Chapter 25
Mira
“Relax,” Ethan said as he walked up to my desk. “It’s going to take time. The last payment was less than a week ago.”
I nodded, scanning Sebastian’s schedule, wondering where he was.
His schedule had been cleared the rest of the week, but why?
I also tried not to spend too much time on when he’d become Sebastian in my head versus Mr. Reid.
Probably about the same time he’d called me Mira, and he’d used it last night in my dream of him.
I was at work. I couldn’t think of that now. Him in my not so innocent dreams was nothing but trouble. If it wasn’t for my arrangement with Sir, I’d already accepted his date.
Ethan handed me a manila folder and a thumb drive. “Victor wants you to go over this. He’d like your input, if you’re up for it.”
I took the items, set the thumb drive down, and flipped through the information in the folder. This wasn’t something they had me do. Ever. Not as a tier two. I glanced up at him, brow raised. What was going on?
“Simulations?” The fun part. Where we tested our programming. Basically it was the testers’ job to see if we could break in, mess things up, identify the weak spots. It was exactly what I loved. I’d help Micah in the background on a few things but this didn’t fall under the scope of my job.
“There are going to be some changes once all this is said and done. Victor would’ve told you himself, but…” He shrugged lightly. “I beat him to it.”
He smiled. Ethan was handsome. Dark blond hair, blue eyes, easy confidence. The kind of man who turned heads when he walked into a room. He just didn’t make my heart trip the way Sebastian did.
“To what?” I asked.
“Well, Ms. Rhodes, for the sake of full transparency, we’re not sure where to put you.”
My heart started racing but I took a deep breath. I wasn’t going to lose control here. Not in front of him. I’d more than proved myself to all of them. “I—”
He waved a hand, cutting me off. Despite the charm, there was no mistaking the authority underneath it. “You and I both know you’re not a Tier Two analyst. And you’re certainly not an assistant.”
I stood, crossing my arms, not sure where this conversation was going.
He chuckled, shaking his head. “We’re trying to figure out where your particular skill set will best serve the company. Don’t worry. Whatever’s decided will come with a nice pay bump and, possibly, your own office.”
“Oh.” Okay, that was the one thing not going through my head right now.
He gestured at the folder. “Victor is planning to stress test our current security architecture and would like your eyes on it since you’ve been so helpful with our current problem. You’ve got good instincts. Use them.”
Without another word, he turned and left me alone with the file. I was happy to have the work because right now we were all in a watch and wait pattern.
I spent most of the morning running through pieces of code attached to one of our largest clients.
It had even taken me downstairs to meet with Micah and a couple from his team to verify a few things.
I hadn’t been surprised when Stan asked what the hell I wanted or that he’d been pissed when I hadn’t acknowledged him at all.
He wasn’t my boss anymore. Sebastian had made that perfectly clear to everyone.
Just a little before one, I stepped off the private elevator and strolled to my desk. The top floor felt different without the constant uncertainty of when Sebastian would blow up, slam a door, or disappear into his office and refuse to take calls.
It felt empty.
“Oh, good, I was hoping I’d catch you.” A young girl turned around from my desk as I approached.
It took me a minute to place her. “Hannah?”
Her smile widened. “Yes. Bash asked me to bring you lunch.” She gestured to the box on my desk. “Tomato bisque and a turkey-havarti panini with fig jam. One of my favorites.”
I shook my head as I circled my desk, lifting the cup of soup and breathing in the aroma. “This smells amazing. You didn’t have to.”
She leaned against the taller edge of my desk. “It was no trouble, really.”
“Do you usually deliver all the way up here?”
“Only for Bash. He’s done so much for us. It’s the least we can do.”
“He really seems connected there.”
“We like having him around. We hadn’t seen him much since his dad died, so it was a nice surprise when you both stopped by.”
He’d disappeared overnight, and everyone had their own version of why. The most popular theory around the office was that the trio had a falling out and Hale and Cross had pushed him out. People loved to gossip, especially when they had no idea what the hell was actually going on.
“I kind of got excited when I saw you,” she said, “but I didn’t realize you worked together.”
I cocked my head as I lifted the lid from the soup. “Why’s that?”
She shrugged. “Bash has never brought a date in before. At least that’s what we thought it was.”
My cheeks warmed, and I took a sip of the soup, buying myself a moment. “We’d both been working late, neither of us had really eaten anything that day. He was being nice.”
She laughed and pushed herself off the desk. “My cousin doesn’t do nice. It was why this was a surprise.” She gestured at the food in front of me before she turned and headed to the elevator. “Have a good day, Mira.”
