My Pop Star Best Friend Ghosted Me for 3 Years. I Infiltrated His Team for Revenge… And Uncovered a Deadly Conspiracy
The Fingerprint Heist
The tension in the room was suffocating. The bass from the speakers vibrated in my chest. Ryland moved through the crowd with a tray of empty glasses. I watched Lucky. He was laughing with a corrupt senator, the scotch glass dangling dangerously from his hand.
Now.
Ryland tripped. It was a masterful performance of clumsiness. He went down hard, sending the tray of glasses shattering onto the marble floor right next to Lucky.
"You idiot!" Lucky roared, jumping back.
In the chaos, Lucky set his glass down on a side table to check his suit for shards. That was my window. I swooped in with a napkin, feigning a frantic cleanup effort.
"So sorry, sir, so sorry!" I wailed, grabbing the scotch glass with the napkin, careful not to smudge the prints.
"Just get it out of here!" Lucky barked, not even looking at my face.
I scurried away into the kitchen, heart pounding. Ryland met me by the service elevator a minute later, rubbing his elbow.
"Did you get it?" he whispered.
I held up the glass wrapped in the cloth. "Got it. Now let's get into that office."
We snuck upstairs. The hallway was empty. The office door had a sleek black scanner next to it. I carefully pressed the side of the glass against the scanner.
*Beep. Click.*
The light turned green.
"I can't believe that worked," Ryland breathed.
We slipped inside. The office was dark, smelling of mahogany and secrets. Ryland went straight for the safe behind the painting—cliché, but Lucky was not an imaginative man.
"Do you know the code?" I asked.
"No," Ryland said. "But I know his birthday."
He punched in the numbers. Red light.
"Try his mother's birthday," I suggested.
Red light.
"Try… the day he signed me," Ryland said softly.
He keyed in the date. *Click.* The safe swung open. inside wasn't just a ledger. There were passports, stacks of cash, and photos. Photos of Ryland's mom, tied up in a warehouse.
"Mom," Ryland choked out.
"Grab everything," I hissed. "We have to go."
The Tracker
We had the evidence. We had the location of his mom from the photos—a shipping container yard near the docks. But we couldn't just leave. Lucky was leaving the party. I saw his car pulling up to the front through the window.
"He's going to her," I realized. "He's going to move her tonight before the tour starts."
"We have to beat him there," Ryland said.
"No," I said, pulling a small device from my pocket—a GPS tag I'd swiped from the tech equipment in the warehouse earlier. "We need to follow him. If we go there and she's not there, we lose her. If we follow him, he leads us right to her."
"You want to put a tracker on his car? Now?"
"It's the only way."
I ran back down the service stairs, ripping off the fake teeth. I burst out the side door and sprinted through the bushes toward the driveway. Lucky was saying goodbye to the senator. His driver was opening the door of the black SUV.
I crawled under the chassis of the SUV just as the engine roared to life. The heat from the exhaust burned my face. I fumbled with the magnetic tracker, my hands shaking.
*Clack.* It stuck to the metal frame.
The car started to move. I rolled away just in time to avoid being crushed by the rear tire. I lay in the gravel, watching the taillights fade into the night.
Ryland appeared beside me, holding the stolen documents.
"Did you do it?" he asked.
I pulled out my phone, which I'd synced to the tag. A red dot blinked on the map, moving south.
"I got him," I said. "Let's go get your mom."
The night wasn't over. In fact, the real fight was just starting. But as I looked at Ryland, really looked at him, I saw a flash of the boy I used to know. He didn't remember our past, but he trusted me with his future. And for now, that was enough.
