Page 146 of The ARC Unit: Breach

“Mostly reimbursements through a small transport account. I’m tracing the account holder now.”

Bear pulled out the chair beside us. “What does this give us if the warehouse is empty?”

“A route,” I said. “It may be old, but if the same approval contact shows up there and in Varga’s transfers, we can start looking for the other places that number touched.”

Wolf looked toward me.

I kept my attention on the screen. “We don’t have to know who owns the phone yet. We follow what it approved.”

“Exactly,” Raven said.

Wolf nodded once. “Do it.”

Surprisingly, there was no argument and no reminder that I had only been with ARC for a short time. He accepted the answer and built the plan around it without arguing.

I wanted to enjoy the professional victory for at least a few seconds, but as Wolf turned away, he said quietly enough that only I heard him, “Good work, Rabbit.”

My pen stopped against the page.

I looked up.

He kept walking.

Raven was too busy with the transport account to notice, and Bear had already turned toward the coffee pot.

I sat there with my notebook open in front of me and tried to hold onto the annoyance, which would have been easier if I had not caught myself smiling.

That part was fucking unacceptable.

Chapter Fourteen

MIA

The rest of the day disappeared into the Strasbourg records. The light behind the narrow window of Wolf’s office stayed on above us while Raven and I worked, and we finally stopped close to midnight after the transport account refused to give us anything clean and every reimbursement code had started looking suspicious. Neither of us could remember which coffee belonged to whom by then. We left the automated searches running and agreed to pick it apart again in the morning.

I went upstairs tired enough that I barely remembered plugging in my phone before I got into bed.

At 1:43 in the morning, something cold hit me directly in the face.

I woke hard enough that my whole body jerked beneath the blanket, one hand already coming up to wipe water from my eyes before I understood why there was water in my bed. Another stream struck the wall above my head and splashed across the pillow. Somewhere near the ceiling, metal rattled with the thin, ugly sound of something that had failed under pressure.

I stared upward.

The sprinkler head in the corner of my room was spraying sideways instead of down, throwing a hard fan of water across the ceiling and directly over the bed. It hit the wall and desk before catching the open door of my locker, where most of the clothes I had been too tired to put away were now being soaked with impressive efficiency.

For a few seconds I stayed exactly where I was, still half asleep and trying to make the room become normal again through refusal alone.

Then water ran into my ear.

“Fuck.”

I threw the blanket back and got out of bed. My feet landed in cold water that had already spread halfway across the floor.

“Fuck.”

The second one felt more appropriate. I grabbed my phone from the desk before the puddle reached the charging cable, unplugged it and opened the door.

“Bear!”