Page 43 of The Bratva's Innocent Sold Bride
The attack on the charity office felt too close to home, too close to CJ. Seeing her in the midst of the chaos yesterday nearly broke me in a way I had never felt before. I had seen men killed, men I cared about. Everyone in my family was in near constant danger, but nothing compared to the fear that had ripped through me when she peeked around that doorway right after the ambush.
Even now, after holding her close all night long and assuring myself she was fine, it still shook me. I was so far over my head, I was as good as drowned. But like I had told her already, there was no other way I wanted to go. She was no longer a means to settle a debt or a way to punish her father. She was just mine.
But as I had learned yesterday, CJ was headstrong, tenacious, and independent. I’d also learned that she was going to wilt like a neglected flower from unhappiness if I kept her at home for much longer. There had to be a way, but how?
The answer came from one of my tech specialists, who was a native Californian and went by some surfer name he had to have made up himself. Delta thought the pictures CJ took of the wreckage were very helpful and suggested it would be a good idea to keep it up. As if I should hire a professional photographer to follow my men and me around everywhere we went. Young people seemed to believe that if something wasn’t captured ontheir cellphones, it was like it never actually happened. After I shut that idea down, he told me that now that we knew who Anatoli was and how to find him, we should start a deeper surveillance than just the stakeout I had about a block away from the building he’d led me to after the gala.
“I know you’re old school, boss,” he said. “But we need to take this online. I can get some experts in here to help hack into his systems, and pretty soon we’ll know everything we need to know to take him out.”
“I might already have someone who can do it. Let me get back to you.”
If CJ could do what he asked and agreed to help, this was something she could do at home, or at the very least under constant guard. I found her outside with the dog, tossing Artem’s toy to wear him out. I asked her what she knew about tracking software.
“What I don’t know will take less time to tell you,” she said, wrinkling her nose in a way that distracted me from the subject long enough to kiss her.
“If I gave you someone’s name, could you figure out a way to get information on him? Information that’s not readily available on the internet.”
“Easily,” she told me. Her confidence was sexy as hell and made me curious enough to ask her to show me how she’d do it.
She scoffed at the offer to use my laptop and fired up the machine she’d had sent from her father’s house. I gave her Terrance Hendricks as the target, waiting to see if she balked at hacking someone who, to her knowledge, was a legitimate businessman. She only nodded, her fingers flying over the keyboard.
“Is it whatever top secret project he’s supposedly been working on that you’re interested in knowing?” she asked.
“We can start with that. Or anything you can find, really.”
She waved me away, leaning over the computer. Half an hour later, she hurried into the kitchen for snacks and rushed back to her chair. I was on the edge of my seat, wanting her to succeed for my own needs as well as her own. Another hour passed before she called me in, excitement in her voice. She blinked at me as if she was coming out of a trance, then waved me over to look at her screen.
I breathed in the fresh scent of her shampoo as I saw more information than I could have dreamed of. Registered businesses, an offshore bank account, access to a report that actually might have had something to do with his mysterious project, but was gibberish to me, it was so highly specialized. For all I knew, any of it could be false leads he’d planted himself, but the fact she found anything in such a short amount of time astounded me.
“This is amazing,” I said, utterly in awe. “Can you send it to my tech specialist? And tell him how you did it?”
She sent it all over, then shrugged. “It wasn’t that hard. It’s probably something he could do himself.” Maybe she was just tired from her hard work, but now that the job was finished, she seemed a bit defeated. As if she already missed it.
I couldn’t have that.
Delta got back to me right away, beyond impressed. “Can this guy go deeper?”
I turned to CJ, absently drumming her fingers on the desk. “Can you go deeper?”
“You want more than that? How much?”
“How much can you get?”
A slow, mischievous smile curled her lush lips. “Everything. I can get into his personal laptop with the right equipment. I can’t do it on this, though, and certainly not on your hunk of junk.”
I hung up on Delta and swept her from the chair and into my arms. “I’ll get you whatever you need,” I said, kissing her until she was clinging to me. “That was so damn hot, my beautiful little genius.”
“Does this mean I have a job?” she asked, her hands gripping my shirt with excitement as her eyes twinkled.
This was all I wanted. My CJ, bright, alive, and happy. Oh, I wanted that information on Anatoli, but I wanted to keep seeing her acting this exuberant more.
“Welcome aboard,” I said, thrown backwards by the force of her hug.
Chapter 27 - CJ
For the first time ever, I was putting my degree to use. It wasn’t Taurus Ingenuity, but the “interview” process was quite a bit harder, and that was saying something. For all the time and arguments behind letting me have a job, Mat was the one to give me one. If it was anything like the audition project he gave me, it was going to be a heck of a lot more interesting than slogging away at the bottom of the Taurus ladder.
When Mat asked me to hack into that guy’s business, I took it as a fun challenge, though it wasn’t much more challenging than what my online friends and I used to dare each other to do when I was in high school. Hacking into Terrance Hendricks’s commercial bank account was easy enough, and I certainly wasn’t going to steal anything. I doubted Mat wanted the info to syphon funds. Something like that was beneath him.
