Damage Control (Valiant Knox)

by Jess Anastasi

  He wanted to blame it on the stress of everything that had happened in the past week—the traitor in his ranks and getting shot at. But he got the feeling this particular type of insanity stemmed from the temptation of Mia and nothing more. He had to get a handle on this. Bad enough that he’d coerced her to work with him on illegally accessing the Knox’s systems to find the traitor in his ranks. Forming any kind of intimate relationship with her would be like committing career suicide. He might as well take the CAFF insignia pins off his shirt and vent them out the nearest hatch, because kissing a subordinate was pretty much doing the same thing.

  He shook his head at himself and straightened his posture as the transit arrived on squadron level. That kiss hadn’t happened. It was as simple as that. He’d had one lapse in control. Considering his sterling fourteen years serving on the Knox, he was going to chalk it up to being overdue for some kind of small infraction and forget about it.

  His comm chimed a little before twenty three hundred. Leigh set aside the reports he’d been writing on his datapad and leaned over to grab the device where he’d left it on the coffee table.

  As expected, the message had come from Mia, letting him know that everyone in her dorm room had fallen asleep, and she was ready whenever he was. He sent back a reply to say he’d meet her in an hour at the dorm transit.

  Truthfully, he was itching to go grab her right now and get to Kerrin’s apartment as soon as they could. And though it was late and most people would be in bed, aside from the skeleton crew who ran the night shift, there was still a chance they could run into someone. If they left it until closer to midnight, hopefully they’d minimize the possibility of getting caught.

  It had occurred to him earlier today that Stanton had more than likely already removed any possible evidence from the apartment. But he needed to see for himself, needed to at least go through the motions so he could be satisfied that he’d covered every angle and done everything possible to find the traitor in his squad.

  The following hour trickled by with frustrating slowness. He couldn’t concentrate on his reports anymore, knowing what he was about to go and do. He was nervous like a rookie facing his first battle, worried about getting both himself and Mia caught. Sneaking around and breaking into people’s apartments wasn’t in his skill set, and there was a very good chance this hunt for the mole could fail spectacularly before it had even begun. In the end, he took his datapad, left his apartment, and made his way up to the recruit dorms after only forty minutes, sending another message to Mia to let her know he was on his way.

  When the doors opened on the dormitory level, Mia stood waiting. He waved her on, then tabbed the transit screen to close them in.

  “Here.” He handed her his datapad. “The first thing you’ll have to do is find out which apartment Kerrin Hershel lives in.”

  She nodded, her expression far more somber now than it had been when he’d talked to her earlier this afternoon. Maybe the gravity of the situation had sunk in. Or maybe she was having second thoughts about helping him. Whatever the case, he needed her committed, needed to know he could rely on her.

  “Look, Mia, I know that I all but strong-armed you into helping me today, but I want you to know that I wouldn’t have done that if I had any other choice. It’s okay to have cold feet or be nervous about what we’re doing, but I need to know you’re with me a hundred percent.”

  She looked up from his datapad, seeming a bit more together now. “I’m not worried about what we’re doing. I spent half the afternoon thinking of all the ways a CSS mole—or several moles—could totally screw us. Most scenarios ended with the Knox exploding into a gigantic fireball. I’m not going to lie, it completely freaked me out. I am so with you on this.”

  He hadn’t realized how tense he’d been about securing her agreement to work with him until he heard the words, causing a coil sitting in his guts to unwind. He hadn’t let himself think too closely about the fact that he’d coerced her into cooperating since he’d left her dorm that afternoon, but apparently the guilt for it had still been sitting heavy and thorny within him. But if she was here because she was just as concerned for the welfare of the Knox and everyone on board, then no matter what happened from here on out, he could trust that she would be doing everything in her power to keep their secret and protect the integrity of this little mission they’d embarked on.

  His datapad chimed in her hands, and she glanced down at it again. “Kerrin Hershel lives in apartment one two seven on the beta housing level.”

  Leaning past her, he punched the destination into the screen.

  Neither of them said anything else as the transit took them down into the apartment levels of the ship, tension tightening through his shoulders the closer they got to their destination. When they arrived, he held up a hand to indicate she should wait and stuck his head out of the transit to check if anyone was in the corridor. Just as he’d hoped, it was empty.

  “Come on, it’s clear.” He exited, Mia just behind him, and they hurried down the passageway until they found a door marked with one two seven.

  As they stopped in front of it, Mia had already turned her attention to his datapad, biting her lower lip while she concentrated, a strand of her golden hair falling forward from the messy bun she had it shoved into.

  Just when he’d started lecturing himself about not getting distracted by the way her teeth dragged over her full lower lip, the door clicked open, and Mia sent him a satisfied grin.

  “I did that in half the time I thought it would take.”

  “Let’s celebrate your breaking-and-entering skills later.” He set a hand on her upper back and ushered her inside, stealing one last glance up and down the passageway to make sure no one was watching them. It was only after the door closed behind them that it hit him.

