Page 87 of Crossed By the Stars
She climbed into the front passenger seat, dropping a backpack that she’d had on at her feet. Cillian and I exchanged a look and then climbed into the back. Once we were all seated, with Terrence’s gun trained on her from behind the wheel, she turned to look at us.
“Our systems have been compromised. The ones at my office and yours at Reinard’s.”
“Not possible,” Cillian said.
“That’s what I would have thought as well, but I’ve just spent five days backtracking code that led me to Mori’s nephew. Did you know he just graduated from Harvard with a cybersecurity degree?”
“Jada has a cousin?” I asked, shock traveling through me.
Rana nodded. “Her mother’s sister’s son. Isamu Yano. You just met him inside.”
My eyes widened, thinking of the younger man in glasses and a suit who’d stepped between me and Jada. He’d been muscled and strong underneath his wiry appearance. He’d be easy to underestimate. I knew because people often underestimated my lean frame.
“How did you see who I was with?” I asked.
“I piggybacked on their line in, linked into their security feeds. It’s as close as I dared go without raising alarms.”
I wasn’t sure I believed her, and from the look on Cillian’s and Terrence’s faces, I wasn’t sure they did either.
“You want to save, Jada, right?” she asked. When none of us said anything, she continued, “Then you need to listen. Mori’s world is crumbling around him. He has multiple factions warring against each other, vying to take his spot at the top of the dogpile. It may have been falling apart even before Jada turned on him. But his inability to defend himself from his own daughter definitely sped things up.”
“How did you get this kind of intel?” Terrence asked, doubt dripping from every syllable.
“I’m FBI,” she said.
We all stared in disbelief.
“What?” I finally croaked out.
“I work for Cruz Malone.”
I shook my head. “No way. Jada wants nothing to do with the FBI, and Dawson walked away.”
Rana nodded. “That’s why I was placed undercover. Jada didn’t know. Dawson didn’t know. No one knew.”
Jada was going to lose her shit. Dawson was going to bust heads. They’d purposefully separated themselves from the FBI to keep themselves safe, to distance themselves from anything that would cause theKyodainato come after them again.
Anger filled me. The FBI had put them all at risk…again.
“Putain. You’re the reason they came after her,” I growled.
“No,” she said, shaking her head vehemently. “Even though my security office was hacked, nothing there ties me to the FBI. Nothing. If I was taken or killed, no one would come looking for me until Malone got worried, and that would likely take months. Three people at the FBI know I work for them. Three. There’s no paper trail. Nothing in the computers. I don’t even have a badge. After the disaster in New London, they wanted to make sure there were no more leaks. I’m pretty sure it was Yano who hacked the FBI back then, too.”
“You left her,” I said. “If you’re FBI, why the hell did you leave?”
She looked out the window, swallowed hard, and then looked back to me with a lifted chin. “Jada wasn’t my job, Armaud. She was just my way of gathering intel.”
I sucked in a breath. My fury was barely contained.
“You used her and then just walked out, not caring whether she lived or died,” I snarled.
Her eyes seemed to swim, and part of me wanted to believe it was from real emotions, as if she actually cared about Jada. But I also didn’t feel like I could trust her. For all we knew, she’d followed us down the coast and turned us in to Mori herself. Cillian had said no one had seen her for days.
“I didn’tjustwalk out on her. I left her with Cillian,” Rana growled. “Because I believed he could protect her while I went underground to figure out how the hell they’d gotten in. To figure out if the leak came from the FBI, my team?who had no idea my company was a government front?or if it was someone in her personal life.”
She sent me a pointed look.
I scoffed, “Me?”
