Page 27 of Code Name: Scorpio

He pushed the door open another few inches without making a sound.

Cassandra was standing at the far workstation with her back to the door. She was dancing. Hips moving with the bass line, barefoot on the tile, fingers working across the keyboard between moves. She’d step away, spin, come back and type something, step away again.

Then she talked.

“You routed payments through a freight company that doesn’t own a single truck. Who does that?” She pulled up a window, typed something rapidly, pulled up another. “Oh, I see. You do that when you’re paying for something you don’t want on the books. Got ya. Seems 1000% legit.”

She danced her way over to the second monitor. “You know what happens now, bitches? Cassandra Leuenberger is what happens. We’re going to find every single one of those kids. Every one. And then you’re going to pay, motherfockers.”

Did she just say fockers?

She pulled up another window, and her voice dropped. “I will rain hellfire down upon you. The biblical kind. Except through computers. Believe it or not, that’s even worse. You will Rue. The. Day.”

He should announce himself. He was standing in a doorway watching her without her knowledge, and that wasn’t okay.

But he couldn’t stop watching. She was barefoot and had to be exhausted, but she was dancing to disco and absolutely furious about stolen children. This woman who couldn’t say hello to a conference room was standing in an empty lab threatening a computer screen—with biblical-level hellfire—on behalf of kids she’d never met.

Goddamn if she wasn’t the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

This was what he’d been looking for in that briefing room. This was what he’d decided didn’t exist when she sat behind those dark glasses and stared at the table.

The passion, the fury that someone was hurting children and getting away with it. The woman he knew from three months ago was still real. She’d been real this whole time.

He knocked on the open door.

She spun around, and her hand shot to the keyboard. The music cut off mid-beat. Her green eyes went wide, and for a second, the wall started going up. He could see it happening in real time, the openness closing down, the guard sliding into place.

“Was that disco music?”

“Um, yeah. It, um, helps me think.”

“I’m not judging. I didn’t think anyone under sixty still listened to disco, but I’m not judging.”

The wall stopped going up. The smallest smile lit her face. “Then you’ve obviously been hanging around the wrong people.”

She was watching him, trying to figure out if he was making fun of her. He wasn’t. “Obviously. Have you been here since you left me at the café?”

“I got in a few hours of sleep. But there’s a lot to finalize. I’ve been going through the Diehls’ digital footprint as part of the background work.” She turned back to her screen and pulled something up. “And I found something that might help you tomorrow night.”

He sat down in what had become his chair over the past few days. “Show me.”

She angled a screen toward him. “Their internal communications. I’ve been watching the traffic patterns while building your cover, and their system goes through a security reset every morning at 4:45 a.m. Automated. Takes about ninety seconds.” She pointed at a log. “During those ninety seconds, the access monitoring goes dark. No logging, no alerts.”

“A window.”

“A window. That’s when you access the system. You’d still need to be fast and clean, but for ninety seconds, nobody’s watching.”

“How the hell did you see that?”

She paused. Turned her mug in her hands. “I’m good with patterns. My brain spots things in data that other people walk past. It’s just how I’m wired.”

Ninety seconds. That changed everything about how he approached tomorrow night. And it was possible because she’d seen a pattern nobody else would’ve even noticed.

“That’s incredible work, Cassie.”

The nickname slipped out. He hadn’t planned it, hadn’t thought about it, and by the time he heard it leave his mouth, it was already hanging in the air between them.

She looked at him. Her eyes held his for longer than they had in any of their lab sessions, and the guard that usually sat behind them was gone. He could see her in there. The real Cassandra. The one who danced to disco and talked to her screens about justice and stayed up all night for children. And for him.