And yeah, I said library. Twice. It’s a weird situation that I’d love to explain, but right now I’ve got a mobster to neutralize, should I ever return to my body.

He’s a small-m mobster, although the weapon he has trained on me is a big-G gun. His eyes flutter from my gun to my face, then to my legs, which are visible below the hem of the checkered sundress I’m wearing.

Why I’m wearing a dress is another thing to ponder if I live long enough to have a quiet moment of reflection.

Mobster guy’s gun is on me, but there are two guys nearby—also pointing guns but thankfully at mobster guy.

One of them is a superhot FBI asshat. The other is a schlumpy, delusional dork of a police detective who got himself entangled in an outer layer of my heart. If you repeat the part about my heart being susceptible to someone like him, I’ll hack your computer and steal your credit card info to buy myself several new gaming systems.

But I’m getting off track.

Behind me is a half circle of gray-haired grannies, their postures rigid like deruny that’ve been left on the counter overnight. That’s a potato pancake, if you’re not Ukrainian. They’re best right out of the cooking oil.

The grannies think they’re pointing their guns at the mobster, but since I’m standing between them and trouble, I can’t see how I won’t catch a few bullets should they fire. Their eyes are full of cold, hard malice (and maybe a cataract or two), but their half dozen hands are trembling like boiled cabbage.

My Auntie Korinna is the wrangler of this group of badass gray hairs. It’s fifty-fifty on whether she’s pointing her gun at me or the mobster, which adds a little unexpected spice to this whole situation, don’t you think? She’s my deceased mother’s sister, may her soul rest in peace, but since I’m the blackest sheep of the Kozek family, it means our relationship is deliciously layered like a Napoleon cake minus any sweetness.

Was it only three days ago that this whole mess started?

Thirty-six hours ago, I was in New York, just another nobody at a boring job, doing mundane things like resetting forgotten email passwords and retrieving accidentally deleted files. And when I wasn’t working my 9-to-5, I was killing my old college buddies in some dystopian computer game. I was a tiny cog turning inside the larger gears of a boring but gunless life. Tick, tick, tick.

Then my simple life went boom when I tried to exact revenge on my slimy boss, who was attempting to—

“Galyna,” purrs the guy on the other end of my gun, and I snap back into my body. I gotta say, the dress feels nice. “Think about this,” he reasons. He’s calm. Friendly, even. “Killing is so final, family or not.”

“Family,” I repeat, the tone of my voice hinting that I’m open to contemplating what he’s saying. But when his finger tightens on his trigger, mind does the same, and his pupils shrink to pinpoints.

“Tak, rodyna,” he says with an ingratiating smile. “We have much to talk about, and I can’t talk if you shoot me.”

What a slimeball, thinking he can play the family-should-talk card so late in the game. Plus, he hasn’t been juggling felonies or gangsters or ghosts like I’ve been.

I haven’t mentioned the ghost yet, have I? Well, hang in there. It’s coming.

“I don’t need to think,” I tell him as I let the sight of my gun hover over the space between his eyes.

He smiles. Then shrugs.

“So who will shoot first?” he muses, his gaze flicking behind me, then back.

If I shoot him first, it would solve a lot of problems. For my aunt and her friends. My hometown too. But mostly for myself.

They might arrest me for murder, but he’s pointing a gun at me, so I could claim self-defense. And going to jail wouldn’t be so bad. After all, they give you three meals a day in jail. Better than making nutritional choices based on which is the fastest-heating pizza pocket.

Sorry about all the food references. I’ve only had one decent meal since all this started.

Any or all of the grannies might shoot first, so if I hear any of them move, I’ll have to beat them to the trigger. I would never deprive the world of their amazing varenyky and holubtsi.

But I’d be pulling the trigger for my father too. Even though I’m back home, he’s still waiting to go home. He’s also the only one who didn’t side-eye my combination of sundress and army boots. For a grouchy, dead hit man, he’s been very supportive. He’s the ghost I mentioned, although he’s nowhere in sight right now.

“What are you waiting for, Galyna?” coos the mobster.

It’s a solid question. Thinking back over the last three days, I can see I have been waiting for something. A missing part of myself, perhaps.

Three days ago, I didn’t think anything was missing. And I’d been excited to pull the trigger on something completely different…

Chapter Two

Lena, three crazy days ago…

There I was, in the cozy basement dungeon of the smallest New York City bank ever incorporated.

Aside from a cityscape of filing cabinets, I had the entire basement to myself.

I had just finished my cheese-and-pickle snack, and I was about to get some luscious vigilante justice.

I hadn’t started out to be a crusader—it just kind of went that way.

