Chapter 5

Chapter Five

All morning, Cass had avoided the moment. Avoided thinking about the smoking gun on her computer. Avoided blowing up her life even more than the small piece she’d seen the previous evening had resulted in.

She’d welcomed Eveline and Teresa into her office because she’d needed the distraction. It was why she’d joined in with their conversation about Teresa’s impending motherhood. Eveline and Ox’s Vegas wedding and the silly names Teresa had tossed out.

For a few brief moments, Cass had felt normal. Like her life was her own. That everything she thought she knew was the truth and not the lie she’d discovered.

What she should’ve known was that Irish wouldn’t let it rest. After all, he’d elicited a promise to contact him the moment she opened up the file.

There’d been no reason to reach out because Cass hadn’t looked at it. Had subconsciously ignored it.

Yet, ignoring it wouldn’t make it go away.

The more she tried to forget about it, the bigger it grew until it was like a gigantic wave threatening to drown her.

“I’m not sure I want to.” The truth shuddered out of her, to her own surprise.

Irish took her hand, warming it between his two large ones. “I know you don’t, but you need to. You know you do.”

How Cass wanted to rage that he didn’t know what she was thinking. How could he know what was good for her when she didn’t even know?

“I don’t need to do anything I don’t want to.” She lifted her chin, a small display of defiance that wouldn’t work on Irish, and she hadn’t expected it to.

Mirth sparkled in his pretty blue eyes, turning them a brighter hue than normal.

She arched an eyebrow. There was nothing to laugh about.

“You don’t. I agree. But I know you, Cass.” His fingers curled a stray piece of her hair behind her ear.

His fingertip brushed the outer shell, and a shiver rippled down her spine.

“It’s already festering in your soul. You need to dig it out. Face it and then beat it into submission.”

God, she hated that he was right. However, what did she want right this second? Cass longed to lose herself in his arms. To have Irish haul her close and kiss her senseless like the night before, but that wasn’t going to happen.

The wave was slowly crashing down. It was sink or swim time, and Cass refused to sink. She needed to swim and conquer the beast she was turning the information into.

Without saying a word, she faced her computer. Her fingers hovered over her pink and white keyboard, before she typed a few commands, the clacking of the keys echoing around the room.

What she’d been working on before Eveline and Teresa had come in disappeared, and the life-altering file appeared.

In her peripheral vision, she caught Irish pulling up a chair and sitting beside her. He didn’t touch her. No reassuring squeeze of her thigh or forearm.

Disappointment swelled in Cass’s belly, but she pushed it down. She didn’t need this strength to do what she had to do. Over the years, she’d built up a resilience to people letting her down, starting with the people listed as her parents on the screen in front of her. Except, they weren’t her real parents at all. They were her guardians. Or so that was what was listed about them.

They were the only parents she remembered, but what did she really know about them?

“I never knew my extended family,” she said as she opened a new window and typed their names into the search engine. “Never met any aunts. Uncles. Grandparents. Or cousins. It’d always just been me and my parents.”

“Having family isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Even those by blood can let you down when you need them the most.”

Cass spared Irish a glance. The sparkle from earlier had disappeared from his eyes, and now they were cold. Ice blue cold. “There are some good ones out there. Angelo and Teresa won’t be anything but wonderful parents.”

“Maybe.”

How could he think that?

They were his friends. Didn’t he believe that they would do the right thing by their child or children?

“I think you’re wrong.”

“I hope I am. ”

Cass studied him for a few more heartbeats. The man in front of her had reverted to the stranger she’d first met when she’d started at Alliez. Not the man who’d held her or kissed her the previous evening.

Not pausing to examine why the shift in his attitude cut so deep, she scrolled through the hits her parents’ names had brought up. There weren’t many, and that wasn’t a shocker. If she wanted to find out who they really were, she had to dig below the surface.

Attacking the keyboard again, Cass spent the next few minutes getting the place she really wanted to. The place that had been listed by their names in the files, but she’d chosen to ignore until she couldn’t any longer.

With a ding, the CIA files for her parents popped up on her monitor. Their familiar faces looking back at her produced no internal response. No happiness at seeing their faces . No love filling her soul. There was nothing but an emptiness. They’d stopped being her parents when she’d gone to college. As far as they were concerned, they’d done their job, and it was over. They could get back what they’d been doing before she turned up in their lives.

Now Cass understood how neither of them had had any parental instincts. They were both CIA Agents. The very company that’d recruited her out of college. The same company that’d registered interest in her when she was eight.

She moved her mouse, clicking here and there, reading page after page. Beside her, Irish stayed quiet. Was he able to keep up with how quickly she was changing the screen?

Even if he didn’t read each word, like she did—speed reading came in handy—he’d get the basic idea of what her life was like.

Cass went to shift the mouse again, when Irish’s hand closed over hers, halting the movement. She looked at him, waiting for him to explain why he’d stopped her.

“You were just an assignment to them.”

