Her smile widened. “Yes. Bash asked me to bring you lunch.” She gestured to the box on my desk. “Tomato bisque and a turkey-havarti panini with fig jam. One of my favorites.”
I shook my head as I circled my desk, lifting the cup of soup and breathing in the aroma. “This smells amazing. You didn’t have to.”
She leaned against the taller edge of my desk. “It was no trouble, really.”
“Do you usually deliver all the way up here?”
“Only for Bash. He’s done so much for us. It’s the least we can do.”
“He really seems connected there.”
“We like having him around. We hadn’t seen him much since his dad died, so it was a nice surprise when you both stopped by.”
He’d disappeared overnight, and everyone had their own version of why. The most popular theory around the office was that the trio had a falling out and Hale and Cross had pushed him out. People loved to gossip, especially when they had no idea what the hell was actually going on.
“I kind of got excited when I saw you,” she said, “but I didn’t realize you worked together.”
I cocked my head as I lifted the lid from the soup. “Why’s that?”
She shrugged. “Bash has never brought a date in before. At least that’s what we thought it was.”
My cheeks warmed, and I took a sip of the soup, buying myself a moment. “We’d both been working late, neither of us had really eaten anything that day. He was being nice.”
She laughed and pushed herself off the desk. “My cousin doesn’t do nice. It was why this was a surprise.” She gestured at the food in front of me before she turned and headed to the elevator. “Have a good day, Mira.”
I stared after her. She knew my name? What did she mean that he’d never brought anyone in? I didn’t have it in me to unpack it. Today had been the first day since the scene on Saturday, I wasn’t feeling the drop so much as whatever happened between Sebastian and myself yesterday.
Unwrapping the sandwich, I dipped it in the soup and took a bite, enjoying how the flavors melded together. This had been an unexpected surprise, but then again, everything with Sebastian had been.
My screen flickered. I set everything to the side and grabbed my keyboard. It wasn’t an alarm, not the notifications that we set up but it was something. Someone had refreshed the test environment Victor had set up. It wasn’t scheduled to push again for another six hours, not until everyone had left for the day.
The code reloaded on its own.
I pulled the keyboard closer, typing in some code, checking a few things. This wasn’t on the thumb drive I’d been looking at, but I’d pulled up the actual system on my other screen earlier to compare the two of them to make sure we were looking at the right things, and here it was doing something it wasn’t supposed to be.
It was a micro-lag in the handshake protocol. It was so small it wouldn’t have tripped an alarm but precise enough it had to be intentional.
I closed my eyes and took a breath before I glanced around the empty office. This wasn’t a breach. Not yet. Whoever it was, was testing the system. Seeing what it would do. Was someone else working on the same thing I was?
Glancing toward Sebastian’s office out of habit, I remembered it was empty. The room was scary silent.
I flagged the anomaly, copied the timestamp, and saved it on my private partition on my computer. When the phone rang, I jumped before answering it.
“Sentinel Tech, Sebastian Reid’s office.”
“So formal.”
I leaned back in my chair, my eyes still on the line of code. “You called your own office. What did you expect?”
He chuckled, and I hated to admit that it made me smile.
“I did try your phone first.”
I pulled my phone from my purse, where it lived in the bottom drawer of my desk. “So you did. But my boss is known to be a grump, and being on my personal phone during work hours is seriously frowned upon.”
Probably calling my boss a grump was also seriously frowned upon.
He laughed again. “You eat?”
