“THAT LOOKED INTENSE,” ROMAN said as he stepped up beside her. “I take it he recognized you after all.”
She glanced back over her shoulder at Robert—Bobby—who still stood there staring at her. “He thinks he did, but I told him it was a case of mistaken identity. I wasn’t who he thought I was.”
“And he bought it?”
She sighed as she turned back around and headed for the door, thankful that she had braced herself beforehand to see him. If she had ran into him without having seen him first and prepared for the shock, it would have gone an entirely different way. “Not at all, but that’s his problem. Now, we all set?”
“That must have been some breakup.” He stared at her as if he wanted to ask more questions, but when she offered no answers, he simply gave a curt nod instead. “We are. They carved out a section of the security booth for us while the rest of them get situated. The summit starts in an hour, so everyone should be busy and leave us alone to rummage around their reports and files.”
She opened the door, stepping out into the hall. “Then let’s get this done.”
However, as she sat in the chair, staring at the monitors, watching the casino’s security team get in place and making notes about their movements and skill, her mind barely saw what was in front of her. Her body might have been sitting in that security booth, but her mind was back in Tupelo, Mississippi, walking through the school halls, her hand clutched to his while she cradled notebooks in the crook of her other arm. A lineman for the football team, Bobby was thick in the chest with brawny arms and a devilish smile back then. From what she saw of him just a few minutes ago, none of that had changed.
And she knew what his secret was back then. After all, it wasn’t like they hadn’t talked about it, fantasized about it for the past few months. She knew he had bought an engagement ring, even though they were both still in high school. And her entire body thrummed with excitement just knowing they were ready to take that next step. She wanted to be Mrs. Robert Jenkins. Wanted to raise a family with him, her life filled with PTA meetings and fundraising bake sales. Buy a house with a picket fence lined with colorful flowers and to cook him dinner as he told her about his day and she told him about hers. She had looked forward to making Halloween costumes and playing Santa for their kids. One boy and one girl. In that order. And a shaggy dog, not too big that he couldn’t sit in her lap, but big enough that the kids could play with him out in the yard.
She had fantasized about it every night, every time they were together out under the stars.
But that was then, back before…
Delaney gave herself a mental shake and forced herself to focus on work. That was the only way she would make it through the chaos that had found her once more, the only way to push through the past threatening to bleed into the present, while every instinct told her to look over her shoulder. It was what she always did when emotions tried to creep in and overwhelmher. She would bury herself in systems and patterns, track procedures and processes. People lied, but networks didn’t. At least not in ways she couldn’t trace. It was why she had formed her company, as a means to forget what she had lost and clutch to something new.
She pulled up Raymond Boudreaux’s security documentation on her tablet, scrolling through policies, protocols, and response trees. On paper, his operation looked solid. Clean and professional with every checkbox neatly ticked. Reality was never that simple, however. And she should know.
Roman leaned against the desk beside her, sipping something from a paper cup that claimed to be coffee but smelled like something someone had brewed last century. “So,” he said, tipping his coffee cup toward her, “on a scale of one to catastrophic failure, how nervous should I be about not getting to enjoy the poker tables right now?”
She didn’t look up. “Ask me again in forty-five minutes.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Have you actually even done any work?”
A real security audit wasn’t just reading manuals and nodding along. It was pulling apart the machine to see where it creaked. It was finding laziness and gaps, where familiarity bred a lapse in judgment or granted extra perks.
She started with policy, reading through the incident response plans, accessing control procedures and network diagrams. Everything appeared current and digitally signed. She then compared written protocols against what she’d already observed on the casino floor, which wasn’t really much since she ran as soon as she spotted Bobby. Cameras seemed positioned well, but there were blind spots near the service elevators. Badge access logs showed compliance, but it seemed a couple of badges were missing, so she flagged it.
Roman peered over her shoulder. “You always find that one thing that makes executives sweat.”
“Executives should sweat if something is wrong,” she told him. “It means they weren’t paying attention, and we’re doing our job.”
She moved on to the casino’s operations for security, looking at how Raymond’s team handled shift changes, who approved system updates, how quickly they escalated alerts and then handled them. Raymond was former law enforcement, which is different than in-house security. There were things he might not think about.
Roman watched her fingers fly. “You ever stop and admire how terrifying you look when you do that?”
She snorted. “No.”
“You should. It’s like watching someone dismantle a bomb while correcting the grammar in the manual.”
She cracked a reluctant smile but kept going. “Shouldn’t you be doing your own assessment? Or are you just hoping I say forget it and let you go to your slots?”
“Poker tables. I’m on to poker tables now.”
She moved into the technical side of things, looking at firewall configurations, intrusion detection thresholds, endpoint protections across guest networks and internal systems. Antivirus definitions were current, and encryption protocols met baseline standards. But there was a lag in anomaly detection, leaving a dangerous gap when you were hosting something the size of the VectorPoint Global and half the world’s cybersecurity elite was walking your halls.
She leaned back slightly, eyes narrowing.
Roman noticed and glanced over at her. “That face means something’s wrong.”
“Not wrong necessarily,” she said. “Just soft.”
