Saving Rain Read online

  Agent Lawson stares at her, temporarily bewildered by Raina’s reprimand, caught off guard by this side of her that he has never seen.

  As what she has just done starts to sink in, the quietness of the room brings her back to her surroundings. She feels all eyes on her, and regret bites into her, not at what she said, but how she said it. “I’m sorry,” he tells her.

  She hears the truthfulness in the words, and she looks up to see Agent Lawson’s regret mirroring hers. She stands there, not knowing what to say or do, but much to her relief, Agent Lawson gives a curt nod and walks back to his desk. Raina is left standing alone, in the middle of the room, as the hubbub returns to its normal chaotic efficiency.

  Quickly turning, she throws the door open to the nearest bathroom, locking the door behind her. She barely makes it to one of the stalls before she vomits, her stomach purging itself of the grotesqueness of all Claudia disclosed of what the men did to her and from the memories of her own experience of a man’s unwanted, sickening touch. The words she viciously threw at Agent Lawson ring in her head, and even though she stands behind them, guilt fills her at the knowledge that he has to hear the horror of these girls’ experiences every day. Rationally, she knows that he has to shut himself off for sheer self-preservation.

  She leans against the cold metal wall of the bathroom stall and slowly slides down, wrapping her arms around her knees. She makes a promise to herself that she will do all she can to help stop the abhorrent madness enslaving these girls.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Kas is reviewing the file on the raid he and his team completed a couple weeks back. He’s engrossed in searching for similarities, anything that ties the two groups together, when Frank, an agent on his team, bursts through his door. Irritated by the interruption, Kas raises his eyes sharply.

  “Man, you should’ve seen it! That girl of yours has a backbone of steel going up against Lawson like that.” Frank’s face is flushed and full of stunned admiration, “I’m telling you, it was epic!” Frank throws his hands up in the air for emphasis.

  Kas drops the file. “What are you talking about?” he demands, standing up and walking around the desk towards Frank.

  “Raina went off on Lawson’s arrogant ass, putting him in his long overdue place,” Frank states, his smile as wide as a kid’s in a candy store.

  Kas listens to the play by play recount of the altercation between Raina and Lawson, pride bubbling up inside him.

  Frank slaps Kas on the back as he turns to go, “He actually apologized! You’ve got a keeper there, Pierce.”

  Kas just now registers Frank’s earlier words, calling Raina his girl. Pride and longing fill his heart, wishing that those words were true. “We’re not together, Frank,” he tells him, trying his best to keep his voice free of foretelling emotion.

  “Yeah, whatever you say, boss,” Frank smirks at him, giving Kas a look like he’s the last one to get the punch line of a joke as he leaves.

  Kas sits back against his desk, blindly staring out at the commotion going on in the room in front of his office. He’s lost in his thoughts, thoughts dominated by flashes of Raina and her tenacity, her kindness, her innocence. He hangs his head and rubs his hands roughly through his hair. He knows just how hopelessly in love he is with her, and it’s killing him.

  He’s disgusted with himself at how he’s led numerous raids, went up against three men at a time, but he can’t find the courage to tell Raina how he feels. He has felt a change between them, they have grown closer, that he’s sure of. There’s no denying that there have been moments they have shared when their eyes have proclaimed the unspoken words. He’s seen her feelings for him growing in her eyes, and he prays that her feelings are at least half as strong as his are for her. Shaking his head gruffly, he pulls himself together and heads out to find his girl.

  Raina rinses her mouth out and splashes water on her face as she stares at herself in the mirror. Her reflection seems so untouched, so far away from what she has been through. A dark blanket of sadness takes her breath away at the knowledge that Claudia has suffered by the hands of so many ruthless strangers, a multiplied magnitude of what she has experienced. Her mind flashes over Claudia’s words as the tears ran down her sweet face when she told of the man who lied to her, betrayed her, then gave her to who she had called El Diablo, to sell to every paying customer.