  “Goddamn it, I didn’t consider the security feed in the corridor.” There’d be footage of them entering this apartment. Shit, he was not cut out for this kind of sneaking around. Never mind Mia slipping up. At this rate he was the one who was going to get them into hot water.

  “Oh, I can take care of those easily enough. I’ll just scrub them or replace the footage or something.” Mia walked farther into the apartment, casting a curious look around. The apartment was identical to every other apartment on the ship, but of course, Mia hadn’t seen any other living space except the dorms.

  “You might want to do it sooner rather than later. Stanton could have people watching this place for all we know.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at him. “Stanton?”

  “He’s a Command Intelligence agent, one of the senior ones.” Leigh went over to the hall table and yanked open the single drawer. Empty. Well, that probably wasn’t a good sign. Frustration started crawling up the back of his neck as he went over to a desk on the adjacent bulkhead.

  Mia dropped onto the couch. “Okay, you look for whatever it is you came here for, and I’ll get to work on the cameras so there’s no trace of us even coming onto this level.”

  Putting Stanton and his worries about getting caught out of his mind, he focused his effort on searching every square inch of the apartment. Unsurprisingly, the place had been cleaned out, no evidence that anyone had even lived here as recently as two days ago. The frustration at yet another failure to get any answers had set into his muscles with taut heat. He slammed the bathroom cabinet door, making it swing back out again. CI had been thorough, not leaving a single scrap of paper or personal item behind.

  He’d already considered the possibility before they’d come up here. Still he was disappointed and irritated about the lack of any clues. He checked the time on his personal comm as he left the bedroom, finding it was just after oh one thirty. He headed back into the main room and went over to drop on the armchair adjacent to where Mia sat on the couch.

  He dragged a hand though his hair as fatigue caught up to him all of a sudden.

  “Find anything?” Mia lowered his datapad to her lap.

 
; He shook his head. “What about you? Did you get the security feed sorted out?”

  “We’re good to go. And I started a program that’s going to mine UEF personnel files and put together profiles on all the fighter pilots in your squadron. If anyone’s trying to hide anything, hopefully this program will find it.”

  “Efficient.” And impressive. At this rate, he might be able to out the bastard traitor in his squad within a matter of days. For the first time since Yang had told him there might be a mole under his command, he felt like he’d gotten some footing back.

  “I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you look really tired.” An edge of something too close to sympathy entered her expression as she stared at him.

  His first impulse was an automatic urge to deny it, but he caught himself.

  “It’s been a long couple of days.” The words came out slowly, because he wasn’t used to being so candid, especially with someone he was only just getting to know.

  “I’ve only know about it for a few short hours, and it’s already doing my head in. I can’t imagine how much worse it must be for you, especially since you’re in charge of everyone.” She reached up and set her fingers on his shoulder, smoothing downward over his biceps in a comforting gesture, but then seemed to belatedly realize what she’d done and snatched her hand away again.

  Instead of doing something totally moronic like revealing he enjoyed it when she touched him, he shifted, angling his body away from hers as she avoided his gaze.

  “Yeah, it hasn’t exactly been a highlight of my career,” he muttered. Yet strangely enough, until a second ago, he’d felt more relaxed sitting and talking with her about it than he had in ages. Maybe it was simply because he’d been able to share the burden with someone. Or maybe it was the way she looked at him with those expressive, dark eyes.

  Whatever the case, things were straying too far toward personal again, when he’d vowed this afternoon that after that slip up with the kiss, things between them would stay platonic and professional. Opening up to her about exactly how this situation weighed on him wasn’t exactly conducive to staying detached.

  Voices echoed in the passageway and Mia straightened, casting a worried look toward the door. He shifted to the edge of the cushions, holding his breath until the conversation faded again, whoever had been out there moving on.

  Maybe if they’d found something, it would have almost been worth getting caught. But since this had been a bust, he didn’t want to face Yang or Stanton for a gamble that had gotten him nowhere.

  “Come on.” He stood up, sidestepping past the coffee table. “We better get out of here before our luck runs out.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Mia stifled a yawn behind her hand, trying to get her brain to keep up with Captain Alphin’s lecture on survival skills. The daily, early morning, rigorous drills before the session definitely hadn’t helped her exhaustion levels. After she’d gotten back from the little midnight mission with Leigh the night before, she’d spent another few hours on his datapad, working a few kinks out of her program before she was completely happy with how it was running.

  Using Leigh’s datapad was a little weird. Every time she logged onto the device and the screen background appeared—it showed a younger Leigh, Sub-Lieutenant Rayne, and two other men she didn’t recognize—she had a moment of total surrealism, feeling like she was invading his privacy somehow.

  Although technically he had all but coerced her into helping him, she could honestly say that even if he hadn’t held her illegal activities over her, she still would have agreed to help him. Yet, she worried whether or not she could come through for him without getting them both caught…when she wasn’t distracted by the incredibly stupid mistake she’d made before he’d left her dorm room. God. She’d kissed him. Sure, he’d said that it had been his fault, but that was just him being all noble and responsible.