My mom died when I was three, my father when I was ten. My mom died from cancer, but my dad’s death had been a hush-hush thing, resulting in my banishment to my aunt and uncle in New York. Like any other kid with a martyr complex, I reveled in my status as an orphan. When it didn’t win me any sympathy, not even a birthday card from my Auntie Korinna, the Banisher, I purged everything about my childhood from my memory. And when I said purged, I mean eradicated, burned, and incinerated in a magnificent furnace. Done. Gone.

“I’m going to do it,” I said into my earbuds.

“You said that last time when the dude didn’t give you that promotion,” Brick scoffed.

“The last three times your boss didn’t do what you wanted,” JP corrected.

“This time is different. He’s blackmailing Mandy,” I explained.

“Who’s Mandy?”

“Sinkhole’s niece,” I said.

Let’s pause here, because this was unusual.

My slimy boss had done a lot of slimy things. Actually, hiring his common-sense-challenged, incredibly inexperienced niece was a nice thing. Shockingly nice. But then my boss exposed the slimy underbelly I should never have doubted.

“So?” Brick asked.

“I’ve got him on video telling her she owes him a personal favor for her promotion,” I said, shivering in disgust and triumph at the same time. “And I’m paraphrasing ‘personal favor.’”

“Video and audio?” Brick asked.

“And a clear shot of his face as he’s saying it?” JP followed up.

“Microscopically clear,” I confirmed.

There were about a million cool things about being an IT administrator at a small bank, but three stood out.

First, even though I had a glob-of-slime supervisor, I rarely had to interact with him or anyone else at the bank. With all the servers in the basement and me being the only IT person on staff, nobody ever came down there.

Second, my job was dead easy because I was absurdly overqualified. My biggest task was fixing email even though I was certified to handle server installations and network configuration. Hell, I protected the banking system from people like me, who hacked into it all the time just for fun. I could even requisition all kinds of equipment that nobody knew the bank didn’t need.

Third, reasons one and two let me do the thing I love most—spy.

“Did you back your evidence up?” JP asked, breaking into my musing.

“Of course,” I said.

“Good old Swiss servers, doing the job of the righteous,” Brick laughed.

“You know it,” I agreed, reaching for the black box under my monitor.

I’m going to pause again.

In hindsight, I missed a red flag. That morning my black box sat slightly askew from the monitor stand. I always lined the two up perfectly, and that morning it was skewed by a quarter inch.

My downfall was assuming that quarter inch was the fault of the cleaners even though we had an agreement that they’d never come close to my workspace. They were happy to have less work, and I was happy to maintain a pristine working environment.

But that freaking quarter inch… crap. Anyway, back to the story.

“Are you going to release the video?” JP asked. “Get him arrested?”

“No,” I replied, pressing the Power button on the box. “Something better.”

“Something sneaky,” Brick guessed. “She’s a very private vigilante.”

It was true; I liked my secret, private life. With all the secrets I collected at work, I never felt lonely.

And holy crap, does my job let me gather the most ridiculous amount of information about the people I work with. It’s the best kind of reality show ever.

I had the whole bank rigged with security cameras and remote recording devices. I could even turn the VoIP desk phones into recording devices. All of it was essential for security and signed off on by Sinkhole, but it meant I could tap into everything anybody did or said.

For example, I knew that our sixty-year-old, uptight assistant loans manager used her work email to subscribe to some pretty salty dating app stuff.

The bathrooms were the biggest gossip areas, though. Not in the stalls—gross—just near the sinks. You wouldn’t believe the gossip I overheard. Affairs (a teller and a bigwig at corporate), fetishes (pro tip: don’t ever watch a questionable video while you’re sitting on the toilet), and Sinkhole’s sexual harassment (the guy literally practiced in the bathroom mirror right before he met with Mandy).

I’ll be honest, Sinkhole featured so predominantly on my secret server in Switzerland that I pretty much monitored him 24/7 at work. I always knew I’d get him fired one day, but threatening his own family with assault crossed some line in my psyche.

“Are you going to clue us in on this plan?” JP asked.

I cracked my knuckles, then accessed Beatrix.

Beatrix Potter was the name I gave my black box. She’d been fascinated by drawing fungi, which dovetailed neatly with my obsession for drawing dead plants. But that’s another not-as-exciting story.

“I’m thinking bank fraud for starters,” I said and started typing, entering my credentials into Beatrix. I never accessed my files until I was cloaked. I dug through the server to find my file on Sinkhole.