  Raina burns the image of Claudia’s lovely face, stained by tears and despair, in her mind as she vows to never forget her, or the others, as they do what they can to stop as many traffickers as humanly possible. She pops a piece of gum in her mouth and composes herself before she unlocks the door and steps out, running smack into Kas.

  Kas catches Raina as she stumbles backwards, “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Raina says quickly, smoothing her shirt nervously.

  Kas grinds his teeth, ignoring her choice of words. “I heard what happened.”

  Raina flushes and drops her gaze to the floor.

  Kas gently tilts her chin up with his finger, “What’s wrong?”

  “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  Kas laughs, “Sweetheart, there’s a line of people longer than the lines on Black Friday that have been wanting to tell Lawson off for years.”

  Raina shakes her head, “Maybe, but I still didn’t have the right to tell him like that.”

  Kas ruffles her hair and pulls her in for a quick hug. “Really, don’t sweat it, sometimes it takes a strong dose of medicine to hit the spot.”

  Kas playfully knocks the bottom of her chin, “C’mon, sweetheart, Erik’s waiting on you.”

  With all that she has heard over the last hour and a half, she has almost forgotten about cracking the computer. Relief seeps into her, grateful for a task that she feels competent at handling, a task that will once again give her a brief escape from harsh reality.

  Raina follows Kas upstairs into a room the complete opposite of downstairs. The walls are a cheerful creamy yellow, the lights are soft, none of the stark fluorescents, and there is a myriad of musical genres that can be heard that somehow blend superbly harmoniously.

  A tall brunette with killer legs and a bright red smile greets them, curiously eyeing Raina. “Welcome to the geek sheik room, I believe that’s still what everyone’s calling it,” she says lightheartedly, waving her hand in the general direction of the room, “I’m Alicia.”

  Raina sees that Alicia’s eyes have reverted back to Kas, and a stab of jealousy pricks her as she witnesses Alicia’s eyes roaming greedily. Either Kas is clueless, or indifferent, Raina can’t quite tell, but she is relieved nonetheless when he takes her hand and leads her through the happy, spacious cubicles to an office in the back. She takes in the cheerful decor full of comical computer lingo that only people who work in this realm would understand. A dusty blond head turns around to face them, and Raina is immediately reminded that stereotypes are sometimes false as a hunk of a man smiles at them behind stylish frames.

  Kas shakes the man’s hand and smiles in Raina’s direction. “Erik, this is Raina.”

  Erik’s eyebrow rises in appreciation of what he sees, and he takes her hand, kissing it, his flirtatious gaze never wavering from her bashful one, “Enchante.”

  Raina blushes, and Kas stiffens slightly.

  “Back off, lover boy, she’s here to look at the recovered equipment,” Kas tells him only half-jokingly, pulling Raina a little closer to him.

  Raina’s heart patters the Rhumba at Kas’ subtle claim of her.

  Erik gives her another appreciative once over before handing her a laptop and turning all business minded. “We’ve been using the Digital Forensics Framework, ran various algorithms, including k-means clustering, but we keep coming up empty.”

  “What about SSH, cryptographic algorithms?” Raina asks as she starts clicking away on the keyboard.

  Erik shakes his head, frustration apparent in the tight lines framing his face, “All have failed to produce anything.”

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sp; Kas listens to them easily chatting away in foreign terms, trying and failing miserably to keep up.

  Raina continues to work the computer, her fingers moving at such a fast pace, Kas can’t tell what she’s typing. Erik, however, is looking over her shoulder intently, “What algorithms are you using?”

  Raina shrugs vaguely, “Some I’ve used that are excellent at cracking codes.”

  Erik continues to stare over her shoulder, engrossed in the material spewing across the screen that looks like childish gibberish to Kas.

  “No freaking way!” Erik states excitedly a few minutes later, clearly impressed by what he is seeing. “Did you find that IP address through the side channel attack?”

  Kas stares at the screen, still mystified about what all Erik’s excitement is about.

  Erik steps back and looks at Raina admiringly, almost reverently. “You’re an Elite Hacker,” he states incredulously, before a look of worry and slight mistrust glazes his blue eyes, “you are a white hat, right?”

