Which meant he had a partner. A federal one. Someone she’d let slip through the cracks when she ran.
Rose sat back in her chair.
The layered misdirection she’d built around Katy, the careful maintenance of Rose Amelia Benson as a name attached to someone else’s face was now exposed. One look at the file, and Kennedy would know that Katy was not Rose. Everything she had done to protect Katy had been constructed around the assumption that WITSEC was impenetrable from the outside—which technically, she had been right about.
She had not considered the inside.
Three seconds. She gave herself three seconds to feel the full weight of that error, the specific nausea of a plan cracking along a seam she hadn’t thought to reinforce. Then she pulled up her interference tools and got back to work.
She couldn’t contact Katy directly. Any communication riskedexposing that the woman currently living under Rose Benson’s name in WITSEC was not, in fact, Rose Benson. She couldn’t alert the Marshal Service for the same reason, not to mention the fact that she was now sitting on the evidence she had lacked five years ago that the Marshal Service itself had a leak somewhere in its structure. Without knowing specificallywho,she might be going to the very person who was compromised.
But what she could do was muddy the trail. Corrupt the outgoing data from the Des Moines query. Not the query itself, because that was already logged and couldn’t be touched without triggering a whole other series of flags, but the location data Kennedy’s partner had pulled. The goal was to salt the field by feeding garbage coordinates back through the same pathway, make it look like a system error on the output end.
It wasn’t a perfect solution, nor did it give her the name of the partner within WITSEC, but it might be enough to delay Kennedy and give her enough time to figure out a way to warn Katy.
Rose was still working an hour later when Keys’ system notified her of a dark web post—and everything in her went still.
Uploaded to one of the boards she monitored was a photograph of a motel room in Des Moines of a man in a U.S. Marshals jacket, face down on the carpet. The timestamp on the image was close to eighteen hours ago.
Fucking hell. No delaying tactic would help Katy now, not when her handler lay in a pool of his own blood.
After glancing over her shoulder to ensure Oscar could not see the monitor directly in front of her, Rose pressed her fingers against her mouth and breathed through her nose. In and out, slow and deliberate, the way she’d taught herself to absorb bad news without letting it take her sanity. The Marshal was alone in the picture.
Katy had to have been moved. The Marshals would haveresponded to a handler going dark, would have pulled every protected individual in that office’s jurisdiction within hours. Rose had been the dutiful witness within WITSEC long enough to remember the protocol. So long as she was still alive, Katy would be somewhere else now, with a new handler, name, and forged background.
She was probably safe. Hopefully. Shit.
Closing her eyes, Rose worked to center her breathing again. Her instinct was to call Keys, but he was busy. Katy had been her friend,washer responsibility. She wouldn’t keep this from Keys, but she would not bother him with it until she had more information.
Rose sat up and squared her shoulders. Placing her hands back on her keyboard, she dove deeper into the post. There was something under the dead Marshal’s hand, and it took a moment of enlarging the picture and solidifying the pixels for Rose to make out what it was—a sprig of poison ivy with three glossy, green and pink leaves.
Below the photograph was a single line of text:
She’s next. Bring me my son.
He’d left a plant under a dead man’s hand and posted a picture of it on the dark web as a very direct, distinct message. Not to the authorities, not to the Marshals, but to whoever was watching Kennedy’s cyber footprint closely enough to find it.
To Rose.
Rose stared at the post for a long moment. Oscar made a small sound in his sleep behind her, shifting on the cot, and she turned automatically to check on him. He settled without waking, his small chest rising and falling in the easy rhythm of a child who felt completely safe.
She turned back to the screen.
Kennedy thought leaving the poison ivy behind wouldfrighten her, apply pressure to an exposed point. He thought the threat to Poison would crack Rose open, send her running to her sister, and make her visible while leaving her son vulnerable. He was not wrong that she loved Poison, but he wasverywrong about what Rose was going to do with that fear.
She closed the dark web post and pulled up her buried tools again. She went back to the interference work, but this time, she was going deeper. Not just corrupting the Des Moines output data but building a secondary misdirect into Kennedy’s partner’s access pathway.
She couldn’t stop Kennedy from looking for Poison, but she could make every search lead somewhere wrong.
She was so deep in the work that she didn’t hear Thorne come back into the lab. Crossing to the desk, he set a mug of coffee down beside her keyboard. Rose didn’t look up. One hand continued on the keyboard as she reached for the mug.
“What took you so long? Did you have to fly down to Colombia to get fresh beans?”
“You say that like this isn’t your third cup of coffee in less than an hour.”
Rose paused, the mug frozen to her lips. “It is?”
He nodded sternly. “I’m not used to feeling so utterly useless, but whatever the hell it is you’re doing is way above my pay grade. All I can do is refill your mug every time it runs out. Apparently, I’ve been reduced to a coffee boy in my old age.”
