Darkest Night

by Megan Erickson

  “What?”

  “We don’t fight, we bicker.”

  “Whatever,” Fiona laughed.

  “We’ll stay in DC then,” he decided.

  She didn’t say anything, just made a happy sound.

  “And we’ll travel a lot,” he said.

  That earned him a, “I’d like that. Maybe Indiana.”

  He froze. “What?”

  “Visit your mom.”

  “Fi—”

  “I’d like to meet her.” She wasn’t backing down. “We don’t have to stay. We can pass on through, but we should stop in and say hi. She lost one son, don’t make yourself lost to her, too.”

  “You don’t know her,” he said tersely.

  “No, I don’t. But sounds like you two don’t know each other so well either. People change, J. Our mistakes, our decisions, everything in our past changes us, and you and I know that more than most.”

  She was right, damn it. “Fine, we’ll visit.”

  That earned him Fiona’s tits pressed tight against his chest and her breath in his ear. “Love you, J.”

  “Love you too.”

  “And I love this vacation.”

  Jock didn’t say anything because yes, this vacation was the shit, and there wasn’t a lot not to love.

  Then she went and did it. “Thank you, J,” she said into his ear.

  He lasted another fifteen minutes before he got them drinks to go and dragged her back to the hotel room. Then he proceeded to take off the bikini, and they didn’t put clothes back on for the rest of the day.

  When she was asleep in his arms that night, he stared at the ceiling. He did it grinning, and then he said to her closed eyelids, “No, thank you.”

  DID YOU MISS THE FIRST NAIL-BITING MISSION IN THE WIRED & DANGEROUS SERIES?

  Hacker extraordinaire Roarke Brennan lives each hour—each breath—to avenge his brother’s murder. Only now Wren Lee wants in too…and she’s the wild card he can’t control.

  Please see the next page for

  an excerpt from Zero Hour.

  Roarke stared at his orange juice, wishing there was vodka in it. Anything to calm his trembling hands. He’d slept like shit last night and was paying for it this morning with frayed nerves.

  His apartment in Northeast DC was his safe haven. One thirty-foot room on the first floor of an old warehouse with a kitchen on one side, a sitting area in the middle, his bedroom at the far end, and his bathroom with a shower stall behind a curtain. Normally he came here to clear his head, to forget about the last mission he’d completed before he had to focus on the next one. But now everything about this place made him think of his brother. So he wanted to burn it all to the ground.

  Flynn’s laptop sat on the scarred wooden table. On the lid was a peeling Green Day sticker and a scratch along the side where he’d dropped it on the sidewalk outside his apartment. Roarke remembered that day because he’d been juggling his Italian sub along with Flynn’s pastrami on rye while Flynn fretted over his laptop.

  Growing up, they’d always had each other’s backs. Their parents died in a car accident when they were kids, and so their legal guardian was Uncle Frank, their mother’s brother, who worked at a local factory. Frank made it clear from the first curl of his lip while he blew cigarette smoke in their faces that their presence wasn’t wanted in his home, but he was happy to hold on to the money left to Roarke and Erick by their parents.

  It was a mindfuck to go through the formative years of your life feeling like a burden. Flynn had been so young, and while he understood more than Frank probably thought he did, Roarke made it his life mission to be his brother’s shield. All of Frank’s hissed words, his derision, his utter contempt at having to provide their basic needs—Roarke stayed on the front lines of it all. He’d covered the inner scars with the ink on his outer skin, but it hadn’t helped much.

  When Roarke was old enough, he’d thrown himself into the Web—fandoms, chat rooms, any place where he could feel like he fit in. When he found a coding tutorial, he felt like he’d found a home. Within a year, he was doing minor hacks for pranks. As a teen, he did everything from hack into radio show phone lines to ensure he was the fifth caller for Pearl Jam tickets to writing open source code for other hackers to use. Of course, he’d gone too far once, and ever since he’d done his best to stay within the law.