  Raina laughs, “All legal, scout’s honor.”

  Erik looks between her and Kas before visibly relaxing. “Need a job up here?” he offers with sincerity, not skipping a beat.

  “Hey, you can’t steal her, she has a job...working with me,” Kas reminds him, still in a stupefied state, which is really beginning to grate on his nerves.

  Raina gives Kas a placating smile and rolls her eyes playfully before turning back to the screen. “Give me a minute to finish the rootkit and I’ll install a sniffer. If you can let me look at one of the laptops they got from the raid today, I’ll look for similarities, and maybe we can do a Trojan Horse.”

  Erik leaves and returns seconds later with another laptop and places it next to Raina before backing up to stand next to Kas as they watch her work. Once Raina has hacked the second system she pats the seat beside her, requesting Erik to help search for shared data as she installs a sniffer to aid them. It doesn’t take long before similarities emerge.

  Kas paces the floor behind them, not dealing well with the fact that he can’t jump in and help like he usually does. He’s used to leading teams, not taking the back seat. The majority of him is fiercely proud as he watches his girl hacking the systems like a kid playing on a playground, but there’s a small part of him that is going crazy not being able to assist her.

  Kas decides to grab his files and do some investigating, the traditional way. He spreads the two files out side by side on the desk with a print out of the commonalities. Together the three of them spend the next hour tracking and tracing until they find one common denominator where information keeps pointing to a heavily coded word. Raina runs a different, even more complicated algorithm to break this code. She tilts her head and studies the screen with narrowed eyes when the word appears. Kas and Erik stare at the word, not knowing its meaning.

  “Prizrak,” Kas carefully plays with the word, looking for hidden meanings in the unfamiliar text.

  “Ghost,” Raina quietly explains.

  “What do you mean?” Erik asks quizzically.

  Raina turns to both of them somberly, “Prizrak is the Russian word for ghost.” She looks at them, too many emotions to identify dimming her eyes. “That makes sense, in a way he is a ghost, covering his tracks so he isn’t traced. Claudia said none of the men referred to each other by names, making it harder to identify them. She gave good descriptions though and tried her best to tell which ones had accents and the country she thinks matches the accents she heard.”

  Two hours later, they have exhausted the information they have in front of them and have found a back door to one of the common links.

  “It will take me a few moments to install a Trojan. Once they access this, we’ll have access as well.”

  Erik holds his breath as Raina works her magic, “Please be careful, don’t let them detect you going in.”

  “I’ve got it,” Raina assures him calmly.

  Once Raina has successfully finished the task, and Erik’s breathing has begun to return to normal, Kas turns to both of them and points to the computer. “Can someone now tell me what the hell you just did...in English, please?”

  Kas stares at Raina proudly as they ride the elevator to the parking deck. “You did a great job today, Rain.”

  Raina smiles and shyly replies, “Thanks.”

  The elevator doors bing, and they step out into a cold wind whipping at their bodies as they rush to the jeep. Raina looks out at the day that has turned quickly from sunny and mild, to wet and gloomy, and shivers as Kas opens her door, and she climbs into the jeep. Kas slides into the driver’s side, quickly slamming his door, turning the heat full blast.

  “I mean it, Raina, you were amazing today with Claudia and hacking those computers.”

  The love Raina has for Kas magnifies when he says Claudia’s name. She’s noticed how he takes the time to learn each girl’s name that they rescue. She also knows that there are too many to memorize, but she loves him so deeply for trying.

  Kas brushes the hair away from Raina’s face and rubs his thumb soothingly across her cheek. The brief sadness in her eyes is almost his undoing before she masterfully slams the fortress gates again. He studies her for a moment, lost in such a heady mixture of love, respect, awe, and concern. It’s all he can do to not pull her onto his lap right then and there, in the middle of the parking deck, and declare his love for her. Instead, he swears silently at his cowardice and turns the ignition.