His legal name was Sinclair Whitmore. He hated women, people of color, and authority figures. His family was rich and, according to the confidential email I could access, had stepped in at the board level twice to avoid him being fired—once for discrimination and the other for showing up at work drunk. I have video of him peeing himself and had to talk myself out of posting that on YouTube. And despite his family stepping in to save his butt, he hated them too.

“Bank fraud is thrilling stuff,” Brick interrupted, “but I’ve got to go to a meeting. Shoot me a text with the details.”

“Good to see Google is wasting your programming skills with endless meetings,” JP chided.

“Hey, we can’t all luck in to gaming design jobs,” Brick groaned.

“Gaming tonight?” I asked before he logged off. It was a stupid question. When didn’t we game?

They both agreed and ended the call, letting me get back to the task at hand.

I riffled through Sinkhole’s file until I found his home IP address. I set up a new path via Beatrix’s VPN, found a friendly server out of Chile, and accessed his IP. Beatrix would keep my identity hidden, but Sinkhole’s digital fingerprints would be all over the changes I was about to make.

First, via his home computer, I logged into his online banking and lowered his interest rate by .0125%.

Next, I uploaded a worm program to his computer, then deployed it to the banking system. That little beauty would scrape .01 percent from every account at the bank and funnel it into his savings account.

Last, I logged into his SpankBank.com account and changed his alias name to his real name. I then switched the billing to his wife’s credit card.

Yes, somehow Sinkhole had found a woman to marry him.

I texted my achievements to JP and Brick, then logged out of Beatrix.

I had to admit, my hands were sweaty. I’d never taken action like this. The smart thing would have been to just sit on the information. Gathering secrets might give someone power, but revealing them was stupid. I don’t think Beatrix Potter said that, but somebody did.

Anyway, the point of all this wasn’t that I was getting even with my slimy boss, but that I had just committed a serious crime.

A bubble of nausea stirred in my belly, and a layer of just-committed-a-felony sweat coated my neck.

I was the girl who hid in the shadows. Even gaming with Brick and JP, I was the one in the background, making sure we didn’t wander into a trap. Now, I was the one out front, doing the things.

The felony things, warned a strange voice in my head. A man’s voice, which seemed odd at the time but would become obvious later on.

“Felony, schmelony,” I taunted the voice in my head out loud.

Four hours later, my phone rang. It was the schmelony taunt coming back to haunt me.

Chapter Three

Lena

“Lena,” slurped my boss’s voice over the phone. Ugh, even the way he talked was disgusting.

“Yes,” I replied. I clenched on the receiver even though I had no reason to think he’d discovered what I’d done. The man couldn’t use the banking system, let alone stumble across my genius hacking skills.

But then he said something he’d never said before.

“In my office,” he demanded.

I blinked, wanting to ask, “What?” except my tongue had instantly dried into a shapeless husk incapable of forming words.

Sinkhole never asked me to his office and rarely called me. He’d just done both.

I looked at Beatrix and thought about the quarter inch I’d smoothed away. She was the only way anybody could trace what I had done.

Every sweat pore on my body cringed, soaking my black jacket and pants with insta sweat.

Heavy breathing filled my ear, making me gag. Sinkhole hadn’t hung up.

“No-ow,” he crooned, then finally hung up.

I replaced the receiver, then pulled Beatrix from where I had stashed her. I felt around all her surfaces until I found a raised bump on the bottom. Turning her over, I saw a small foil patch. I picked at the corner until I could peel it back, revealing a microscopic silver circuit.

Shit and shit and shit.

My body broke out in another wave of perspiration. A rivulet ran from my scalp and down my neck, and I flailed at it like it was a spider crawling out of my hair.

I had committed a felony, and the only thing I could cling to was the hope that Sinkhole was about to lay me off. The problem with having access to so much information, though, was knowing everything that was going on. There was zero chance I was being laid off.

The only thing I didn’t have access to was who’d put that data collecting circuit on Beatrix. The single camera in the basement didn’t show my desk, as it just covered the stairs up to the main floor.

Wasn’t that some hubris?

I took my time going to Sinkhole’s office. Several curious glances followed me, like I was the monster from the basement lagoon, letting herself be seen by the people of the blue-collar village.

I avoided attention as a rule. I was so good at staying under the radar, I was almost at the Earth’s core, but with every step, my breakfast threatened to projectile out of me. Trying to breathe more slowly, I looked around for a handy garbage can just in case I couldn’t hold back the vomit.

After what felt like a year, I stood in front of Sinkhole’s door.

“Come in,” he burped after I knocked.

I did.

The cheap excuse for a man stood in the corner of his office pretending to look at some paper. As I walked further into the room, his pasty, round face rolled into the smile a slug would make. He jabbed a finger at the chair opposite his desk.

“Sit,” he demanded.