Page 60 of Blood Code

The new victim, the girl on the livestream, was out there, and we needed to find her.

So from morning to night, I wrote code and scoured every lead we had, determined to find her. My system tracked clock delays and sound waves, searching for clues to her prison cell’s location.

We would find it. We were only days away from an answer.

In the meantime, my attention needed to return to my family. Either I would clear them or unmask one of them as the mole, Damon.

I’d spent two years investigating my family's digital involvement with the Order, hacking into their systems for hundreds of hours with every resource I had, only to find nothing.

But that didn’t mean they weren’t members.

It only meant their personal servers and computers held no evidence connecting them to the Leathean Order, which was precisely why I’d needed to hack into Severin’s systems in the first place.

Because my father’s systems were squeaky clean.

No missing money. No mentions of the Order. No suspicious trips. No hidden girls. No business outside their purview.

Nika and Ilya were just as clean. Suspiciously clean.

I wanted to believe it and truly weren’t members of the Order. But the question always lingered in the back of my mind.

Because how could Aleksandr run or aid a trafficking cult without his top intelligence man knowing about it?

Unless…

I pulled up my last message from Damon Bayswim Locke.

The mole.

The assassin.

The assassin who was taunting me and coming for me.

Damon Bayswim Locke.

What a strange name.

I stared at it.

The way to hide from someone as talented as my father was to hire someone even better.

Or at least, talented in a different way.

And Damon was talented, obstructing my investigation and aiding it at the same time.

For two weeks, I’d watched him do both while trying to hack him back, the two of us playing cat and mouse. He’d offer me information, then scurry away like the rat he was.

He showed me the girl and then ran away.

He offered me Order files, then burned them.

Cat and mouse.

Helping me and taunting me.

He thought he was winning, but he wasn’t. My game wasn’t to win. It was to watch.

But I had to give it to him. He was very talented. So talented, in fact, that he might have been a Morozov.