Page 22 of Beyond the Rules
“Did you read my diary?” she said. “Myprivate, onlinediary?”
“Sorry, but yes, we did. Wehadto.”
A crimson flush pinked her cheeks and a scathing glare swept over us like a deadly radioactive wind. “You had no right,” she muttered between her teeth. “My laptop is my privateworld.”
“I’ve already told you,” Zar said, unapologetic. “Securityfirst.”
“Easy for you to say,” she snapped. “No one has hacked intoyourstuff.”
“You are a hacker yourself,” he countered. “So it’s okay for you to do this to others, but not for others to do ittoyou?”
She lowered her chin and glared at Zar. I half expected armor-piercing kinetic energy penetrators to shoot out of her eyes. Zar was blunt, uncompromising, and direct and we were used to him, but to make this work, he ought to tread carefullyaroundher.
“Stand down, everybody.” Tanner took a shot at defusing the situation. “How about this? You show us what you’ve got. Then we decide what canbedone.”
“So you didn’t findeverything?” she said, almosthopeful.
“We haven’t found the specific evidence that brought you here.” The admission rankled the hell out of me, but it was true. “Another twenty-four hours, and I’llfindit.”
“Yeah, sure.” Her lips curved up into a smug, sassy sneer. “I have no doubts you’ll find the evidence in my laptop…in about a millionyears.”
I swear this woman had a way of sucking my dick without touching it. She had me so hard I might come in my pants. Nothing like a dare to get me excited, nothing like the prospect of pitting my brain against hers to make my cock feel as if it was already buried in herpussy.
“Come on, Nina,” Tanner said. “Let’sdothis.”
“Not so fast.” She studied us like a grizzly eyeing the salmon stream. “So what happens if I turn over the evidenceIhave?”
“We assess it,” Zar said. “If it pans out, we take it to someone who can dealwithit.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. I’ve already concluded that you guys are a capable outfit.” She jerked her head in my direction. “As top tech dog around here, Aiden’s not going to walk away from a cyber hunt of this caliber. Neither is Tanner. He’s obviously been putting in some time trying to figure me out.” If looks could burn, Tanner would be a pile of ashes. “What are you, some sort of intelligenceoperative?”
Tanner never lied. “What I can tell you is that, as a civilian, I work as a personalityprofiler.”
“A personality profiler?” The bitterness in her cackle soured my stomach and Tanner’s too, probably. “Of course. I should’ve known, this morning, in the bathtub? You’d already read mydiary.”
“Nina,I—”
“Don’t bother.” She whirled away from Tanner and confronted Zar. “What about you? What the hell doyoudo?”
His jaw locked. He didn’t say asingleword.
“Let me guess.” She stepped up to him and nailed him with her stare. “You boss people around for a living. And once you figure out what this is all about you’re not going to let some other shithead fight this battle. You’re just not the kind to letanythinggo.”
In addition to being a techy, she showed promise as a profiler and a tacticalthinker.
“You guys want truth from me?” She whipped her chin in the air. “Then you dish it outaswell.”
We exchanged looks, making decisions in the field. Truth for truth. It wasn’t a bad deal if youaskedme.
“Okay, fine,” Zar conceded, an infrequent occurrence. “I can’t acknowledge Ulysses’ existence. And I can’t change the fact that you have no security clearance and we can’t share classified information with you. But if this is what you say it is, then I can promise you this: We will take down theperps.”
Her plush lips pressed together as she considered Zar, but she was a tough and smart, and she wasn’t convinced yet. “How do I know that you people can dothejob?”
I would’ve asked the same excellentquestion.
“You don’t know for sure.” Zar didn’t try to pull the wool over her eyes. “But you have my word. And think about what you’ve learned about us so far, about how we infiltrated your defenses. We’re good. We’re top-of-the-line.”
The daggers she launched in my direction hit right where it hurt. Would she everforgiveme?