Page 66 of Perfect Order
“Just remember to reset the password for your social media accounts. Sorry, but they’re for sale on the dark web.”
I immediately begin banging my head on the desk before I meet her eyes. “I’m going to live in a tent.”
Humor at my reaction is chased away by sadness. “Lee wanted me to build in the city to be closer to her. Maybe if I had, I could have protected her better. Then maybe this wouldn’t have happened to her. Listen, I have to lift the filter on my side before someone gets suspicious I read you in.” She hides her face as her fingers begin tapping away.
Even as I try to find the right words to say, Leanne lifts the security lockdown. I know I’m in deep trouble when I find intimacy in what should be a work meeting. Yet, “I like the idea of upstate New York. The idea of your fingers flying over a keyboard with the mountains in the background, the moonlight gleaming over your skin, is incredibly enchanting, Leanne.”
Her head whips up, eyes as big as an owl’s. “Excuse me?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought we were done talking about work and had moved on to personal stuff.”
“I…we…personal?”
“Oh, wait. Did I misunderstand all the flirting, not flirting conversations?” I try to tease away her sadness and fear. But then I get serious. “Are you ready to talk about us now?”
“Us? What us? I mean, I never expected after I told you about…”
“About what? That you were the individual who fed me the intel that saved my life? The lives of how many others by stopping an arms deal?” This woman was in no way responsible for what happened in Azerbaijan. All she did was give us the final nail to find the mole in our unit. “Did you really believe that dims you as a woman in my eyes?”
“Yes,” she declares bluntly.
“You are very, very wrong, Crash.” I reach up and drag my finger down the screen— tracing her cheek without touching her through the bits and bytes of technology. Her cheeks flush as if we were skin on skin, and my heart accelerates accordingly. “All you did was give me another angle of you to process.”
She weighs that in her mind. I hold my breath until her body visibly relaxes. “So, tell me this, how did you never know who I was with those mad hacking skills of yours? Or are you just getting rusty?”
She aims a lethal look at me. “I prefer to access plain text. There’s less of a chance of fending off a cyberattack as there is through steganography.”
“Stegasaurous-what-ophy?”
“It’s the use of hiding malicious code within an image file. It’s being used more and more frequently these days. I leave that to others who specialize in its use to examine the pixels within the images to see if there’s coded messages—things like that.” She shrugs. “That’s why I never put two and two together. Your file had an image file referenced, but sure as the devil, I wasn’t going to open it. The only thing I do to images is blast them.”
“Christ.” I scrub my hand over my face.
“What about you? How did you never put it together? It’s not like you didn’t meet my mirror image,” she challenges me.
“I wasn’t protecting your sister day in and day out, so I never got to know her well. And yes, she mentioned an older sister, a twin. But never an identical one.” A wrinkle of pain ripples across Leanne’s face. I continue. “I suspect she assumed most people knew she had one, especially if you were at most of her shows.”
Leanne’s face brightens. “That makes sense.”
“Why were you upset?” I probe gently.
She chews her nail. “Something my mother said. She said I didn’t have time for Lee anymore.” A harsh laugh escapes. “I’m certain you can guess she hasn’t taken this well.”
“And since you look just like her…” I don’t get to finish the thought.
“I’ve spent maybe a few hours at home since the week of the funeral. I’m persona non grata there. And God, Kane. If this has to do with the things I did, I’ll lose them all.” Tears fill her eyes.
“You won’t. Despite everything, they love you. It takes time.”
“That sounds like experience talking.”
I nod sharply. But instead of pressuring me, Leanne holds up a hand as if to run her hands over my hair. “I’m here if you want to talk about it.”
Her simple words cause my heart to shift inside of me. If I’m not careful, it’s going to fall right out of my body and land at her feet.Crash. In so many different ways, her code name was appropriately chosen. I recall after a few missions when my commanding officer used to tell me aboutQ?za.I didn’t know until he informed me that the intel agenthad disabled certain enemy systems so we could access our targets and recover weapons, intel, hostages. Or about the timeQ?zahad alerted us to nearby bogeys unidentified by command all because she’d won a high-stakes game online. But it was meQ?zacontacted when Gene tried to sell the weapons for cryptocurrency. She’d documented everything in the event lethal measures were necessary.
I owe this woman not just my life but my freedom. And she thought I wouldn’t look at her the same? Well, in some ways, she’s right.
For the rest of the night, I can’t prevent my lips from curving every time my eyes meet hers. As we spend the next few hours going through additional Castor contracts with one another, it’s different. This time, with location being the only distance between us, everything’s different.
