Page 5 of Cipher

In other words, he needed a cyber specialist he knew couldn’t be corrupted. As Director of Information Security and Secure Logistics, I oversaw the teams protecting Black Castle Security and the clients whose lives, companies, or reputations depended on information remaining where it belonged. I had spent twelve years as a SEAL and JSOC tactical-intelligence operator before taking the position, which meant I understood that the person behind a keyboard could become a physical threat the moment someone found the right door.

“I couldn’t take a chance contacting county IT or the contractor maintaining the dispatch network,” Raines explained as he led us deeper into the building. “Since either one could be involved, I wasn’t about to hand a possible suspect administrative access and let him clean his own fucking crime scene.”

“Made the right call,” I told him as we approached the dispatch doors. “Bringing them in first could’ve erased whatever traces are still there.”

“Exactly what I was trying to avoid.” Raines swiped his card and waited for the lock to release, anger sharpening every line of his face. “Somebody used my department to leave a woman alone with the man trying to kill her. I want to know who.”

The dispatch center sat behind another controlled entrance, its usual activity reduced to low voices and the hum of equipment no one had been permitted to touch. Two dispatchers waited near the supervisor’s office with their arms folded, one visibly irritated by the shutdown and the other frightened enough to keep glancing at every dark monitor. A deputy stood beside the routed-call terminal taking emergency information relayed from the neighboring county, while the remaining consoles had been abandoned exactly as Raines ordered.

Then I saw Bex behind the center console, and every useful thought in my head had to fight through the physical reaction she caused before it reached the surface.

A navy-blue department polo followed the soft shape of her tits before disappearing into practical black slacks, and her honey-blond hair had been pulled into a high ponytail with a few loose strands around her face. Her headset rested around her neck, exhaustion bruised the skin beneath her vivid eyes, and concern had stripped away the impish brightness she’d aimed at me three weeks ago without diminishing her beauty by a fucking inch.

My cock hardened beneath my jeans with enough force to make the reaction irritatingly difficult to ignore. One glance at her full pink mouth dragged up the same image I had spent three weeks trying to kill—Bex on her knees between my thighs, that silky hair wrapped around my fist while her clever tongue learned exactly what it took to make me lose control. I’d avoided any place Raines’s daughter might have crossed my path, yet my first sight of her again proved the distance had accomplished nothing except leave me hungrier.

Bex’s attention snapped to me before the door finished closing, as though her body had been tracking my arrival with the same unwanted accuracy as mine. Relief crossed her face first, softening the tension around her eyes, but it vanished beneath the memory of our last conversation so fast I couldn’t decide whether I’d imagined it. Her chin lifted by a fraction, and the look she gave me made it clear she remembered every word I’d said at the wedding and remained unimpressed by all of them.

I should’ve been satisfied that my actions had proven successful. Instead, I was pissed the fuck off. Not at her, but at the situation. And myself for the obvious lack of self-discipline.

Hawkeye glanced from Bex to me, and the corner of his mouth twitched. But he wisely kept walking, joining Stryker beside Raines near the supervisor’s office without testing how much patience I had left from avoiding the woman who’d brought my body to life after years of not giving a shit about being alone.

I carried my equipment toward her console and set it on the empty workstation beside hers.

“Start from the beginning,” I ordered, my focus shifting into work mode.

Bex blinked once, then folded her arms over her chest. “I already walked Dad through it twice.”

“Good. Now do it again for me.”

Her gaze narrowed, but she picked up the legal pad beside the keyboard and slid it toward me. “You could’ve said please.”

“Wouldn’t have changed the outcome.”

I opened the notebook, finding a clean timeline written in dark ink, each detail separated from the next with small marks that made the sequence easy to follow.

“Walk me through what happened.” I turned the pad so we could both see it. “Please.”

Bex’s expression said she was as shocked by the word coming out of my mouth as I was. “Tell me what you observed. Keep assumptions separate.”

The request came out harsher than I’d intended because I was irritated at my lack of control.

“I know the difference,” she replied tartly.

She leaned closer, and her shoulder brushed my arm as she pointed toward the first line, leaving a slight tingle in its wake.

Bex reconstructed the call and her procedure, then explained how Nina’s incident vanished and what followed. “I don’t know whether the same person deleted Nina’s call and created the rollover. The timing makes me think they were connected, but that’s an assumption.”

She tossed me a cute little warning glare, clearly daring me to comment on her conjecture. I remained silent, but her glare darkened when she obviously picked up on my amusement.

She huffed and continued, “What I know is that I never dispatched the unit to the rollover, and the incident wasn’t there before Nina’s disappeared.”

“Checked the active queue and event history?”

“Twice,” she confirmed. “Then I called Dad because Nina didn’t have time for me to wonder whether I was violating procedure.”

Raines shifted beside Stryker, his expression softening with pride for a moment before the sheriff replaced the father. Bex had trusted what she knew, bypassed a system insisting the emergency never happened, and put help in motion while everyone responsible for corrupting that system believed the evidence had been erased.

The sheriff had informed us that Nina had been injured badly before the deputy reached her, but she was alive because Bex had refused to let a screen overrule her judgment.