Page 5 of Wounded Fox
"You said you had something you wanted to talk to me about?" I asked impatiently of the man who was not only my friend but now my boss. I respected the hell out of him and any other time I would've given him the respect he deserved, but today wasn't that day.
"What the fuck crawled up your ass and died?" was of course Maverick's response.
For the second time today I dropped my head in shame. I should've stayed in bed when I had the chance. Today was clearly not one of my finer days.
"More like Maisie handed him his ass because she caught him stalking Valerie again," Hendrix unhelpfully answered.
My head snapped up and I glared at the man who was slowly becoming a pain in my ass. "Who the hell told you that?"
I certainly hadn't gone into that much detail when I snapped at him just seconds earlier.
Hendrix gave me a cheeky grin. "Maisie texted me before you came in."
Of fucking course. "So you already knew my day sucked when you made your comment." It really wasn't a question since he already admitted it, but Hendrix answered anyway.
"Of course I did. I just wanted to see if you would say something."
The motherfucker. I wanted to punch the smile right off his face. I barely resisted the urge. Instead I looked back at our boss. "You had something to discuss with me?"
"There's been a breach."
Maverick's words immediately put me on edge and had me glaring at Nolen, our resident computer expert. "I thought you said we were secure here?"
When I decided to move back to Willow Creek, my friends decided to follow me. At that point, Maverick was already looking for someplace to be a home base for his business and wanted us to join him. I begged for Willow Creek because Nolen assured me the people of the town would be safe from everything we’d done in the past.
"Not us," Maverick answered before Nolen could.
"Then I don't understand why the urgency to have me come in." Not that I was doing anything important but he didn't need to know that.
"Because the breachdoesaffect us."
I grabbed a chair and spun it around so that I was straddling it. With both arms on the back of it, I tried to keep the annoyance out of my voice when I spoke. "Enough with the riddles. What the hell is going on?"
It was Nolen who sighed and answered my question. "Someone hacked into a secure server and accessed the information about our last op before we retired."
Memories of our last mission, and the shit show it turned into, flashed through my mind. "Our names and personal information were redacted though, right?"
There were protocols for things like this that kept us safe. Only those with top government clearance were supposed to be able to see something as confidential as our last op had been.
"We were advised that there's a possibility they were able to obtain that information," Maverick said somberly.
My mouth dropped open but no words came out. This was worst-case-scenario kind of shit. The people involved in that op weren't just your typical pieces of shit. These were nasty motherfuckers.
"How?" The one word was a bit of a croak.
"They’re still trying to figure that out," Nolen answered.
I couldn't believe what they were saying. "Does the rest of the team know?" My friends weren't just operatives anymore. They had families and lives. Hell, Easton and Hendrix were raising kids.
"They do. I told them this morning while we were waiting for you."
I glanced around the office but the only person I found was Hendrix. I wasn't sure where the rest of my friends were, but Hendrix wasn't acting any different.
"Aren't you worried?" I hollered across the room to where Hendrix was sitting with his feet up.
"Nah, but Iampissed off." Hendrix played with a stress-relief hammer. "Now I have to worry about Maisie shanking another person, and me having to hide the fucking body."
That was a real possibility but I couldn't understand how he could act so casual when inside I was freaking the fuck out. "What about Olivia? Aren't you worried about her?"
