Lila was getting sick of feeling like that.
She had invited the man to her room so she could sneak a peek at his palm, but she wouldn’t have slept with him for it. She wouldn’t have pretended an interest she didn’t have.
Lila lathered herself again, her skin turning pink as she scrubbed harder and harder. How had La Roux even managed to hack BullNet? He was a senator. Where had he learned the skills to penetrate government servers?
The answer came quickly. His matron was a Masson. He must have received a different sort of education among his kinsmen, one unlike the senators of Bullstow. And as a Masson, he’d had access to Xavier Masson’s ID, likely taken on a visit to the family compound.
He’d stolen from a dead boy, his own cousin nonetheless.
Lila thought back to the files on her desktop. Luckily, she’d encrypted all of them. She’d also hidden the most important files on star drives, placing them in her desk’s secret compartments. They were safe there, far safer than in her computer. You had to know where the compartments were to find the seams. You also had to know how to open them, else you’d end up frustrated, with sore fingers and bloody nails. And even if La Roux had managed to break into the desk and find the drives, he’d still have to unencrypt them.
Lila rinsed off and hopped out of the shower, donning little more than an old militia t-shirt and a fluffy robe. She quickly worked her way through the desk’s compartments, finding that all her star drives were still secure.
As she replaced the last compartment, the results from her snoop programs flashed onto her screen. La Roux hadn’t gotten far in his infiltration, but he’d left behind a tangle of snoop programs. A window popped up, prompting Lila to delete them, offering to restore her computer to what it had been the night before.
Lila hit cancel and yanked the cable from her palm. He’d not hacked into it at all. He’d merely snuck a GPS sensor and an audio bug inside the casing.
She drummed her fingers on her desk, unsure how to use the sabotage to her advantage.
She’d figure something out on the way to the security office.
Lila hopped up and ventured to her closet. Now that she knew that La Roux was the Baron, her job had become much simpler. She couldn’t believe that he had used his childhood nickname as an ID, but people often made such stupid mistakes.
Like sleeping with people when you should have known better.
Gods, everything he’d said the night before had likely been a lie.
She opened her closet, and a string of curses flooded from her mouth. As predicted, the insufferable, tartan-clad idiot from the nigh
t before had cleared out her entire closet. Every militia uniform had been tossed out, and a sea of monochromatic crimson surrounded her.
Lila fetched a pair of black trousers from her hidden compartment and added a crimson sweater and her old crimson woolen coat, clothes she might have worn a month before. Then she donned a pair of new boots, snatched up her palm, and bound her damp hair in a twist.
She gave a last glance to her abandoned wine glass. Biting her lip, she poured the dregs into a small vial and snapped the lid closed.
She’d walk the sample over to the security office, assassin be damned. She had more important things to do than remain locked inside the great house.
Shoving her Colt into her coat pocket, she fled from the room.
At the top of the stairs, she ducked behind a door as she spied Alex pacing along the base of the staircase, a duster poised in her hand. Waiting to be paged, waiting to be intercepted, waiting to hear Lila recount every detail from the night before.
Lila waited too.
The front door quietly chimed a few moments later.
The slave retreated.
Lila darted from her hiding spot, sneaking through the empty kitchen and into the scullery.
Exiting through the back of the great house, Lila avoided the patrols and jogged toward the security office. The fog hung so thick that she could barely make out the buildings on the street. She tied her coat more tightly, longing for the warmth of her blackcoat, so thick that the chill would not have touched her.
But the privilege of wearing her blackcoat had been taken away. She’d never be allowed to wear it again outside of her own bedroom.
Shoving open the still-broken metal door, she marched into the security office. As it was a couple of hours after shift change, few people scrambled about. She nodded to the man at the front desk and rode the elevator to her office, nodding to the receptionist, who had just poured cream into her morning coffee.
The pair exchanged brisk nods.
Sergeant Jenkins sat at his desk as she entered his office, already tackling a pile of work. He looked up at her in confusion and annoyance, then opened his mouth to speak.