by Cole McCade
“You do your job, I do mine,” she finished. “And the wheels keep turning.”
His smile turned almost ingratiating as he gestured at the iPad. “And this is part of your job?”
“It’s all of our jobs,” she answered evenly. “We keep the peace. We keep people safe.”
Matheson said nothing more, for several moments—while in the background her own voice continued, exhorting people to go home. To protect the people they loved.
If he wanted to call her to the carpet for that, he could go to hell.
But after a few moments he tapped the screen and stopped the video short. Silence fell between them, spreading like smoke through the entire office to fill it from corner to corner, accented only by the slow creeeaaak of his desk chair as he sat back, settling his shoulders, folding his hands over the central button of his suit coat and lacing his fingers together.
“There are people,” he said slowly, “calling for you to take over as police chief.”
“I don’t exactly think YouTube comments are a political mandate.”
“No. I suppose they aren’t.” His lips twitched; a thin parody of a smile, before he abruptly asked, “You’re a very ambitious woman, aren’t you?” Sudden change of direction, his voice almost mild. “Came up in your family’s law firm, made a name for yourself as a wolf in the courtroom, then broke into law enforcement. Gave up a much more lucrative career to claw yourself up from the bottom. Made Captain fairly young, but…” His brows rose in mock surprise. “You haven’t moved from that spot since then.”
So this was it.
He wanted to know her goals. Her design.
As if she’d planned that night.
As if she meant to use it for some kind of political clout.
Leverage.
She let him wait, long enough for his eyes to start to narrow, before she answered neutrally, “Maybe I like where I am.”
“Maybe.” He tilted his head in acceptance. “I know it’s hard for women in this field. Opportunities always just seem to pass you by, unless you scratch a few backs here and there.” He shook his head. “I don’t really like those games. I hope the local administration hasn’t been unfair to you.”
“No more than expected.”
He looked at her with that sort of frank regard that, to most, probably came off as sincerity. He was good at that—shifting the tone of his gravitas one way or the other to either intimidate or ingratiate.
“Just let me know if there’s anything you need, Anjulie,” he said quietly.
What she needed, she thought, was someone who didn’t want to waste her time with useless politics.
This game was transparent.
And she had cases to solve.
“We aren’t on a first-name basis, D.A. Matheson,” she said firmly. “And you may be part of my chain of command, but I don’t answer directly to you.” She stood, straightening her tie, her coat. “If I need anything from you, you’ll be hearing it from the police commissioner. Have a good day.”
She turned away, striding toward the door, but stopped, her hand on the frame, and glanced back.
“And hire a receptionist. I wouldn’t debate labor law with someone with Ms. Leon’s track record. Save yourself the trouble.”
Matheson’s nod was as artificially gracious as his smile.
“I’ll look into it,” he said mildly. “Receptionists can be easily replaced.”
And so can you, was the silent message.
As if she didn’t already know how tenuous her position was.
She said nothing.
She just turned and walked out, pulling the door closed firmly in her wake.
C
GABI WASN’T EXPECTING TO SEE Anjulie come sweeping out so soon.
She’d known the meeting with Matheson wouldn’t go well.
He’d been rewatching that YouTube video for days, as if he didn’t have anything better to do—sitting in his dim-lit office with his expression set in a grim, dark mask, unreadable and strange.
The few times she’d caught him at it, he hadn’t even noticed her in the room.
And something about it had made her deeply uncomfortable.
It was like seeing a different person overlaid on her employer, someone who’d been hinted at in a certain razor edge to his smiles or brooding preoccupation when something displeased him.
Right now, though, she couldn’t quite trust that it wasn’t her own paranoia driving that, too.
After Lucas, after finding out who and what he really was…
She didn’t quite trust her own instincts with anyone anymore.
Not when she’d ignored the discomfort and unease she’d felt in Lucas’s presence to label him as a harmless social manipulator.
Not a murderous, highly disturbed antisocial personality who had nearly killed her ex-husband and his partner, and who had somehow manipulated people into a string of homicides throughout the city.
Was she really that off her game?
She used to have a reputation in the courtroom for being perceptive. Sharp.
Being able to read people like a book with an intuition that bordered on the uncanny, turning empathy into a weapon to suss out people’s motivations. It was easier to figure people out by sympathizing with them than by antagonizing and attacking them; get under their skin, get into their mind, find out what made them tick.
But she hadn’t stood up in front of a judge in a long time, and rather than getting back into the game with landing the Assistant D.A. job…
She felt like she was slipping more and more.
Like she was still wading through the fog of her past, and it still clouded her ability to see what was right in front of her.
No wonder Matheson treated her like a glorified secretary.
Her teeth had lost their edge a long time ago.
