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She shook her head. “His pain medication pretty much knocks him flat.” She looked around the room, and I saw her white teeth sink into her bottom lip. I had to shake myself from staring. “I don’t like leaving him alone in strange places.”
I could only imagine how tired and frazzled she must be. It had been a long day. “Did you want to sleep?” I asked. “We can wait to look at the message in the morning. This room is for the two of you—I’ll take the couch out in the living room.”
Nataliya thought for a second but shook her head. “I don’t think I could sleep yet,” she admitted. “Too much adrenaline for one day, you know.”
I did. “Still, if?—”
“It’s fine,” she insisted. “I’m fine.” I wasn’t sure about that, but I also didn’t want to argue with her any more than I already had.
We came back to Drake in the living room. I had been with this man through some of the most dangerous places in the world, and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever seen him so tired. “How’s fatherhood, Drake?”
He chuckled. “Like an acid trip some days.”
Nataliya laughed, and it almost startled me—it was such a pretty, rich sound. “Good and bad, yeah?” she asked, and Drake nodded. “How old are your little ones?”
“Five months,” he said, face stretching in a wide, proud smile. “They were born on Halloween.”
She hummed. “I’ve heard somewhere that’s lucky.”
“With twins, I’m going to need all the luck I can get.”
They shared another laugh, and I felt a little like an outsider, which I hadn’t anticipated, considering Drake had been my friend and teammate for years. “Nataliya, you were working on the message in the car. Did you figure it out?”
She nodded. “It’s a cipher. It’s easy if you know the trick to it. Here, I’ll show you.” She looked at Drake. “Can I borrow a piece of paper and a pen?” He grabbed them from his desk and gave them to her. We both watched as she carefully copied out the message, and then at the bottom, wrote down a key. “We used Waathanian idioms translated into English. You have to translate the phrase back into Waathanian, and then each first letter of the words spells out the message.”
Generally, I thought of myself as a smart guy…I was feeling decidedly less so right now. “You designed this as kids?”
She nodded. “Our mother always read our notes, so we created it to have some privacy.”
“What does it say?” Drake asked.
Underneath the message in Waathanian, she wrote the English translation. “It’s a log-in for a OneDrive account.”
I was relieved, truly, to know what the message was and vindicated that I was correct that it wasn’t nonsense…but I had a feeling things weren’t about to get any easier.
“I have my laptop,” she said. “But, if I know Anton like I think I do, the files in the account are going to be encrypted.” She nodded toward the massive computer setup that served as Drake’s desk. He’d always been our tech guy on the team, and he’d clearly bought all the necessary toys to keep up with the latest advances even now that he was a civilian. “Can I?”
Drake was visibly surprised. “You sure you can handle it?”
Nataliya smirked, and it was a touch smug. “You could say that,” she said. “I have a masters in computer science from ETH Zurich. Before I moved to the United States, I worked in cybersecurity.” The smile slipped off her face. “Although I haven’t gotten my hands on a system like that in a long time.”
“You’re welcome to it,” Drake said.
“In the morning,” I added, and they both looked at me with surprise. “It’s late, and it seems likely there are hours’ worth of work ahead. It can wait until sun-up.”
Nataliya thought about it for a second, then nodded. “Okay. I guess…goodnight, then.”
She headed toward the guest room, and Drake and I watched her go, not saying anything until we heard the door click shut behind her.
“Dude, she’s hot,” Drake said. At my flat look, he laughed. “What? Layla is the love of my life, but I’m not dead.”
I shoved at him. “Idiot.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Hayes followed me right to her today. I put her and Elias at risk.”
Drake clapped me on the shoulder, and I grunted as he landed a hit directly on a bruise. “You need a first aid kit?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Just some bruises. I’m fine.”
He sighed. “Blaming yourself for today won’t do anyone any good. What was it you used to say to us? ‘It happened, it’s over—what matters now is dealing with what comes next.’ Anyway, they would have found her eventually. At least this way, you were there to help her.”
