Rook Security Complete Series

by Camilla Blake

  ROOK SECURITY

  Complete Series

  by: CAMILLA BLAKE

  Copyright © 2018

  All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters appearing in this work are products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to events, businesses, companies, institutions, and real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  PART TWO

  Chapter One

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  PART FIVE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  PART ONE

  PROLOGUE

  High School

  Elena Vasquez was sitting cross-legged on his bed.

  Cool cool cool. No biggie.

  Cedric handed her the glass of tap water she’d asked for and attempted not to hyperventilate. Suddenly his bedroom seemed obscenely small. Which was ridiculous considering she took up not more than a quarter of a corner of his bed, and she probably weighed all of 110 pounds soaking wet.

  Her wild black hair tumbled over her shoulders and her dark eyes x-rayed the room. He wondered what she saw. What she thought of his New York Giants poster, his map of the world that he’d had on his wall since he’d moved into his grandfather’s house in the fourth grade.

  Assuming they’d work in the living room, he hadn’t bothered to clean his room and he was now embarrassingly grateful to his own OCD tendencies. When they’d come home to see his grandfather had dismantled the engine of their Ford on the kitchen table, they’d had to deviate to his room. He’d made the bed that morning. And there were no dirty underwear on the floor.

  She sipped the water, set it aside and brought up one knee to her chin, resting her head there. Her slightly large nose was heavily shadowed by the afternoon sun slanting in through his window and Cedric badly wanted to press his own nose into that shadow.

  She looked so strange in his room. So gorgeously out of place. Like an orchid growing in the middle of a football field.

  “Should we get started?” she asked him in that voice of hers. She always had a slight rasp, like she was just getting over a cold. It drove him nuts. Her family spoke Spanish at home, he knew, very common in Queens. Her English wasn’t accented, but it was somehow smoother, rounder, more fluid than the other girls at school.

  He felt like every word she spoke was being gently pulled from a warm, velvet-lined pocket.

  “Cedric?” she asked him, her brow furrowing.

  He’d taken too long to respond. How embarrassing. He’d just been standing and staring at her like a big red-headed lump. Great.

  “Right. Yeah. Let’s get started.” Cedric accidentally bumped his desk chair as he sat down in it and it half swiveled away before he could make it down. He grappled with the arms of the chair and did an awkward half-slide.

  God.

  Normally he was graceful. Unusual for a guy his size. At seventeen he was well over six feet and gaining muscle ever day. His grandfather bought eggs and beef jerky in bulk. Sometimes Cedric felt like he spent half his life famished and the other half shoveling enough food in his mouth to fill a Volkswagen.

  She flipped open their history textbook and he saw, gratefully, that she hadn’t noticed him nearly jamming the arm of the chair up his ass. A cold bead of sweat taunted him down the canal of his spine.

  This was torture.

  Elena Vasquez was in his room, her body heat warming his comforter, and now they had a history project to do. He turned and accidentally knocked a sheaf of papers off his desk, bringing the desk chair up onto one leg as he scrambled to pick everything up.

  It would be a miracle if she left here without thinking he was an absolute oaf. He felt like a grizzly bear in a ballet costume. Cedric wished that he’d had time to change out of his school clothes before she got here. He could smell the day on him and he was extremely paranoid that it would waft across the room and make her wrinkle her pretty nose. He imagined his high-school-boy-athlete-sweat-stench wilting the delicate petals of an orchid. A lavender orchid, like the color of her eyelids.

  He took a deep breath and hoped it wasn’t completely obvious that he was pretty much swallowing his own tongue just having her in a five-foot radius. When they’d been assigned to be partners for this project he’d been immediately bludgeoned with equal parts elation and dread.

  To Cedric, Elena was the loveliest girl in their entire high school. She was brilliantly smart and witty and argumentative with their teachers, something Cedric could never in a million years have imagined being. They had History and English together. She had concise opinions and laughed at jokes in A Confederacy of Dunces that Cedric hadn’t even realized were jokes.

  But she wasn’t popular. Not the way Cedric was. This was something that was a constant mystery to him. Why in
God’s name would humongous, silent, shy Cedric be considered cool when Elena Vasquez was not? She was the coolest person he’d ever met. Confident and self assured and unconcerned with the opinions of her classmates.