  She had no idea what had possessed her in that moment. Actually, she totally knew and didn’t want to admit it. She’d been fighting it, denying it, ignoring it. And what had that gotten her? In that moment, when he’d stood there looking down on her, his gray-blue eyes sparking with humor, the forbidden thrill of flirting with him chasing through her, she’d gotten ambushed by all the ways she’d tried not to notice him, and all logic had abandoned her brain. Somehow, she’d ended up against him, and then she’d pulled him into that kiss.

  But holy mother, what a kiss it had been. It had lasted no more than a second or two, but it had burned her from the inside out in a way she wouldn’t ever forget.

  And it had mostly been fine. Despite a brief explosion of butterflies in her stomach, she’d thought she had herself well in hand until she’d walked onto the transit. Seeing him had triggered some kind of auto-response, causing a sensory recall of the moment she’d been up against him with his mouth on hers. Yeah, in that millisecond she’d been far from the logic of everything wrong with a relationship between them, instead swamped by exactly how exhilarating it had been and the deep gouging need for more.

  How much of an idiot could she possibly be? Things were already dangerous and complicated. Adding any kind of personal feelings to the mix was just asking for things to get messy.

  On top of it all, this morning’s drills had nearly killed her, and the following session had dragged as she’d fought the exhaustion from staying up so late the night before. She hadn’t been able to find anything, either. Maybe the answer was in the actual transit car the shooter had used to escape. In the end, she’d only gotten three hours sleep before getting up again to skip breakfast and drag herself straight to class.

  Now that the lecture was finishing, she hoped to grab a quick lunch and a quick nap before the class went into the PT room for the afternoon’s drills and practical activities on survival. At some point she needed to tell Leigh her idea, but had no idea how she was supposed to arrange that. She supposed he would find time to see her when he could.

  Her name being called pulled her attention up from the admittedly poor notes she’d taken over the morning.

  “Recruit Wolfe, since you spent half of the morning yawning through my lecture, you can stay behind and explain to me exactly which parts of survival training you found so boring.” Leigh’s voice had an aggravated edge to it, and though she assumed he was actually keeping her behind to ask her if she’d found anything, she could almost believe from his harsh tone that she really was in trouble.

  “Sir, yes, sir,” she replied as Kayla sent her a sympathetic glance.

  She walked to the front of the room and stood by the lectern as the other recruits filed out, while Leigh stood nearby looking pissed. Her heart skipped a nervous beat. Maybe he really was angry that she’d constantly yawned all morning. But she’d done her best to conceal it.

  Once the last recruit left, he walked over and swiped a hand over the door control to close it. When he turned back to her, he no longer looked angry, and she breathed a silent sigh of relief.

  He walked back toward her. “From how tired you look, I’m assuming you were up late last night working on the project instead of getting that sleep I ordered?”

  She nodded. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to put so many hours in, but I guess once I got going, time kind of slipped away from me.”

  “Then am I right in assuming you found something?”

  A small kernel of excitement lit up within, the same one she’d gotten last night that had kept her working so late. “I tried to pick up the shooter’s trail, but the utility levels are like a maze. The security camera coverage is pretty poor. There wasn’t much chance I was going to find him, which is exactly why he picked there to disappear. So I focused on finding whoever helped him by messing with the transit IDs and cameras.”

  “And?” Leigh leaned against the lectern, staring at her expectantly.

  “Well, I didn’t find who it was, but I was thinking maybe if you checked out the transit car the shooter got into, you could see if it had been tampered with at the so
urce.”

  “Less than twenty-four-hours in and you’ve already got us a lead.” He seemed more than a little impressed as he stared at her. “We’ve got an hour until the afternoon session starts. Let’s go track down that transit and see what we can find.”

  He pushed off from the lectern and started to step past her. “Wait, you’re going right now? And you want me to come?”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “You’re all in, aren’t you? And since we’re looking for one specific transit car, I’m thinking I’m going to need your skills.”

  The kernel of excitement turned into a full surge of anticipation. Really, this wasn’t meant to be fun, it was serious and dangerous, but the idea of sneaking around the ship with Leigh was apparently enough to quell any anxiety she might have felt.

  “Okay, let me duck up to my dorm room to get your datapad.”

  “I’ll meet you at the transit near the gym in ten minutes. Now wipe that smile off your face and start looking like you’re about to cry because I just reamed you for yawning through my class this morning.”

  She tried to settle her face into a more serious expression, but failed miserably.

  Leigh shook his head at her, but a grin kicked up one side of his lips. “You are terrible at this. Remind me to give you a few lessons in keeping things under wraps later.”

  Him smiling at her like that definitely wasn’t helping her put on a sad face, because she felt nothing but buoyant at the sight of his amusement over her apparent lack of acting skills.

  “Off you go, we’re on the clock.”

  “Okay, okay.” She turned away from him, and as she approached the door, she took a settling breath, making a more concerted effort to appear miserable. Luckily, she didn’t see any of the other recruits as she navigated the squadron level and went down to the dorms. She grabbed the datapad and made it back to the designated meeting spot well before ten minutes were up, but found Leigh already waiting for her.