Page 1 of Code Name: Admiral

PROLOGUE

ADMIRAL

January 15

Long flaming-red hair with pale pink woven in streaked across the cemetery.

“Target is at one o’clock, Admiral, and we’ve got company.”

“Move out, move out, move out!” I shouted, racing toward the woman who was about to put herself between the man Tank had referred to as the target and “the company”—another man sent to take him out.

In less than five seconds, I’d place myself in the same crossfire Alice was headed into. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d take a bullet in order to save another’s life. This time was just more personal. More important. More imperative I get to her before the hail of bullets rained over both of us.

“Alice!”I roared when I was close enough to see her hand pull a gun from the multicolored patchwork bag strapped across her body.

I heard the first pop, followed by countless more as I tackled her to the ground, covering her with my body.

“Man down!”Tank shouted through the comms. I turned my head to see my cousin—Bobby Kane, or Cue Ball, as he was known in New York mafia circles—lying in the freshly fallen snow, blood seeping from his body in the same way colored, flavored water spread through Hawaiian ice.

Alice, the woman who lay beneath me, the one I was crushing with the weight of my body until I was certain she was safe, the one whose gun I’d knocked so far away from her hand that she couldn’t reach it, hadn’t been there to save Bobby. Just like the mafioso whose bullets had ended his life, her plan was to kill him.

“You fucking bastard!”Her words were muffled against the snow, but I heard them clearly. I also heard the sobs racking her body as I gently raised myself first, then her in my arms once Tank gave me the all clear. She tried to fight me off and pummel me with her fists, but I held them pinned to her sides.

“He’s in the wind,” Tank reported. I wasn’t surprised. A hired gun always had an exit strategy.

“Give me my fucking gun!” Alice shouted at me when Blackjack, another man on my team, retrieved it from where it lay in the same snow Bobby did.

“You want me to take her in?” Blackjack added.

“I’ll handle it.” No one knew the danger Alice had gotten herself into, not even the three men who’d been on surveillance with me today at the memorial service for Sarah Gordon, who wasn’t just the woman whose cremated remains were supposed to be inurned into the earth, but also the one whose death Bobby was responsible for.

Worse, though, she was Alice’s sister.

1

ALICE

PREVIOUS FRIDAY

2:37 AM

Rain came down in sheets, creating shadows across the multiple monitors positioned around what was supposed to be a dining area. The constant patter against the windows provided an oddly soothing backdrop to my late-night investigation, though it did nothing to ease the knot in my stomach. I rubbed my eyes, struggling to focus, knowing my inability was due more to exhaustion than the weather. I’d always been plagued by insomnia, but since my sister’s death a week ago, I doubted I averaged more than two or three hours a night.

The blue light from the screens cast an eerie glow across my workspace, making the crystals scattered around the monitors throw prismatic patterns on the walls. After absentmindedly rearranging them—strategically, near the base of each screen, not just for better coding energy but to help reduce the amount of radiation seeping from the liquid-crystal displays—I held one in my hand and brought it to my sternum. The cool surfacepressed against my skin through the worn Ithaca College T-shirt I slept in.

“My heart is healing and growing stronger,” I said aloud, the daily affirmation feeling hollow in the empty apartment.

I opened the toxicology report I’d received from the medical examiner who’d performed my sister’s autopsy. The emergency responders had taken her to Mercy General Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side the night she died.

Coincidentally, it was the same hospital where Sarah and I were born. It was also where they’d taken my parents after they both suffered life-threatening injuries the night a drunk driver had hit them head-on on their way home from dinner with us. My father was pronounced dead on arrival. My mom succumbed to her injuries a few hours later.

“Fentanyl concentration of 34 ng/mL,” I read for the fifth time tonight, the numbers burning into my retinas. Beside it, the base range suggested therapeutic levels of 1-2 ng/mL were considered normal. My hands shook, knowing she’d had seventeen times that in her system. This was no accident.

That my sister had died of an overdose was horrifying enough. That she’d led a life I knew nothing about, even though it took less than ten minutes to get to her apartment from mine and we saw each other almost every day, was the harder part for me to accept. The Sarah I knew collected vintage vinyl records, volunteered at an animal shelter on weekends, and couldn’t handle two glasses of wine without either getting a migraine or falling asleep. She didn’t take opioids.

“You need to get on a dating app.” She’d pushed me several times to do so, using her own profile as an example. “What better place to find someone who gets you, right?” Her voice echoed in my memory, that characteristic optimism that had always both annoyed and comforted me. And yet, after hacking into her dating profile, I saw she hadn’t responded to a single messageshe was sent—except to someone who went by BK, a guy who’d never had a profile. If he had, I sure as hell would’ve been able to hack into it, even if it had been deleted.

“What the fuck, Sarah?” I said out loud. The only response was the same hum of computers I’d grown so accustomed to that I only heard it when listening for something else.

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