“It’d definitely go viral,” the other woman agreed, and they all stepped into the elevator.

Nita’s fingers dug into the crate of blood wine, and she tried to keep her anger off her face. None of it was real to these people. To them, Kovit wasn’t a human, he was just something they could watch from a safe distance, a piece of entertainment, his life only as valuable as the followers they gained from his death.

She hated people.

She got off on her floor and tapped her keycard on her room. The door opened, and she immediately put the wine down and assessed their new space. It was small, with a queen-sized bed, a desk, and not much else. Faded red curtains matched a faded red blanket on the bed.

She closed the door and sat on the bed. It groaned ominously.

She yanked out her phone, but still nothing from Kovit. She texted him the room number, and waited for something, anything.

Finally, she shoved the phone aside. She had things to do, and sitting here worrying wouldn’t get them done.

She plugged the laptop in and connected the hard drive. She had a terrible fear that the information hadn’t transferred, that something had gone wrong.

But when she plugged the hard drive in, it was all there, all thirteen terabytes of it, an impossibly large amount of information she couldn’t imagine where to even start parsing.

She stared at it a long moment. This was it. This was the power she craved. Here was the information that could crumble nations, destroy powerful men, change her life.

She had no idea how to use it.

The words blurred in front of her. She didn’t know any of these names, didn’t know who she needed to blackmail to stay safe, didn’t know how to best deploy this information. Didn’t know what was important and what was junk, didn’t know who was at the top and the bottom.

She let herself be overwhelmed by it all for a moment, the sheer magnitude of what she didn’t know, of what she had to learn.

Then she pulled herself together and took out her phone.

Adair picked up on the first ring. “Hello?”

“It’s Nita.” She forced herself to sound cool and confident. “I have the information. I successfully robbed Tácunan Law.”

There was silence on the other end of the line before Adair finally whispered, “Well, damn.”

A smile crept across Nita’s face at his impressed tone. Just hearing those words made something ease in her chest. She had done something incredible. She could do anything she put her mind to. She would figure all of this out.

“I didn’t think it was possible,” he admitted. “I’m impressed.”

“You shouldn’t have doubted me.”