  Cedric knew he was cool simply because of his football prowess. He was a defensive end and good at it. The team had made it to the state championships two of the last three years. Which meant that Cedric had somewhere to be most weekend nights. Parties with the cheerleaders where he clutched a beer in one hand and tried not to grimace through the awkward flirtations.

  He liked girls a lot. But he was clear-headed enough to not want to be one of his slobbering classmates, so desperate for a girl they’d hook up on public couches, half drunk and red eyed.

  Cedric was one of those rare high school boys who actually wanted a girlfriend. He fantasized about hooking up with Elena, of course, but he also fantasized about her coming over for dinner with him and his grandfather. He fantasized about driving her out to Far Rockaway so they could go to the beach when it got warm out. In his deepest fantasy, he was comfortable enough around her that he could speak as easily and naturally as he did with his grandfather. He wanted so badly to be comfortable enough that he could ask her how her day was. That he could tell her about his.

  Elena absently handed up some of the papers that he’d knocked off his desk, her eyes still on the textbook. “I was thinking that it might be cool to approach this project from a biographical angle. Like a profile on both Lee and Grant and compare them? But if you were thinking something else, I’d like to hear it.”

  “Oh.” He cleared his throat and flattened his palms on his knees. “No, that, uh, sounds good.”

  He knew a fair amount about the civil war. His grandfather was kind of a history buff and the two of them had done a whole Gettysburg vacation last summer. They’d listened to The Killer Angels on audiobook on the drive and Ced had thought the whole thing was actually pretty interesting. Because of that, he’d had a slim thread of hope that he wouldn’t come off like a complete dope during this project with her. No dice. Because he really didn’t know much of anything about Grant or Lee. Not beyond their tactical choices during specific battles. This was going to mean a lot of research.

  Cedric was not good at research.

  He imagined going to the library and pulling a biography off the shelf. In his imagination, it was dusty and four inches thick. The font was microscopic and half the words were in Old English. He was so screwed.

  “All right. Well, in that case, it probably makes the most sense for us to each choose one of them to research. After we’ve done that, it’ll be easier to come up with the places to compare and contrast in their lives and personalities.” When she said it, it just sounded so simple and logical.

  “Okay.” Dread unfurled in his stomach. There was no way he was going to be able to hide his learning disorder from her. Being an athlete bought him a lot of leeway from most of his classmates. To them, it just automatically made sense that he sat silently in the backs of classes. They thought he was too cool for school. They had no idea that he was just attempting to make himself invisible to his teachers.

  Elena grabbed the assignment rubric and began to talk with him about all the points they were going to need to hit in order to get an A. Something in Cedric’s brain just sort of shut off.

  He felt about six inches tall. He already knew exactly how this was going to go. He was going to grunt his way through his half of the assignment, feign disinterest and boredom. He’d pretend he was lazy, do a terrible enough job that she’d redo his work and they’d get an A all on her elbow grease. He’d feel like an ass and blow any chance that she’d find him interesting or attractive.

  Well, it was either that or lay it all out on the table. Look, he could say, I actually only have a fifth grade reading comprehension level and letters rearrange themselves in front of my very eyes. So unless you’re willing to go about a quarter of your usual pace, there’s literally no way I can help you with this project. By the way, I’m totally in love with you, which is why I can’t string two words together when you’re around. Also I’m probably going to sit exactly where you’re sitting and jack off after you leave. Total catch, right?

  Yikes.

  Yeah. Neither option ended up with Elena Vasquez being into him. Or probably even respecting him. So he might as well just go with the lazy, disinterested jock option and at least then there was the off-chance that she’d think his stupidity was a choice.

  “Cedric? Are you listening?”

  His gaze clashed with hers as she cocked her head to one side, her brow furrowed. Her tiny white sneakers were in a jumble on his floor. Cedric wanted to freeze them in amber just to commemorate her ever having been here.

  “Oh. Sorry. I was thinking about something else.”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “Football,” he lied immediately.

  “Oh.” He watched a light go off behind her eyes. “Right. I forgot you played. Okay, well, like I was saying…”

  Cedric slouched in his chair and listened to every single word she said, even as he desperately pretended not to care.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Twelve Years Later

  “Time for a quick drink before you catch your train?”

