Makes sense. “Did they get in?”
Kaz coughs. “There was a zero-day in your API gateway. Looked like a TLS downgrade at first, but they piggy-backed it into a privilege escalation inside your SSO. If it had landed, they’d have root on every user profile inside Malice Media. They’d own our authentication keys. Every call, every handshake, spoofed.”
I blink. “Somebody is feeling brave.”
“Apparently. They could’ve hijacked every identity on the platform. Every politician, every celebrity, every account. They’d be inside the system anytime they wanted.”
I grind my back teeth together. “Did you stop it?”
“Of course. I built a decoy environment last month. Full mirror of your production. Their exploit tripped my canary accounts. They thought they were rooting the real servers. In reality, they were trapped in my sandbox.”
Excellent. I like that. A lot. “What’d you do to them?”
Kaz chuckles. Low. “I injected a poisoned payload. Their central command should be fried, every machine in their cluster hard-locked. Whoever ran it won’t be sleeping tonight. I left them a little note. Nothing they’ll enjoy.”
“Good job, Kaz.” He’s so jacked right now that his voice isn’t grating on me. That’s interesting.
“Thanks.” Yeah, he sounds surprised. “They wasted rockets and hackers and got nothing.”
I wish that were true. “Not nothing. They tested our response time. They measured how long it took you to move assets and how quickly I countered. Next time, they won’t send amateurs. This was recon. There’s another attack coming, Kaz. After they regroup. Get ready.”
“I agree. Also, hate to tell you this, but that wasn’t the only cyber attack. There was another push from that signature we’ve been watching the last couple of months. Just a push.”
Ah. The fifth player. “Keep trying.” I end that call. Maybe Ella has a line on the new player. It’s possible.
The door opens and a sleepy Ella Rendale stands there wearing one of my T-shirts that reaches past her knees. Her eyes are cornflower blue, her legs toned, and her toes cute and pink. “We need to talk.”
Ella
I don’t like feeling off balance, and dealing with people sucks, which is why I prefer computers. Code. Numbers. Not hot-bodied males who can fuck like machines against a tree with a storm beating the wilds all around us.
Leo yips and runs toward the porch.
Justice partially turns, his dark eyes raking me. Head to toe. I swear, I can feel that gaze like a touch. A rough one. “So talk.”
Irritation clacks through me. Along with vulnerability. Even though he’s sitting and I’m standing, and eventhough I have a knife tucked into the back of my underwear beneath the borrowed shirt, I feel anything but strong. The sun has risen in the east, painting the bottom of the clouds pink. My mouth opens and nothing comes out. What in the world can I say? “Okay.”
His hair is tousled and his feet bare. Man. Even his feet look tough. His toes are scarred, the skin rough, like he’s used to gravel, to fights, to never being comfortable. The shirt he’s wearing is thin and clings across hard muscle, every line cut and unyielding. He looks carved into that porch, the boards straining faintly under his weight. “How about you lose the knife and then we talk?”
I blink. How in the world does he know? “Um—”
“Don’t lie. We’re past that.” He holds out a hand. “I don’t want to come and take it from you.”
There’s a part of me, a rather large part, that’d like to shove that blade through his palm. Rolling my eyes, I yank it free and hand it over. “You’re kind of a jerk.”
“Just kind of?” He pats the worn wooden porch next to him.
I feel shy. Darn it. So I lift my chin and walk to him, sitting on a plank. The wood is warm from the sunrise, and I notice the grooves cut deep into the boards, like someone sharpened knives here. His heat radiates through the space between us. Leo licks my face, snorts happily, and then jumps off the porch, bounding into the trees. His tail wags once before he disappears, ears high, already on guard.
Maybe I can be honest with Justice. “I’m not going to give you the code for the computer virus.” At least not until I figure out a cure for everybody if it gets loose again. I feel guilty enough about that already. Causing a world-wide problem would suck.
“You’ll give me what I want.”
What a complete ass. Maybe I can change the subject. “Forget that for a moment. Why do you need my help, if it’s not for that virus?” It’s a safe topic, much safer than talking about sex the night before, so I latch on to it.
He looks into the trees. “It’s about that virus. You apparently know that my brother has lexical-gustatory synesthesia and he gets a taste in his mouth when people speak to him?”
I nod. All right. Now we’re finally getting to it. “Do you have that?”
