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“Not the word I’d use,” Gavin said, approaching her.
“Me neither,” Agent Warwick concurred. His attention lingered on the door, then turned back to her. “You okay?”
She nodded, realizing she hadn’t answered Gavin when he’d asked. “I’m fine. Hardly got my heart rate up.” Agent Warwick’s lips kicked up into a ghost of a smile. With his dark hair, sharp features, and nearly black eyes, he was a good-looking man. And she’d be blind to miss the flicker of interest that flared in his eyes.
“Want me to remove the wire?” he asked. His left eyebrow raised a fraction of an inch when he asked. She’d bet that if the room hadn’t been filled with FBI agents, and now crime scene techs, it would have full-on waggled.
“I’ll get it,” Gavin said, striding toward her. She flashed Warwick a smile before turning her attention to Gavin. He looked none too pleased, although she wasn’t sure if that was because she’d been in a knife fight or because Agent Warwick had flirted with her. Either way, her way of dealing with it was the same, and when he was within reach, she tugged him to her and pulled him down into a kiss. The kind of kiss that left no doubt in anyone’s mind, let alone Gavin’s, where her loyalties lay.
He was smiling when she finally released him. “Are you really okay?” he asked, his hands gripping her waist.
“I’m fine. I wouldn’t mind losing this wire and then heading home for a nice long shower. Being in the same room as those three made me feel dirty. And not the good kind of dirty either.”
His smile broadened, and he dipped his head and dropped another kiss on her lips. “I don’t need to worry about Mr. Clean, do I?”
Epilogue
“To Jeremy,”Six said, raising her glass of champagne.
“To Jeremy,” everyone echoed. As she took a sip, her gaze traveled around the room of revelers, and she smiled. Although the criminal case had been resolved two months earlier—with guilty charges being levied all around—barely three hours ago, a jury had found Austin Fogarty and a number of executives of Shanti Joy, including Kaden Fogarty and Julia Newcross, liable for the torture and violations of human rights of their workers at the Indonesian plantation. It was the finding that Jeremy would have wanted. The one he had no doubt hoped for when he’d first learned what was happening at the plantation.
Thinking of her friend, Six’s smile widened. She truly believed that on this gorgeous fall day, Jeremy was smiling down on all of them—her, Gavin, Cyn, Joe, Nora, Devil, Heather, Abyasa, Candra, and Shinta—as they celebrated this victory. In some ways, it was a bit hollow—the atrocities shouldn’t have occurred in the first place—but if wishes were horses and all that. And today was not about lamenting everything wrong with the world and the people in it. Today was a day to celebrate justice.
And the new beginnings of the plantation.
During the investigation, the plantation had shut down. Without Shanti Joy there were no buyers, and with no buyers there were no paychecks. And given that the entire C-suite of the company (more or less) had been involved in the indictments in one way or another, there’d been no one to manage finding a contract for new buyers.
But no longer. Tomorrow, the plantation, operating under the new owners—who happened to be cousins of Devil—would reopen. And Candra and Shinta would return home to manage employee relations for the new company. Abyasa, on the other hand, had decided to stay in the Boston area and was currently taking cooking classes with a dream to open her own restaurant. The woman would do it, too. Not only was her food outstanding, Abyasa had more drive than anyone Six knew, and that included herself and her friends.
“Are you happy?” Gavin asked, slipping an arm around her waist and dropping a kiss on her temple. In the past five months, they’d been both living and working together. The lease on his apartment wasn’t up for another few months, but neither of them were kidding themselves that he was living anywhere other than with her in Cos Cob. Much to the dismay of their single colleagues.
It was still a little awkward to be in a relationship with someone who was, from an HR perspective, not as highly placed as she. But because they didn’t technically work together, they’d managed to get their relationship officially signed off on. She had no say over his assignments or his performance reviews, nor did she wish to. They might have learned to work together as agents for their respective governments, but if one of them were put in charge of the other, either as agents or as legal professionals, well, all bets would be off.
“Very happy,” she answered, tipping her head for him to kiss her, which he obligingly did.
“Good,” he replied. “Like happy enough to sneak upstairs and enjoy a little—”
“Fuck!” Devil exclaimed, cutting Gavin off.
Everyone swiveled their heads in her direction, but Devil kept her head down, focused on something on her phone.
“Devil?” Nora prompted.
Devil started muttering something in French as she furiously typed a message into her phone.
“What’s wrong?” Six asked.
Devil stabbed her phone with her index finger, presumably sending the message she’d finished typing, then looked up.
Her blue eyes landed on Nora first, then traveled to Cyn before settling on Six. “That was our new chief operations officer at the lab. He said there’s been a data breach.”
“How bad?” Six asked. Devil’s research wasn’t top secret, but there were top secret projects happening in other labs in her building. It was part of the reason she’d been assigned to that particular block.
Anxiety flashed across her friend’s beautiful features. “Five labs were hit, including mine. Two months’ worth of research is gone.”
“Gone?” Cyn asked, and Six understood why Cyn’s tone sounded confused. Unless someone was planning to ransom the data for money, very rarely was datataken in its entirety. More often than not, it was copied so that the hackers could expose it.
Devil gave a sharp nod. “Gone. Completely.”
