She loved that he was allowing her to make the choice, while at the same time desperately wished the decision wasn’t hers to make. “I can’t tell her I’m alive.” Her voice was quiet, but absolute. “At least not yet. I’m not ready.”
“Do you have anything on Kennedy?”
“Nothing that we didn’t know yesterday. Keys,” she hesitatedslightly. “I don’t think this was him. What motive would he have to take Ranger and Becks?”
“I know.” His voice was tight. “I was thinking the same thing. It doesn’t fit.”
“We can’t concentrate on Poison right now. She can handle herself. They’re dealing with that corrupt mayor anyway, so me going missing won’t be a priority for her. Once we figure out what is going on here, I can figure out what to say to her.”
“You’re a part of her club, regardless that you don’t ride with them. She’s going to be looking for you, Rose.”
Rose was shaking her head before he finished speaking. “I’m not her priority,” she repeated, though she wasn’t sure which one of them she was trying to convince. “The club will do what’s right and help that town bring the mayor to justice.”
Keys was quiet a moment. “You could send one message. False alarm, just something so she doesn’t worry.”
“Not to worry?” Rose repeated almost mockingly. Her laugh was anything but humorous. “This is Poison we’re talking about, Keys. She doesn’tworry.Not exactly an emotion that she’s capable of, especially not when it comes to me.” Rose rubbed her tired eyes. “And telling her to stop looking, that it was a mistake, will only spark her curiosity and her paranoia. You know Poison. If I send a message telling her to stop, she’ll search harder. And if she discovers I’m alive, then she’ll come here. Which will lead Kennedy right to Oscar.”
Rose knew Keys wanted to argue, but she also knew he wasn’t going to. Because she wasn’t wrong, and there was so much else burning down around them for him to fight a battle he couldn’t win.
Somewhere down in the marshes of Mississippi, Poison would soon be waking up to a message that said MV’s enemies had found her.
And Rose was going to let her.
* **
Nine Days to Present
Thorne was in the kitchen making another pot of coffee. Grimm and Goose were back in the building, too, but Keys wasn’t. This was the second day where he chose to remain with his club rather than work in the computer lab with her. She understood it, and as much as it reminded her of the past two years of them working together, she would have preferred him at her side.
Oscar still slept on the cot in the corner of the lab, his little butt up in the air under the dinosaur blanket. Goose had offered to take him back to the apartment and stay with him while Rose worked, but she was more comfortable with her son beside her. Thankfully, Goose did not take offense to that. With all three brothers back in the building, the task to watch Rose no longer fell solely on Thorne’s shoulders, yet he seemed to be the one always there when she needed something. He’d even forced her onto the cot next to her son for a few hours. As much as she loved her Oscar cuddles, Rose felt guilty for getting some sleep when Keys wasn’t getting any.
It had been nearly three days since anyone had seen or heard from Ranger and Becks. Ghost was understandably going insane. The club was torn between hunting for their missing family members, to take care of their injured, and mourning their dead. Frankie, the club’s nanny, as well as one of the bar’s waitresses also had not made it out of the explosion.
Keys was now concentrating on tearing apart Cameron’s life after it was discovered that Ranger’s girlfriend had been the one to plant the bomb at the bar. Things had not slowed down, but the pandemonium of that first night was no longer pulling Keys and Rose in a million different directions. Which gave her the opportunity to really look into Kennedy and the feelers he’d put out looking for Poison shortly before the bar had been attacked.
Rose had been at the monitors since four in the morning, running a sweep of Kennedy’s digital fingerprint with methodical patience. She’d been doing this long enough to know that the most dangerous information never announced itself.
She was currently working her way through Kennedy’s former associates, a slow burning task that felt like she was waiting for water to boil. Each blink felt like the inside of her eyelids had turned to sandpaper, and she prayed to the coffee gods that Thorne had found a magic button on the machine that made it brew faster.
Keys’ code was brilliant, but like with any backdoor, it could be used for emergency escape or a forceful entry. They couldn’t put out feelers looking directly for mentions of Poison or Rose. A targeted query left fingerprints, the same way Kennedy’s searches had left his. Instead she had to work around the edges, casting wide nets through unrelated data and sifting for anything that might brush against either of their names.
The amount of information that came back to her was so vast that she almost missed something significant.
Almost.
It was a report from the U.S. Marshals Des Moines field office. A query logged against the protected individual file listed under the name Rose Amelia Benson.
Rose sat up, suddenly feeling more awake.
The query’s pathway was wrong. The fingerprints of it, the way it moved through the system, was too clean and too specific to be a routine internal pull. Someone had covered their tracks well. Not perfect, but well. Well enough that it wouldn’t have triggered an internal alert within the secure system. To the untrained eye, it checked all the proper boxes of a standard administrative query.
She opened her trace tools. It ran clean for the first four nodes, then started fragmenting. Whoever had built this pathway knew how to scatter it, breaking the trail across multiplejurisdictions, bouncing it through intermediary servers that had no obvious connection to each other. It was good work. Rose or Keys could have done better, but it was good.
She followed it as far as she could, hitting walls she couldn’t breach without making herself visible to the system. She stopped before that point. Visibility was the one thing she could not afford.
But she’d gotten far enough to know that the query hadn’t originated from outside the Marshal Service. It had come from within. Someone with federal access, with clearance high enough to reach directly into WITSEC’s protected files and pull a location without triggering the standard audit flags.
Shivers ran down her back like a thousand-ant stampede. She’d always suspected, but she’d never had proof. Not before right now, because to her knowledge, there was no other explanation. Even when he’d been an agent, Kennedy hadn’t had the authority to run such a trace.