  Elena Vasquez tore her attention away from the environmental impact report she’d been fully absorbed in and blinked at the man in the doorway of her temporary office. It was David Cauley, her counterpart at the International Wildlife Conservation Fund and a very close friend. She blinked at him in confusion because he stood there in the dim, blue light of early evening.

  “Holy smokes, it’s six already? Thank god you came and got me, I probably would have missed my train otherwise.”

  He chuckled. “I thought that might be the case. I swear, El, you’re the only person I’ve ever met who can read an impact report like it’s a Michael Crichton novel.”

  “It’s scintillating stuff!” she insisted as she rolled her desk chair out and slipped her flats back on. Her desk was a mess, even though she’d only been stationed at the D.C. office for three days this time. Apparently, it was enough time for her to make it look like a mini-tornado had scattered papers to the four winds. She glanced at her watch and started gathering papers up, jamming them into her briefcase. “I have enough time if you don’t mind getting a drink by the train station.”

  “Perfect.”

  She’d known David would say yes to her condition. They were great friends, had been for years and they always looked for the extra moments in their busy schedules to catch up.

  She was heading back to New York tonight, where she was the highest ranking person in the IWCF NY office, but she always enjoyed her time here in D.C. This was where the non-profit’s national headquarters was located, and where all the bigwigs lived and worked.

  She finished gathering everything into her briefcase and tossed her duffel bag over her shoulder, giving a big sigh and a tired grin to her friend. “Shall we?”

  He held her door open for her and flicked the lights off in her office as they left. That was one of the many things that Elena loved about working with so many environmental nutcases: nobody left the lights on, or the sink running, everyone recycled and used every last inch of a piece of scrap paper before they threw it away, almost every employee had a water bottle latched to their backpacks so they wouldn’t have to purchase the plastic kind.

  The IWCF D.C. office was a thing of beauty. There were solar panels on the roof and huge windows in every room so that they could make use of the natural light in every way. The entire renovation had been done with all recycled materials, and all of their recent triumphs were photographed and displayed on the walls of the main hall like beautiful artwork. Seeing the sleek attractiveness of their recent re-branding sent a jolt of pride through Elena, but it also had her shaking her head.

  “What?” David asked, as she came to a stop in the main atrium of the building. She was craning her neck back
and peering up at the ten-foot tall photo of herself and David standing in the Sahel desert in Mali. Their grinning faces were covered in sandy grit, their arms thrown around one another’s shoulders, and a herd of elephants marched on in the distance. It was her favorite photo of herself ever taken.

  It was taken at the moment of her greatest triumph. But still, the sheer size of the photo had her chuckling self consciously.

  “Did it have to be quite this big?” she asked him.

  He chuckled too, his hands in the pockets of his perfectly tailored suit, every blond hair on his head immaculately combed to one side. He looked like a J. Crew model. David had two very disparate sides. There was the person he was when he was out on the job, like in the photo, sandy and disarrayed and fighting for the world’s wildlife with every breath in his chest. And there was the person he was when he was back in D.C. Utterly immaculate, his outfits curated down to the very last button.

  “How many times do I have to explain branding to you?” he asked her, attempting to pluck the duffel off her shoulder to carry it himself.

  She wiggled away, in a move that was completely familiar to both of them. She never let him carry anything for her. “I know, I know. The IWCF needed an update on its image, but I guess I don’t understand why that involves splashing my face all over the website and on photographs ten feet tall.”

  “Of course you don’t understand it, El.” He was looking down at her with a raised eyebrow and an inexplicable smile on his face.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she bristled as she followed him out of the atrium and down the stairs to the underground parking garage where the employees parked.

  “It’s not that you don’t see yourself clearly…” he started, his voice echoing in the dank, cavernous garage.

  “Oh lord,” she grumbled, rolling her eyes. How many times had they had this conversation before? A hundred, probably.

  “It’s that you just don’t see what everyone else sees when they look at you, El.”

  This was where he tried, again, to convince her that she was stunningly attractive.

  “You’re telling me that the PR department chose that picture of you and me to put in the atrium simply because we’re good looking people? How depressing.”