  He’d been so proud when he’d shown Flynn some basic programming skills and Flynn showed natural talent. It gave them something to bond over, something that shut out the outside world. Roarke had scored a pair of old laptops for cheap when his school sold them because they’d upgraded the staff’s equipment. So he and Flynn sat huddled in the bedroom they shared, threadbare carpet beneath their toes and paint peeling around their heads. And they’d learned how to be a couple of the most elite hackers on the eastern seaboard. They’d been just kids, and it’d all been fun and games at the time, until it wasn’t.

  Roarke downed the rest of his orange juice and juggled the glass between his palms. Flynn’s face flashed in front of his eyes, and Roarke swore he could feel the heat of Flynn’s arms as he gave him one of his famous Flynn hugs.

  He cocked his hand and threw his glass at the brick wall opposite him.

  The crash and subsequent rain of glass shattered the silence. Juice and pulp dripped from the bricks as Roarke stood there, clenching and unclenching his fists as the anger burned through him, hot, bright, and sharp.

  Roarke was a fixer. Flynn had called him that. If there was a problem, he fixed it. He wasn’t about empty promises or platitudes. But he couldn’t fix Flynn. He couldn’t bring him back, and the helplessness was nearly crippling. Flynn, his little brother, with his big, white grin and lanky limbs and infectious laugh, was dead. He’d failed to protect him, and the way to get revenge was to place in danger another person he cared about—Wren.

  He closed his eyes and pictured how she looked last night, lavender hair framing her face, those bright red lips, that fucking body he couldn’t help but touch.

  He’d crushed on her as a teen, but as an adult, he fucking wanted her, like he’d never wanted anyone before, and wasn’t sure he’d ever want anyone else in his life. When all he’d had of her was links and lines of code, he could handle it, but now that she was back, in the flesh, all the rules he’d set for himself regarding her were breaking apart.

  Roarke had seen Darren Saltner a couple of times. He was a smarmy bastard. His touching her, flirting with her, thinking he was worthy of her attention was like a vice in Roarke’s chest. He’d wanted that to be his touch, his hands between her legs.

  Fuck, he was an asshole.

  As a teenager, he’d tried to ignore the gorgeous, charming younger sister of his best friend. He’d practiced his scowling in the mirror, as if it would ward off everything he was feeling for her, but it never worked. She’d tagged along with him and Erick, asking questions about programming. She smiled and laughed and always smelled like a dream—how did women always smell so good?

  So he did what a fuckhead teenage techie who was crushing hard on a girl did. He hacked into her online journal. Total dick move. He squirmed every time he thought about it.

  He didn’t know what he was looking for, maybe a poem where she professed her love for him? He sure as fuck didn’t find that. He found a whole manifesto about what she wanted for her future—a husband and three kids and a happy domestic life with a house in the suburbs and a dogwood in the front yard.

  That wasn’t him. Even at sixteen, he knew that was never going to be him. Erick and their parents placed her on a pedestal, and he didn’t want to be the person who dragged her off it.

  So he’d turned off the part of him that wanted Wren. That hadn’t stopped him from tracking her life as best as he could from behind a monitor. So maybe he’d done a little puppet mastering behind the scenes and made sure Wren never saw the strings. Watching her life for ten years through a web of links was not satisfying, but it’d been all he had.

&n
bsp; Which was why it burned him that he hadn’t known what she’d been up to with Dade. Dade Fucking Kelly.

  With a frustrated growl, he turned away from the mess he’d made and sagged against the wall until his jean-clad ass touched the floor. He stared at his bare feet, a roaring lion inked on the top of one and a sleeping lion on the other.

  So Wren was back, and she’d changed, but he hadn’t. He’d known since he was thirteen that he’d never have a normal life with a nine-to-five job. He’d always wanted to travel and play a little fast and loose with his profession. Hell, he paid taxes on only about a third of his income. The government thought he was a landlord. They had no idea his main source of income was from hacking. Hacktivism was the term he preferred, or white hat hacking. He wasn’t a criminal. He maybe did criminal things, but it was all in an effort to defeat the real bad motherfuckers.

  Flynn had been his sidekick, along with Erick, since they were teenagers. A couple of years ago, Flynn had said he wanted to get straight, have a family, and be an active member of society. So he got a job at Saltner Defense—a computer security software company—where he’d planned to work and pay taxes and fit into the general population.

