her arms and stared down at Reed. “Don’t parse and don’t skimp.”
“Someone tried to access my DoD file.”
Startled, she blurted out, “Excuse me, what?”
“You heard me right. And it wasn’t just any attempt. It came via an encrypted server and had a security designation higher than mine.”
Her mouth moved, but no words came out. Reed studied the baby for a long silent moment. When he looked up and held Summer’s gaze, she swallowed the panic lodged in her throat.
“I think there are two things happening at once.” His voice was restrained—soft. He was trying not to scare her.
Good luck with that. “What the hell do you mean?”
“Easy, twerp. Don’t alarm Ari. Sit back down.” He patted the carpet and gave her a stern do as you’re told frown.
She dropped like a marionette with cut strings. Cross-legged and visibly shaking, Summer fought to keep up.
Reed knew how short her fuse could be, and to his credit, he didn’t waste time with bullshit nonsense.
“I’m a boots in the dirt kind of guy. Drawing maps in the desert sand, dropping stealthily out of the sky, shit like that. I let the other guys collect the intelligence and come up with an assessment.”
“Uh, okay.” Where the hell he was going with this?
“All I have is a gut feeling, but it’s strong and makes strange sense.”
Her brows shot up into her hairline. Gut feelings were something she understood.
He turned his face away for a few seconds. She could feel him organizing his thoughts.
“Anyway, here it is. Before family matters sidelined Cyrus, he was running down the 4-1-1 on this NIGHTWIND business. Your baby daddy has a serious firewall around him, and I can’t get involved. In my position, if I went poking around, I’d get court-martialed and thrown out of the service faster than a whore dropping her undies for rent money. So I left it to Cy and his contacts outside the active military to pierce the wall.”
Summer more or less knew this but not in such blunt terms.
“Obviously, life happened. For all of us. The world doesn’t hold still just because we need it to. There’s no point in trying to catch your breath because every day, there’s something more.”
She scowled. “Why the lecture? What’s your point?”
He gave her a meaningful look. “I just want you to remember as this thing plays out that there are no superheroes. We’re all human, doing the best we can at a time when life comes at us fast.”
Why did it seem like maybe Reed was softening his stance toward Arnie? She listened carefully—with her heart.
“There’s no new information on NIGHTWIND. But, and this is a huge but, only someone with high-profile anonymity and a government level firewall has the sort of access that gets you close to DoD records..”
Summer squinted—it helped her think. “I don’t understand.”
He sighed. Heavily. “Summer, this is personal. Think about it. Some unidentified twat stalks you at your job, tries to intimidate you, and does so by invoking Mom? Really? Jesus. The ploy is so amateurish as to make great fodder for a Hallmark movie.”
“I never looked at it that way, but you’re right. I freaked when she brought up Mom but not out of fear. Marie Hall has no meaning to me or connection to my life. I freaked because anyone who would stoop that low to scare me was capable of much worse.”
“Exactly. So what does this mean? Hmm? On the one hand, we have an amateur villainess with unclear motives. Taking her or her threats at face value is a mistake. There’s no evidence whatsoever that she acted on anyone’s authority but her own. She has an ax to grind, and you yourself said that you saw her try to verbally shiv your boyfriend in public.”
Her brain began to rearrange the deck chairs. What if Maleficent was an outlier? Someone who was still dangerous but only had a bank account and no power? And what if Arnie didn’t know any of this? What if he had come looking for her only to find that she’d run to ground and disappeared? It made a convoluted kind of sense and bolstered her belief that he just didn’t know about Ari because if he did, the man she knew would move heaven and earth to find them.
Nodding, she mumbled, “Following,” and hoped Reed had more to say.
“But the other hand,” Reed said in a somber voice, “that’s where shit gets interesting. If we take into account how deeply hidden you are, and