Seventeen Justice
SEVENTEEN
Justice
I watch her sleep. Blonde hair springs in curly directions, and her body is barely discernible beneath the comforter.
She snuggles into the bed with the dog splayed across the bottom, no doubt pinning her feet.
I took her hard against the tree outside and then again inside the cabin, and she’d been all in.
A fireball in such a small package. Consent from both of us had been clear, and I’m sure we’d both like to change that fact.
Not the consent, but the fact that we’d been unable to stop. Truth be told, I almost lost control.
Never in my life have I wanted a woman more.
She’s wrong for me. All wrong. An enemy with a mission of her own.
She’s a killer as well. Attempted, anyway.
Allowing such a threat to continue breathing goes against my very DNA.
Against every cell still multiplying or dying in my body.
I’ve fucked her twice, and she’s nowhere near out of my system.
It might take a week.
A buzz sounds and I move to the kitchen, opening the bottom drawer and ripping out the false bottom to grasp a burner phone. Neither the woman nor the dog move.
I pad barefoot across the cabin and outside to sit on the porch, my legs extended to the bottom step. “You shouldn’t be calling on your honeymoon,” I answer.
“Who attacked us?” Anger rides Thorn’s tone. So much for his relaxed vacation.
“Don’t know.” The rain has ebbed but water drips loudly from the tree branches around me. “The hit was to the penthouse and not the servers, so—”
Thorn swears. “You were the target. Take you out while I’m gone.” He exhales. Loudly. “I’ll have the pilots clear a flight home.”
I stiffen. “Nope.” My jeans are clean but my feet are still dirty. I should shower. “If you come back right now and don’t trust me to handle this, then you’re cutting my legs off beneath me.” It’d be seen as a sign of weakness. “I have to handle it myself.”
He’s silent. Yeah, he knows I’m right. Might not like it, but there you go. “Do you think it was Ella Rendale?” The question makes sense because she did try to kill him.
“No.”
“How can you be sure?”
I glance at the silent cabin behind me. “I had her in the penthouse at the time. She might’ve been the target.” I do like that none of our men told Thorn about Ella. So his sources are from outside the organization. Our men are loyal to us both. “She’s safe.”
“You kidnapped Ella Rendale?” Thorn snaps.
I grin. “Maybe she came willingly.” Actually, she’d just come willingly. I doubt Thorn would appreciate that statement.
“Justice, I said I want her alive. Not dead.”
Yeah, he had said that. “You’re safe, brother.”
He growls now. “I’m not worried about blame. If she dies, Alana is hurt. Bad. I can’t let you do it.”
“I’m not going to let her die,” I snarl.
He’s quiet. “Wow. That’s a tone from you.”
“If I have to lock her down, I will. But I won’t kill her.
” Damn, I sound reasonable. What tone? I can smell her on me and still hear her sighs while I moved inside her.
I have to remember always that Thorn is now compromised because of Alana.
Not weakened. Just not thinking as pragmatically as he once had.
I’ll never let anybody get that close to me and my motivations.
A shuffle sounds and I reach back to let the dog out.
Leo looks at me and then saunters down the stairs, running into the trees.
Allowing her to keep him wasn’t a weakness. Maybe I’m totally full of shit. Could be. “Thorn? Stop worrying. I’ve got this.” My tone stays level. I let her keep the dog because now she has a vulnerability. Simple as that. Yeah, I’m lying to myself.
“What the hell is going on?”
Perhaps my tone wasn’t as level as I thought. At least he hasn’t heard about the attack in the middle of the street. The first attack. “Nothing. At the moment, I’m trying to figure out who just shot a missile into my penthouse. Someone is making a move, and you have to stay there.”
He’s silent for several long moments, no doubt trying to get around my logic. He can’t. “You need to hit somebody and hard. Now.”
“Already in the plans,” I say calmly. Even if I’m wrong, I have to strike out. That’s easy enough. While I’m calm, I’m pissed. Cold fury is so much more effective than heated fire, usually. “I’m not hitting Alana’s family, so don’t worry about that.”
“Alexei might’ve made a move since he probably didn’t know Ella was in the penthouse.”
Very true. A good statement would be to hit the Sokolovs and Hologrid Hub.
Our people are prepared for a mob war with the Russians, and Alexei is probably ready as well.
I don’t like the idea of the streets of Silicon Valley running red while Thorn is out of town, but I’ll do what I have to do.
“Thorn? Get back to your bride and make me a nephew. Or niece. I don’t care which.
” So long as the kid can charge garnets.