  Until he uncovered something he wasn’t supposed to and paid for it with his life.

  Roarke stared at his hands, where GAME OVER was tattooed on his knuckles. He cracked them, deep breathing to get himself under control before the hot rush of anger took over and he did actually burn his apartment down.

  After glancing at his watch, he rose to his feet. He had a half hour to cross town to where his team was meeting in the basement of a warehouse he owned.

  He finished getting ready, grabbed a can of his ever-present addiction, Diet Coke, for the road, and was in his vintage Mustang within five minutes.

  Roarke owned an old warehouse in Southeast near the Anacostia waterfront. When he arrived, he tossed his empty soda can into the dumpster and entered the code to the door. The keypad beeped, and he opened the heavy metal door. It latched shut behind him as he descended the stairs that would lead him underground. After another code and another door, he entered the room where the team was gathering. There he found Jock, their best programmer, hunched over his computer at the single conference-style table in the corner of the room.

  Jock glanced up, his blue eyes taking in Roarke’s appearance before he nodded and resumed whatever he was working on. The man had earned the name Jock long before Roarke met him; it was a hacking term that meant using brute force tactics. One look at the six-four, two-hundred-fifty-pound Jock and anyone could see the name fit.

  Roarke met Jock—real name Jamison Bosh—on a job a couple of years ago when they were hired to hack into a terrorist cell’s network. Jock was a silent mastermind, stoically dismantling the cell’s communications until the leader lost contact with his team. It wasn’t until later that Roarke learned Jock’s brother—while on deployment—had been killed by the cell. He’d shown zero emotion, and when the task was done, he’d walked away.

  He knew Jock would understand why this was so important, to avenge the loss of his brother just like Jock had done. When Roarke asked the man to participate, he hadn’t hesitated.

  Marisol Rosa was the next to show up, the buckles on her black boots rattling as she stomped her way across the concrete floor. She blew a bubble of pink gum and popped it with a click of her teeth as she tilted her head. Her purple hair was shaved on one side and long on the other, so it draped over an eye as she took him in with purple contact-colored eyes. “What’s good, Brennan?”

  He could never figure out if she was coming on to him or punking him. Gender didn’t matter to Marisol when it came to loving and fucking, so it was anyone’s guess. “Pissed off.”

  She grinned at him. “Wouldn’t want you any other way.” After winking, she sauntered over to where Jock sat. She hopped onto the desk beside his computer, where she perched with her legs swinging. “Can I touch your beard?”

  He didn’t acknowledge her presence. She shrugged and smacked her gum. “Guess that’s a no.”

  Marisol was a little unpredictable, but she was loyal and crafty. She grew up in the Bronx surrounded by her Puerto Rican family, who had no idea they had a social-engineering mastermind in their midst. Marisol had an uncanny ability to ferret out information from anyone and could change her appearance and personality easily to slip into situations. Hacking wasn’t just coding, it involved using people skills. The greatest security threat was human stupidity, and Marisol had a lock on finding the weakest links. That wasn’t even getting into her coding skills, for which she’d served three years in the New Jersey prison system. She operated legally now, mostly, and Roarke had worked with her recently on a server’s security breach. She’d outsmarted every offense the hackers had thrown at her, smiling the whole time. It was all a game to her. But it was a game she played to win.

  Voices drew Roarke’s attention, and he turned to see Erick trudge inside, dark circles under his eyes. He glanced at Roarke and jerked a thumb behind him. “So she wore you down, huh?”

  Roarke shifted his gaze to the door as Wren walked inside. This morning, he’d wondered if he’d imagined the whole thing, the heat of her soft skin on his palm, the sound of her breath catching in her throat, the rise and fall of her chest.

  This was going to be a fucking disaster. He wasn’t impartial with Wren. She was a wild card he couldn’t control, and he couldn’t keep a handle on the emotions surging through his blood.

  And of course, she was looking as hot as ever. She wore tight jeans, a blue shirt that hugged her curves, and heeled brown boots. Her hair was pulled up onto the top of her head, and her nails were tipped with hot pink polish.