But she snapped them together now in a startled inhalation as the door to Matheson’s office snapped open and Anjulie came stalking out, her face set in those tight lines that said she was doing everything she could to keep her composure, her entire body nearly vibrating with tension. The slick coiffure of her usually messy hair looked like it was about to pop into a furl of irritated, aggressive spikes just from the sheer force of Anjulie’s repressed anger, without ever laying a finger on it.
And brown eyes flared wildly, as they swept the reception area and landed on Gabi, before jerking away as Anjulie let out a huff under her breath.
Gabrielle braced her hands on the reception desk and pushed herself up. “Anji…?”
“Not right now,” Anjulie said, a raspy, thick growl. “Tonight. When you get home.”
Sometimes, when Anji was like this…the kinetic energy radiating off her was potent enough to make Gabi shiver, something about the roughness of it, the fierceness of it, that got deep under her skin.
But right now it felt less like a raw burn of animal attraction and more like a wall shoving her back, Anji’s fury so thick that she couldn’t even see Gabrielle through it.
Especially when, without a second glance, Anji stalked from the room, her square-heeled boots clicking forcefully, long gray coat swinging, the glass door nearly singing like a struck tuning fork with how hard she shoved it.
Leaving Gabi just…
Staring after her.
Alone.
And wondering if, once again, she was falling in love with someone who would stop seeing her the moment she needed them most.
C
ADELAIDE BLACKTHORN PROPPED HER CHIN in her palm, her other hand clicking rapidly on her mouse while she shifted her hips, trying to get comfortable in the ergonomic chair she’d requested as a condition of her employment. Unfortunately the chair ordered was slightly too large for her, and she would likely have to report to HR with a request for a very specific brand in a very specific size unless she wanted to spend her night on a morphine drip to even be able to sleep.
As it was, she was leaving early today, as soon as she finished sorting thro
ugh the tangled spiderweb mess of layered security protocols the previous system admin had left behind. She might work from home in her custom chair, might not.
The BPD was not paying her enough on a temp’s rate to hurt herself just to sort out someone else’s mess.
The screen was beginning to hurt her eyes, anyway, and the UV coatings on her glasses weren’t helping much.
If they hired her full-time, she fully intended to have the office fully recustomized. New furniture, new equipment.
Honestly, sometimes people did not think.
The previous system admin, though, had probably…thought too much. This spaghetti tangle of firewalls, redundant intrusion detection apps, strangely layered file systems, what looked like a secondary shadow network repository hiding behind the primary repository…
At first it was the sign of a disorganized mind.
Highly sloppy, implementing band-aid solutions that led to a deeply insecure system and poorly managed file structure that made access nearly impossible.
But that was the point, she was beginning to realize.
It made access nearly impossible, and in such a cleverly hidden way that no one would know where the cracks were in a million overlapping admin permissions, security protocols, access restrictions.
She thought, rather than being a mess…
The previous sysadmin had been quite elegant, in their own way.
And she hummed to herself as she explored the intranet they had left behind, swinging her legs just enough for the light rhythmic clank of her braces against the metal leg of the desk to provide the repetitive stimming she needed to focus and shut out the noise of the strangers moving around outside the office and milling among their desks while they talked about uninteresting things. Mostly dead people.
She didn’t like dead people very much.
They didn’t talk, and didn’t say the strange and odd and yet queerly fascinating things that living ones did.
Not that living ones didn’t confuse her at times.
But confusing things could be puzzled out.
And she did so enjoy puzzles.
She clicked over to the local root directory—then frowned as an alert popped up in her taskbar. Some kind of network probe was inbound, on a very specific port not usually used by email programs, or the general login pathways for officers remotely accessing the systems to pull up case files and other relevant data. But the intrusion detection software wasn’t flagging it as malicious, just of interest, and she pulled up the application and tapped the exception list.
And found multiple odd, random port numbers assigned to BPD IP addresses for the intranet and a few critical websites.
She tilted her head to one side, pulling her headphones off and staring.
“Oh, no you don’t,” she said, and started deleting the exceptions, narrowing her eyes. One after the other, she cut off ports of access—even as new intrusion attempts popped up as the attacker tried again and again on different ports. As soon as she cut off one, another port popped up in the alert, and she deleted that one from the exclusions until they were all gone.
…and yet there was another alert, a different port, a different attempt to access, this time trying to tunnel through what looked like…
A backdoor in the user access management system for the evidence repository database.
They were fast, so fast. Fast enough that it wasn’t hard to tell they weren’t just probing at random; they knew exactly where the hidden access ports were.
Probably because they had left them there.
Someone had left the entire BPD’s intranet riddled with secret access passageways, and layered access control so that multiple applications controlled which ports were blocked and which ones weren’t.
Adelaide grinned, pushing her glasses up her nose, and got to work.
“Well now,” she said. “At least I won’t get bored today…will I?”
C
SADE STARED AT THEIR COMPUTER screen as the cmd window spat back a number of rejected attempts to access the BPD systems through the ports they had specifically left open in the network firewall and intranet.