I stared after her. She knew my name? What did she mean that he’d never brought anyone in? I didn’t have it in me to unpack it. Today had been the first day since the scene on Saturday, I wasn’t feeling the drop so much as whatever happened between Sebastian and myself yesterday.
Unwrapping the sandwich, I dipped it in the soup and took a bite, enjoying how the flavors melded together. This had been an unexpected surprise, but then again, everything with Sebastian had been.
My screen flickered. I set everything to the side and grabbed my keyboard.
It wasn’t an alarm, not the notifications that we set up but it was something.
Someone had refreshed the test environment Victor had set up.
It wasn’t scheduled to push again for another six hours, not until everyone had left for the day.
The code reloaded on its own.
I pulled the keyboard closer, typing in some code, checking a few things.
This wasn’t on the thumb drive I’d been looking at, but I’d pulled up the actual system on my other screen earlier to compare the two of them to make sure we were looking at the right things, and here it was doing something it wasn’t supposed to be.
It was a micro-lag in the handshake protocol. It was so small it wouldn’t have tripped an alarm but precise enough it had to be intentional.
I closed my eyes and took a breath before I glanced around the empty office. This wasn’t a breach. Not yet. Whoever it was, was testing the system. Seeing what it would do. Was someone else working on the same thing I was?
Glancing toward Sebastian’s office out of habit, I remembered it was empty. The room was scary silent.
I flagged the anomaly, copied the timestamp, and saved it on my private partition on my computer. When the phone rang, I jumped before answering it.
“Sentinel Tech, Sebastian Reid’s office.”
“So formal.”
I leaned back in my chair, my eyes still on the line of code. “You called your own office. What did you expect?”
He chuckled, and I hated to admit that it made me smile.
“I did try your phone first.”
I pulled my phone from my purse, where it lived in the bottom drawer of my desk. “So you did. But my boss is known to be a grump, and being on my personal phone during work hours is seriously frowned upon.”
Probably calling my boss a grump was also seriously frowned upon.
He laughed again. “You eat?”
I glanced at the soup, the sandwich still half wrapped sitting next to it. “I was working on it.”
“It’s my favorite pairing. Wanted to make sure you ate.”
Why did he care? He’d always seemed hands off when it came to the employees.
But the longer I spent up on this floor, the more I found out that wasn’t true.
At least once a week he arranged donuts and juice for the entire office and always had fresh fruit in all the break areas.
I’d never thought about it but it was him.
As was the filtered water throughout the building, or that while management was expected to work overtime, those on the lower side of the totem pole knew that we had the option to say no, but we got well compensated so I wasn’t sure anyone ever had.
Sebastian Reid was very much a puppet master pulling strings, making sure his employees had what they needed to succeed.
That was until his dad died and his life had blown up on him.
“Can I ask a question?” I’d just call him a grump so I was already pushing buttons. What was one or two more?
“Shoot.”
“Are you okay?”
The line went silent. Just long enough that I wondered if I’d overstepped.
“Yeah,” he sighed. “My mom fell last night.”
“I’m so sorry. How bad is it?” I asked.
“She broke her wrist. They would have sent her home last night, but she was showing signs of a concussion and may have been dizzy which led to the fall.” He sighed before he continued. “Nothing major, but enough to remind her she hates hospitals. They just want to observe her.”
I exhaled, some of the tightness in my chest easing. I didn’t know her, but what I knew about him, he didn’t need any more loss. He was trying so hard to put things back together. “I remember you telling me about that.”
His dad had been sick and in the hospital for a week before he passed.
“She’ll be fine,” he said. “She’s already arguing with the nurse.”
I smiled despite myself. “That sounds familiar.”
A low hum of agreement came through the line. “She doesn’t like being told what to do.”
“That must be where you got that from.”
A pause, then he laughed quietly. Softer than he had before. I smiled.
“I should let you get back to work. Victor said you’d be buried today.”
“I’m good.” And I was. For some reason, him checking in helped with the nerves I was dealing with today. I didn’t mention what I’d found. I’d bring that up to Micah and have him double check before I went to Mr. Hale.
“I know you are. Make sure you eat. I’ll check in later.”
The line went dead. The office was quiet again. The kind of quiet that was anything but soothing.
I turned back to my screen.
The anomaly was still there, staring at me.
Whoever had triggered the refresh hadn’t been sloppy. They’d been testing boundaries instead of mowing them down.
I forwarded the file to Micah with a short note.
Need a second set of eyes? Don’t escalate just yet. Want to make sure I’m seeing what I think I am.
I locked the partition and returned to my soup, which was still warm. So much had happened in the last week. In the weeks since I’d met the man who had been training me, everything had shifted.
There were a hundred things on my mind.
They just weren’t racing.