  Her eyes didn’t leave his as she made her way to where he was standing. Roarke had to force himself not to look at her breasts, which were close to spilling out of her shirt. He swallowed and looked at a random point over her shoulder.

  A wolf whistle sounded in the cavernous space, and he whipped his head around to see Marisol wiggling her eyebrows. “No one told me there’d be pretty eye candy on the team,” she said.

  There was a beat of silence before Wren started giggling. He narrowed his eyes at Marisol. “No fraternizing with other members of the team.”

  She rolled her eyes at the empty threat. “You’re a buzzkill.” She beckoned to Wren. “Come on over, sweet cheeks. I don’t bite, and I’m really good with my hands.”

  Roarke dropped his chin to his chest. “Fuck me.”

  Wren’s hand brushed his arm as she passed. When he glanced up at her, he saw the old Wren for a moment. The one with the innocent smile, who saw him and noticed his inner turmoil when no one else did. Then, in a moment, it was gone, lost beneath the click of her boots as she made her way over to Marisol.

  He thought belatedly he should have complimented Wren. Told her she looked nice. Smelled nice. Did something new with her hair. Wasn’t that how to treat women? He’d never been good at it. Lately, he relied on his tattoos and moderately attractive face to get women into bed. Wooing one? Fuck if he knew how to do that.

  Wait, there’d be no wooing. None at all. He shook his head. Enough with the distractions. It was time to rally the troops.

  He walked over to the table and stood at the end, drawing his laptop from his bag and placing it gently in front of him. Everyone took a seat except for Marisol, who still sat on the table, watching him.

  He took a deep breath. “So—”

  A door banged open, the sound like a shot, and every person in the room flinched. Roarke’s heart leaped into his throat as he whirled around to see Dade swagger into the room.

  Roarke’s shoulders dropped in relief. It was just this fucker. He resisted punching Dade in his perfect face. “Nice of you to join us.”

  Dade shrugged, and as he drew closer, Roarke spotted another cut on his eyebrow. What the fuck was this guy doing? He gestured to Dade’s face. “Is whatever you’re doing that’s making you bleed going to interfer
e with this mission?”

  Dade leaned against the wall beside the table, purposefully not taking a seat. “Nope.” His eyes scanned the table before landing on Wren, and then his lips split into a grin. “Hey there, Wren.”

  Marisol straightened. “Roarke said no frater—”

  “Everyone just shut up, for fuck’s sake,” Roarke growled. “Swear to God, this is like herding cats.”

  “Well,” Erick pointed out, “we’re your cats. That you handpicked from the shelter. So that’s on you. I prefer wet food by the way.”

  “My catnip is for medicinal purposes,” Marisol piped up.

  Roarke breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth before he committed multiple homicide. “All right, enough. I gotta go over why I got you all together. Some of you know the basics, and some of you know next to nothing.” He glanced at Dade, who stared back impassively. “So listen the fuck up, okay?”

  Roarke knew talking about this was going to be like ripping off a Band-Aid, one that took skin with it. He opened the laptop in front of him and tapped some buttons. An image projected onto the far wall. He ignored the oohs and ahhs as he focused on a picture of the graying, skinny, sallow-skinned motherfucker who killed Flynn.

  “This is Arden Saltner, owner of the computer security software company Saltner Defense. Two years ago, my brother, Flynn Brennan, decided he wanted out of hacking and was hired at SD in their research department.”

  He flashed the company logo. “His job was to analyze possible viruses and malware so SD could protect their clients from those threats. Everything was fine until he discovered a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in the latest release of the QuartzSoft Operating System.”

  He glanced around and found most people nodding, but he needed to explain everything so there were no team members left behind. “A zero-day is a weakness that is unknown until after a product launches, which gives developers zero days to fix it.” He tapped another button. “Some companies, like the developer of the operating system Flynn found, offer bounties for a zero-day. Flynn took his findings to Saltner—as he was supposed to do based on the rules in his department—who said he’d taken care of it and notify QuartzSoft. This was important because this vulnerability allowed a hacker to access personal information from OS users, like credit card numbers.”