Someone was on their old rig at the office.
And systematically locking them out in real-time.
What the fuck.
They knew someone would have to replace them sooner or later, considering they were officially marked as “Missing, Presumed Dead” after a little finagling Min Zhe had done to pony up a body that looked enough like them that, with some nudging and a few coded messages, no one—including Sten—had done enough DNA analysis to confirm or deny. Their next of kin had been notified.
No one had held a wake for them.
No one had sung songs in their name.
They were proud of their family, for that.
That the people they loved would not accept them as dead until they saw the body for themselves.
As long as their family still spoke of them as if they were alive…
Then they were not truly gone.
They were not truly off the hook, either, though.
Min Zhe’s ruse had been flimsy, at best—and sooner or later the FBI would be able to spare the resources to hunt Sade down again. The feds still felt as though they held the leash around Sade’s neck, and could call them to heel any time they pleased; Sade simply wasn’t enough of a liability at the moment to figure out where they had disappeared to or why.
That, or they simply assumed Sade was where they always were.
One way or another, they always gravitated back to Min Zhe.
And why bother hunting them down, when they were exactly where the FBI wanted them to be?
“Make one childish mistake breaking into an NSA data warehouse,” they muttered to themself, squinting at the screen and tapping rapidly, “earn a prison sentence for life.”
They just…wanted out.
And that was why they were helping Min Zhe again.
It…
It wasn’t about their feelings. Not really.
It was about putting an end to this.
It was about ending what never should have started, and maybe…
Maybe, one day, they’d see the Min Zhe they used to know again.
The Min Zhe they used to love.
Before Min Zhe had become Jason Huang, and soaked his hands in so much blood the stain soaked down to the core.
Sade didn’t know if they could ever see him not painted in red, even if he washed his hands of the entire Baltimore area cocaine business and walked free right now, never to raise a finger against another again.
Fuck.
They rubbed at their stinging eyes, focused on the screen, scowled at yet another litany of failed pings and rapidly typed in another IP, another port number—fuck, were they going to have to break into the very intranet they’d designed and rip this person out of the center of the tangled web they’d woven?
Who the fuck was this?
They tried again—again and again and again, pinging different IPs, different port backdoors they’d left connecting to different systems that would act as a trojan horse to allow them full access control over everything else in the BPD intranet. They just needed old case files. Files from when Min Zhe had first been deployed undercover. Although every record of who he had been before had been erased along with all connection to the DEA—and Sade would have to do a lot more than access a few open ports to crack the DEA systems—there were still tell-tale case files with a few subtle details that would be enough to start to unravel this mess.
Unravel this mess, and—if that Sila bastard was telling the truth—link the entire destruction of Min Zhe’s identity to the one man who was responsible for everything that had gone wrong for the last damned ten years.
Min Zhe would never walk away clean.
Never be able to return to his old life again.
Not after the things he’d done.
And not after that monster had murdered everyone who could even remember who
Min Zhe had been before.
But with the right leverage…
He could disappear without being chased down to the ends of the earth, and maybe start over again somewhere else. As long as he had hard evidence, more than just his word and Sade’s, he could live out his life in peace with that promise that if anyone pursued him…
He'd pull the trigger and ruin more than one life.
But maybe save another—if Sade could disappear with him.
Damn it.
Focus.
Focus.
But it was no use. Whomever had access to the systems on the other end of the connections was quick—almost like they were reading Sade’s mind, following their every thought process, skipping one step ahead of them. This person was, good, smart…probably thinking about how exactly they would set up a network of backdoors as a last resort if they ever needed a quick escape but knew they’d still need access to systems they couldn’t physically touch again. So they had some background in infiltration, or were just ridiculously smart, well-organized, highly logical, good at recognizing patterns.
And the other person led Sade right through their own pattern as if dancing ahead of them, right down to the closure of the very last port.
Before a message flashed on the screen, sent back along the connection before it fully closed.
Simple white letters popping up on the command prompt, all-caps and bold.
TRY AGAIN. :)
Sade leaned back in their chair, staring, brushing their hair back out of their face.
Then grinned.
“Challenge accepted,” they whispered.
Before cracking their knuckles, and diving in.
[8: NOW I’M NAKED]
MALCOLM LEANED AGAINST THE HEADBOARD of the overly plush, king-sized hotel room bed that he already knew would ruin his back by morning.
And cradled Seong-Jae’s head in his lap, holding his omr-an close and curling over him, silent as he traced his fingertips over the stark lines of his eyebrows, the ridges of his temples, the crests of his cheekbones, the slope of his jaw, the bridge of his nose, the angled slash of the scar between his eyes. Again and again, memorizing him by touch, reading him like reading tarot and stars in the texture of skin, stroking again and again with soft, light touches while Seong-Jae went looser and looser against him.
