Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
“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 overwhelm her.
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.”
He grimaced. “That’s worse.”
She rubbed her temple as she stared at her tablet. “They’re reactive instead of predictive. They’ll catch breaches eventually, but not fast enough if someone knows where to poke, and by then, the damage is already done.”
“No one ever wants to spend money on ‘eventually,’” Roman muttered. “It’s too expensive.”
She nodded, knowing no system failed all at once. It failed in inches. “They’re behind in a few of their updates. We need to tell Raymond that.”
She needed to interview every member of Raymond’s team, test their knowledge, and confirm that they knew what to do when something went sideways. A few quick conversations had already revealed uneven training and a casualness to procedures. A dangerous combination.
She looked through the compliance reviews last, cross-checking the director’s practices against industry standards. He met most requirements, but most wasn’t enough, not for her anyway.
When she finally compiled her preliminary findings, she already knew what the final report would say.
Too many assumptions.
Not enough redundancy.
Weak internal oversight.
And a dangerous belief that perimeter security alone could keep the chaos out.
She blew out a slow breath and saved her notes. All it would take was one really determined individual to get past the man at the entrance or in through the back door.
She knew the director would not appreciate what she wrote, but her job wasn’t to make the man comfortable. Her job was to tell him exactly where his defenses would break.
Roman stretched. “You know, some people collect stamps to relax. You collect vulnerabilities.”
She packed away her tablet. “Everyone needs a hobby.”
He chuckled, shaking his head. “Remind me never to lie to you.”
She hesitated, then answered with a whisper. “Smart man.”
He studied her for a moment longer than necessary, and she already knew what he was about to say.
“You ever notice,” he said, lowering his voice, even though it was just the two of them in that section of the room, “that I’ve worked with you for three years and I know absolutely nothing about your childhood? Today just proved it. Why is that?”
She didn’t look up as she finished packing away her things. “That’s because I was born fully formed in an Oregon server room. It was all very dramatic. Very sci-fi.”
Roman snorted. “Nice try. But seriously. You would think over the years something would have come up, some funny memory of a family trip, your school years and what type of student you were, a story about how you and your sister raised a zombie. Something should have come out, don’t you think?”
She paused, then leaned back in her chair. “What do you want to know?”
He shrugged. “Anything. Where you grew up. I know you have a younger sister, but were you a band kid or a choir brat? Cheerleader? Mathlete? Just anything. It’s just funny you’ve shared nothing over the years.”
She felt the muscles in her jaw tighten just a fraction as she took in a slow breath.
She had learned to block out her growing up years for fear of slipping up somewhere.
“It wasn’t… exciting. I lived in a small town here in Mississippi, raised by parents who worked too much.
Mom stayed lost in her work, and Dad fixed weird shit he found on the side of the road. ”
Roman waited, simply staring at her, an expectant look on his face.
She sighed, knowing he would never give this up.
“I liked books and always had one with me.”
“Still do,” he said.”
She nodded, a soft smile creasing her face as she thought of the romance tucked away in her purse. “I hated gym class and considered it torture against future crimes. I was painfully awkward until I wasn’t.”
“Ah,” Roman said with a slow bob of his head. “Your glow-up era.”
“Something like that.”
He smiled, but didn’t push. “High school sweethearts?”
Her fingers stilled for a second. “Yeah,” she admitted with a whisper. “One.”
Roman cocked a brow as his head fell to the side slightly. “I take it that’s who you were trying to avoid today?”
She nodded once. “Bobby Jenkins, but you can’t say anything to him about it. It’s best if he thinks I’m someone else.”
“That doesn’t sound ominous at all,” Roman said. “Was he abusive in some way?”
She shook her head, a small smile slipping across her face. “Not at all. He was the sweetest man I’ve ever known, played guitar badly. Sang even worse. Had this stupid grin that got him out of trouble and was a freak when it came to Elvis Presley.”
Roman chuckled. “Sounds dangerous.”
“He was,” she said. Then added carefully, “In a good way, of course.”
“Then why are you not wanting to catch up with him?” he asked. “Sounds like it ended amicably enough.”
“It’s hard to explain. Life took us to different places.”
It wasn’t a lie, just not the whole truth.
Roman didn’t press after that. He simply studied her for a moment, then gave a small nod. “Well, for what it’s worth, mysterious past or not, I think you turned out okay. Hell, you built a company that’s on the verge of moving to the next level.”
She glanced at him, one brow cocked. “High praise coming from a man who still uses ‘password123’ on his personal email.”
“Hey,” Roman protested. “I at least use a capital P. Give me some credit. Besides, whoever hacked into my email account would only see a bunch of coupons for the local comic book store and a rundown BBQ place.”
She snorted despite herself, pushing up from her chair and stretching the stiffness from her shoulders. Some truths were safe. Some weren’t. And Bobby Jenkins lived in the ones she couldn’t share because it simply wasn’t safe.
Without meaning to, her gaze drifted past the glass wall that overlooked the casino floor.
Crowds moved in slow, glittering currents below.
Some were in suits and dresses, the keynote for the summit having ended a few minutes ago, while others wore casual clothes like it was simply another day.
She could see people laughing as she witnessed the soft chaos of money and music and motion.
And there—
Her breath caught.
There stood Bobby near one of the security pillars, speaking to the man she saw him with earlier today, posture loose but alert. His dark blond hair caught the overhead light, making him look older. He was broader through the chest, harder around the edges.
But it was still him.
Her pulse stuttered, then picked up speed like it had a memory of its own.
Fifteen years.
She swallowed.
The part of her that had learned to survive whispered that this was dangerous. That ghosts didn’t just show up in your life without consequence. That buried things stayed buried for a reason.
She tore her eyes away before Roman could follow her line of sight.
Before questions started again.
Before anything broke open.
Work had to come first.
Always. That’s why she was there and what she would use to get her through the ache in her chest.
But her hands shook just enough as she clutched the strap to her laptop bag so hard that her knuckles turned white. Because no matter how many firewalls she built…
No matter how many identities she wore…
Bobby Jenkins was standing just downstairs, breathing the same air, taking up the same space, causing the same flutters in her stomach that he always caused.
And Delaney Rhodes had just realized that the past wasn’t done with her yet.