Beating Ruby by Camilla Monk Read Free Book Online Page A

with great care, afraid that a single noise might betray me. It was a text from Prince.
    Go, go, go!
    Thank God, he could see me with the security cameras. My heart racing, I wiggled out of the car and fell onto the soft taupe carpet. No one in the hallway. I inspected the opposite wall. A man-sized vent was there, as promised. Game on.
    Unlocking that damn grille proved a tedious challenge. At first, the star-shaped screws resisted the magic screwdriver Prince had given me. I struggled for a few seconds, blood drumming in my ears, faster and faster every time the blade slipped. When the screws loosened up at last, I let out a long sigh of relief; I was starting to get cramps in my forearms. I carefully placed the metal grille and the four screws at the tunnel’s entrance with the intent of putting everything back in place when I was done. Now all I had to do was wiggle my way into the vent.
    This, at least, was the easy part—there weren’t even any rats. I silently crawled straight ahead in the dark tunnel, toward a faint light I assumed came from the clean room. Of course, there had to be a catch: it turned out the tunnel I was crawling into crossed a vertical one, forming a wide hole in the passageway. It was manageable, but the few seconds I spent contorting to pass that particular obstacle had my chest constricting in near-panic. Against my belly, I could feel the slight breeze coming from the vertical vent, blowing under my sweater and reminding me that I was perched precariously above a five-story-deep rabbit hole.
    Once I was on the other side and only a few feet away from the clean room’s grid, I registered male voices. Dammit! If there were still people working inside the room and so close to the air vent, I’d never be able to sneak in and reach Ruby’s servers. I crept closer, my breath coming in short pants. I rolled to my side so I was able to see where the voices came from. Less than three yards from where I lay hidden, two men were sitting on the white floor, surrounded by laptops all connected to the same server rack. Ruby’s.
    The older of the two was a short, fiftysomething man with a neat suit and a shaven skull. I squinted to better see his face through the grid. Small rectangular glasses, potato nose. I knew this guy; I had seen him with Ellingham and Kerri Lavalle at a press conference a few months prior. The other guy was a young Asian with long hair, round glasses, and a cool Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt. His face looked sort of familiar, but I had no idea who he could be. I was pretty sure I’d never seen him inside EMT’s walls before. Some nerd cop, perhaps?
    I heard a door open somewhere in the clean room. Then the sound of footsteps approaching, closer and closer, until a pair of khakis entered my field of vision. I jumped and stifled a squeak of surprise when they brushed the vent’s grille. Paralyzed by fear, I clasped a hand on my mouth to muffle the sound of my breathing. The pants shifted away, revealing brown boots partly covered by bright blue overshoes. Worn leather, no shine. I knew those pants and those boots.
    The newcomer walked to the two men working on Ruby and knelt beside them. And when he did, it took everything I had not to scream. My chest constricted until I thought I’d suffocate, my ears were ringing, my heart seemed to be ramming against my ribs as if to tear through bones and muscles and escape.
    Alex.
    Alex was in the clean room.
    Past the shock, there were a few seconds during which my brain went into overdrive trying to rationalize this. Alex worked in insurance. Maybe he didn’t specialize only in expatriate contracts, and someone had stolen something in EMT’s building. I had seen in movies that sometimes they might send an insurance expert to investigate, and maybe he had tried to tell me he was coming, but my phone hadn’t rung and he had forgotten to call back because he was busy with insurance contracts . . . and stuff.
    Or maybe . . .