Keys’ fingers paused on his keyboard as he realized his assessment of Lyra had been wrong. She wasn’t cold and unfeeling. She just masked so completely that it took something extreme to break through.
Realizing the others were looking at him, he confirmed, “Everything she said is true.”
“It needs to look like an accident. Nothing can lead back to me.” Lyra’s eyes traveled to Angel on the back wall. “Or Selene.”
“As much as removing a pedophile’s dick would make my day,” Poison stated, leaning forward, “I have a hard time believing you would allow a man like Corrigan to continue to roam freely in your agency, regardless of whether we ‘remove’ this fucker or not.”
Lyra’s jaw tightened as she turned her attention down the table to Poison. “You’re right. Corrigan will be handled either way, but I have a hard time believing the same for you in regard to Webber. You have two hackers at this very table who could find him in a matter of days with or without my intel. So the way I see it, both of our…dilemmas get solved without anyone’s identity at this table being revealed.”
While she did not look at Rose, there was no doubt inanyone’s mind that it was Rose she was speaking of. Under the table, Rose’s leg stiffened against Keys’. He quickly lowered his hand to her thigh, squeezing.
Poison’s eyes narrowed. “You’re asking us to make Webber disappear, which means you know damn well we have the willingness and ability to do so. And yet you sit there in your uptight pants suit threatening to expose my sister? Not very smart on your part,Deputy Director.” Poison said Lyra’s title like a mocking joke.
“Or extremely smart, Ms. Benson,” Lyra countered. “Of everyone here at this table, I am the one with the most to lose. I came prepared because I thought this meeting was about somethingverydifferent, but I am not so foolish as to not seize an opportunity such as this. My knowledge of who is or is not at this table ensures that you will not go abovemyhead if you are not satisfied with Corrigan’s outcome.”
The two women stared at each other for several long moments before Rose said, “Your discretion is appreciated. By all of us,” she added more pointedly at Poison than Lyra.
Lyra turned her attention across the table. “As is yours.” She reached for her briefcase, flicking it open with her thumbs. “I will need everything you have on Corrigan, and a safe pathway for me to send you everything I have on Webber.”
* * *
It waslate afternoon as theNon Crasset out. Unlike the VDMC who kept their partners out of club business, the NCMC Knightmares knew everything. With a nomadic club, that seemed appropriate. Still, not everyone within the club were fighters, and since Poison made it very clear that they would be returning to Mount Grove after handling Webber, Sissy remained behind to spend some more time with her family.
Scotty was thrilled by this, and made himself into a Scottybackpack that he forced his big sister to carry around. It was a good thing Sissy had been working out since joining her wife on the road.
Oscar was exhausted from his day in the sun with his new cousins and could barely keep his eyes open during dinner. It became an early evening for all of them, with Keys and Rose taking advantage of the safe sex kit Keys had stashed in their bedroom. At this point, there really was no point continuing to classify it asherbedroom. Keys would be moving his things out of the clubhouse sometime in the near future—or whenever he got tired of wearing the same clothing over and over again.
The downfall of going to bed so early was that Keys was awake at three in the morning. Not wanting to disturb Rose, Keys made his way down to the computer lab in a pair of sweats. TheNon Crashad a multi-day ride ahead of them, and had stopped for the night at a motel. While Keys didn’t think they would go hunting for trouble, it had a way of finding Poison regardless of where she was or who was with her.
After two energy drinks and a pack of jelly beans, Keys was ready for a bathroom break when a slight anomaly caught his ear. He paused, turning back to face his lab. Behind his numerous monitors were several black tower workstations built by Keys himself with the best components available including multiple processors, maximum RAM, and high-end graphics cards for processing power. Each one was tall and imposing with ports and blinking green, amber, red, and blue lights. Cable management was essential, leading several color-coded routed cables to the workstations as well as smaller NAS (Network Attached Storage) units and a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) system that kept everything running if power was cut.
Overall, the aesthetic of the room was calming. The space was climate controlled with the continuous hum of the cooling fans, like never-ending white noise. And despite the stillness of the room, Keys’ hackles started to rise. While he could argue that itwas four forty-seven in the morning, he also knew his system. He’d built it literally from the ground up, and he knew every sound, tick, and nuance, no matter how minute.
So what had stopped him?
Picking up a tablet that was placed on the shelf next to the door where he was standing, Keys did a quick scan of his system. Just as he was about to call it sleep-deprivation mixed with paranoia brought on by a sugar high, he heard it again.
It was small, the kind of anomaly that could have easily been dismissed as a system glitch or a sensor calibration error. Anyone else might have even written it off as the ordinary noise of a building’s security infrastructure processing the ten thousand small inputs it received every hour, but not Keys. His eyes narrowed behind his glasses. He knew the difference between a glitch and a ghost.
This was a ghost in the system.
Bathroom forgotten, he rushed to his chair and pulled up the log, working to trace it back. He nearly missed the entry point because he’d been looking for a breach from outside—but it wasn’t. His heart started pounding a million miles per hour as he realized with horror that the modification had come from within. Something had been changed.
Old fear started to creep inside his head of the last time someone had gotten past his perimeter. A cold January day and salted ice had led to near catastrophe, and if Scar hadn’t moved as quickly as he did, Tally could have ended up in the freezing water.Anyof the club kids could have ended up in the water. It was a fear that continuously haunted Keys. What if one of the ol’ ladies had taken her child over to that section of the pond to skate, instead of Scar and Tally using it so Tally could skate without worrying about where the children were? What if one of the babies had ended up in the water because a loophole in the system had been exploited?
What if Oscar got hurt now because Keys had missed something again?
A quick command locked the apartment and activated the electrified floors. Another sent a silent alert to the Riley brothers. None of them would be in the building—there was no reason for them to be. But miracle upon miracles, it had been poker night the night before at the clubhouse. At least one of the brothers always stayed for that, usually Thorne, but sometimes Goose, too. The last message he sent before returning to his hunt was to Ghost.
Fear made Keys’ fingers feel like he was typing through molasses. Who was here? And why? Did it have to do with Lyra? Had they been wrong to trust her? How could someone have gotten inside the building to modify the system? And where?
It took him several precious minutes to follow the trail without tipping them off that he was aware of the breach, but finally, he found it. A camera on the eastern perimeter was cycling on a three-second loop instead of a live feed. Whoever was inside his building made it so that a thirty-foot section of the eastern fence was showing him the same empty footage on repeat.
Fuck. For how long? Was that how they’d gotten in or were they already inside when they looped the feed?
His hands went still on the keyboard as his eyes scanned the code before him. He needed to focus. He couldn’t let fear lead him to do something stupid. There was clearly something he missed that was currently being exploited.
He took the time to get his headset on and lock the door behind him. The walls were as thick as a bank vault’s, but not wanting a heavy door to hinder him on a daily basis, that was simple wood. As the locks activated, a ballistic steel plate silently lowered in the hollow door that was already held up by reinforced hinges.