“You might need a few of those.” There’s a good chance their kid will charge aquamarines like Alana does, so they’ll have to keep going until they get a garnet charger.
He coughs. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. I just got married and am not bringing a kid into this until we get things settled down.” He clears his throat. “Why don’t you have a kid or five? Ella is a genius, and she’ll make kids who can charge stones.”
I inhale so fast I almost choke. “Shut up.”
“You shut up. I’m going to ask you again. Why was Ella Rendale in the penthouse?”
I can’t let him know about my illness, so I take the easy way out. “I want her.”
He’s quiet.
I roll my eyes. “It’s temporary. There’s something between us, and we’re dealing with it.”
He snorts. Actually snorts. “I see. You giving it a number of fucks or a number of hours?”
I think he might’ve attached “dumbass” to the end of that sentence, but I’m not sure. There’s wind through the line. “None of your business. Just don’t worry about it.”
His chuckle sounds lighter. Amused. Good. “This might be fun, brother. Ella Rendale, huh?”
That’s it. I’m done. “I’ll be in touch. Say hi to my new sister for me.” I end the call.
The dog returns just as my phone buzzes. “Yeah.”
“It’s Kaz. The servers are safe, but we did have a backdoor attack when the missiles were flying.”
Makes sense. “Did they get in?”
Kaz coughs. “There was a zero-day in your API gateway. Looked like a TLS downgrade at first, but they piggy-backed it into a privilege escalation inside your SSO. If it had landed, they’d have root on every user profile inside Malice Media.
They’d own our authentication keys. Every call, every handshake, spoofed. ”
I blink. “Somebody is feeling brave.”
“Apparently. They could’ve hijacked every identity on the platform. Every politician, every celebrity, every account. They’d be inside the system anytime they wanted.”
I grind my back teeth together. “Did you stop it?”
“Of course. I built a decoy environment last month. Full mirror of your production. Their exploit tripped my canary accounts. They thought they were rooting the real servers. In reality, they were trapped in my sandbox.”
Excellent. I like that. A lot. “What’d you do to them?”
Kaz chuckles. Low. “I injected a poisoned payload. Their central command should be fried, every machine in their cluster hard-locked. Whoever ran it won’t be sleeping tonight. I left them a little note. Nothing they’ll enjoy.”
“Good job, Kaz.” He’s so jacked right now that his voice isn’t grating on me. That’s interesting.
“Thanks.” Yeah, he sounds surprised. “They wasted rockets and hackers and got nothing.”
I wish that were true. “Not nothing. They tested our response time. They measured how long it took you to move assets and how quickly I countered. Next time, they won’t send amateurs. This was recon. There’s another attack coming, Kaz. After they regroup. Get ready.”
“I agree. Also, hate to tell you this, but that wasn’t the only cyber attack. There was another push from that signature we’ve been watching the last couple of months. Just a push.”
Ah. The fifth player. “Keep trying.” I end that call. Maybe Ella has a line on the new player. It’s possible.
The door opens and a sleepy Ella Rendale stands there wearing one of my T-shirts that reaches past her knees. Her eyes are cornflower blue, her legs toned, and her toes cute and pink. “We need to talk.”
Ella
I don’t like feeling off balance, and dealing with people sucks, which is why I prefer computers. Code. Numbers. Not hot-bodied males who can fuck like machines against a tree with a storm beating the wilds all around us.
Leo yips and runs toward the porch.
Justice partially turns, his dark eyes raking me. Head to toe. I swear, I can feel that gaze like a touch. A rough one. “So talk.”
Irritation clacks through me. Along with vulnerability.
Even though he’s sitting and I’m standing, and even though I have a knife tucked into the back of my underwear beneath the borrowed shirt, I feel anything but strong.
The sun has risen in the east, painting the bottom of the clouds pink.
My mouth opens and nothing comes out. What in the world can I say? “Okay.”
His hair is tousled and his feet bare. Man.
Even his feet look tough. His toes are scarred, the skin rough, like he’s used to gravel, to fights, to never being comfortable.
The shirt he’s wearing is thin and clings across hard muscle, every line cut and unyielding.
He looks carved into that porch, the boards straining faintly under his weight.
“How about you lose the knife and then we talk?”
I blink. How in the world does he know? “Um—”
“Don’t lie. We’re past that.” He holds out a hand. “I don’t want to come and take it from you.”
There’s a part of me, a rather large part, that’d like to shove that blade through his palm. Rolling my eyes, I yank it free and hand it over. “You’re kind of a jerk.”
“Just kind of?” He pats the worn wooden porch next to him.