  The rain beats relentlessly on the windshield, and he can barely see, even with the wipers at full speed. Kas steals a glance at Raina, who is deep in thought, staring out at the rain. “Do you like Thai food?”

  The random question shakes through the fog in Raina’s brain, “Yeah, I love it, actually.”

  A big smile spreads across his face, and he winks at her, “Great, because I know a place where they make the best Thai food around. I’m going to treat you to dinner for a job well done.”

  Raina’s stomach growls at the mention of food, and she smiles appreciatively. “I think it’s past my turn to buy you dinner, Agent Pierce.”

  “Huh uh, not today, this is your reward for getting us a lead on another group of traffickers.”

  “All three of us worked on that lead.”

  “Well, you were the one to hack the computer and put in that Trojan Horse thing, so don’t argue with me, young lady,” he teases.

  “Yes, sir,” she mocks a salute before turning to him with a sincere smile, “thank you.”

  Kas makes himself tear his eyes away from her so he can concentrate on the blurry road in front of him. He grins in disbelief at her gratitude over a simple dinner when she just did in a few hours what a room full of their best geek sheiks couldn’t do in three weeks.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The rain slacks to a cold drizzle as they sit in a corner booth, finishing their dinner. Raina pushes her clean plate away and grabs her stomach, “If you keep feeding me like this, I’m not going to fit into my clothes anymore.”

  Kas laughs, happy that she cleaned her plate again, “We’ll buy you new ones. Gaining a few pounds wouldn’t hurt you at all, anyway.”

  Raina sips at her orange Cha Yen Thai iced tea and swirls the straw around pensively.

  “What’s going on in that smart, pretty head of yours?”

  Raina slaps at him playfully, “Just thinking.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “I was just thinking how nice it is to sit here with you after the kind of day it’s been,” Raina admits, smiling before a pang of guilt slams into her when she thinks of Claudia, wondering when and if she will ever be able to enjoy a nice dinner with a man ever again.

  Kas sees her complacency morph into guilt, and he reaches across the table and grabs her hand, making her drop the straw back into her glass. “Don’t do that to yourself, Rain. Don’t feel guilty for enjoying yourself. You didn’t take anything away from Claudia or any of the others. You deserve to enjoy yourself just like they d
o, but if you punish yourself by taking away your pleasure because they don’t have any back yet, you will no longer be able to help them. You have to live, feel the pleasures and enjoy the gifts of life so they can see that in you and they don’t forget. You have to give them something to look forward to, Rain.”

  Raina looks up into pleading eyes, knowing Kas is right, but it’s so much easier said than done. She won’t spoil his evening. Plastering a smile on her face, she looks out the window, “Look, the sun’s coming out.”

  Kas doesn’t tear his gaze away from her; he can see the evening sun’s rays slowly spread across her face through the window as it peeks behind a cloud. She is breathtaking, her face sparkling in the sun, her eyes as green as the brightest jade. He looks at her full, luscious lips and almost falls apart when she picks up her tea, closes her succulent lips around the straw, and takes a long sip. Not being able to stand the torture any longer, he grabs the check. “Ready to get your things from the cabin?” he asks quickly.

  Raina pouts when he doesn’t wait for an answer and takes the tea from her hand, setting it down on the table, pulling her behind him. “Can I at least get it to go?” she asks, looking back at the deserted tea.

  “No,” he practically growls as she looks up at him, her innocent eyes bewildered with his sudden gruffness. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath before relenting. Suppressing a very needy groan, he kisses the top of her head then asks for a Thai iced tea to go as he pays the check. He’s rewarded with Raina beaming at him and is again lost in disbelief at how something so small and simple can make her so happy.

  The last rays of the evening sun have cleared away all of the clouds by the time they pull into the drive to Raina’s cabin. She looks out into the field and is amazed at the beauty of the rain-coated grass glistening like diamonds in the rays of the sun. It’s hard to believe that something so horrible and ugly happened to her, less than two weeks ago, in the exact place where nature’s beauty is currently showing off in all its splendid glory.