“Looks like it. They had instructions to act as my parents. To provide me with a roof over my head and food in my belly. Nothing more. They made sure I went to school and got an education that the company could use.” She pushed away from the desk, needing to move, as agitation and anger swarmed like angry bees. Her office wasn’t huge but there was enough room to pace a little. “I was never going anywhere else but the CIA. They’d decided when I was eight that that was to be my life.”

Irish snagged her wrist as she went past .

She looked down at their connection, her skin tingling again.

The urge to fall into him and have him hold her was strong, but she didn’t.

Never show weakness.

The words her “mother” had muttered to her over and over resounded in her mind. For years, she’d grasped onto them and kept them close, when things had got hard at college. When life had become unbearable while she’d been working at the CIA.

“You got away from the CIA, Cass. You’re here, and you’re free to do what you want. You don’t answer to them at all.”

“Don’t I?” Cass snapped, flinging a hand at the screen. “That says otherwise. Who’s to say they aren’t watching me now? That they didn’t let me crack the firewall surrounding my file. A firewall that was more complicated than the one I was able to crack to find out about my parents’ life.”

“I won’t let them hurt you. I won’t let them take you back,” Irish said vehemently.

“You may not have a choice,” she said sadly. “I’ve always wondered why I was allowed to leave. I’d been told over and over how much of an asset I was. How instrumental I was to ensuring their operations were successful. And yet they let me leave without a fight.”

“Maybe they knew they were slowly suppressing you and felt bad.”

Cass laughed sardonically. Was he for real? How could he say that? “Tell me you don’t believe the bullshit that’s sprouting from your mouth? You of all people should know how things are twisted so a person looks bad, and not the military or the government.”

“I don’t, but sometimes they have a conscience. It’s rare, but it happens.” Irish canted his head to the screen. “They have information about the first eight years of your life, you know that. You just need to find it.”

He was right. If Cass had been given to her parents as an assignment when she was eight, she’d caught their attention before then. No way did they decide out of the blue that she was to be given to those people.

Question was—if the people she’d known as her parents for her whole life weren’t actually her blood relations . . .

Then who the hell was?

Determination fired through her. Cass would find out who she was. Where she came from. If she’d been snatched from her real parents, had they ever tried to look for her?

Had they mourned her thinking she’d died? Or had they handed her over without a moment of regret or remorse.

There was only one way to find out, and Cass was going to do find it. The CIA had trained her, but she’d honed her skills even more over the last few years. Had made connections and now could do things she hadn’t been able to do before.

Her fingers flew over the keyboard, her eyes darting from screen to screen as she punched in instructions and code. Behind her, Cass was aware of Irish leaving the office and closing the door quietly after him.

It should’ve hurt that he’d left her to her own devices, but she was also glad he wasn’t there. Once she got into the zone, an alien invasion could occur, and she wouldn’t even be aware of it.

Her attention turned back to the initial file she’d cracked. The first time she’d come across the folder title Red Feather it hadn’t been a surprise. How far it was hidden behind a firewall had been.

Cass knew every CIA agent, hell, everyone who worked there, had a folder with information about them in it. Yet they were easy to access. Of course, the top-secret ones had major security only a few could access, but it was like they wanted no one to access her details after she’d left .

Would there be two folders for her?

One with her code name, and one with her given name.

Shit, why didn’t I think of that earlier?

Finding that information out could be a challenge, but not really for her. She’d find it. The chances of locating something labeled Cassandra Whitehall would be slim, considering the last name given to her. Then again, maybe it would be that easy.

Only one way to find out—type in her name.

Time appeared to slow as Cass waited. Her heartbeat echoed in her ears. The cursor blinked slowly, as though it was thinking about it hard.

File not found .

Not the message she wanted to see, but not entirely unexpected.

“Fuck, I was hoping it was going to be that easy.”

Cass jumped, landing her hand on her heart upon hearing Irish’s voice. “I thought you’d left.”

“I did, but I came back about ten minutes ago, gave you a coffee, and you said thanks.”

Huh?

Sure enough, there was a coffee cup sitting on the coaster she always put her drinks on. Beside it was a cupcake .

Her stomach grumbled, and Cass picked it up, peeling the paper away, taking a large bite. A moan escaped from her as the chocolatey goodness from the cake and frosting caressed her tastebuds.

“Damn, I want to be that cake,” Irish muttered.

She looked up at him from beneath her lashes, praying her face wasn’t smeared with frosting and cake crumbs weren’t caught between her teeth. “Want some?” she held it out.

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to take your cake lover away from you.”

For a brief second she stared before laughter burst out. “My what?” She snorted, and immediately placed a hand over her mouth, as if that would erase the memory of the sound she’d made.

“You heard me.” Irish winked.

This was what she needed. Irish showing her that fun side of him. A side he usually only shared with her when they were alone. Yet, he’d shared it earlier with Teresa and Eveline.

She liked it.

Liked it a lot.

Cass finished her cake and tossed the wrapper into the trash can. The short break had been the perfect brain rest .

After focusing so long and hitting a brick wall, she’d needed this moment out of time to regroup and think logically about the problem.

Now that the idea had taken root, Cass was convinced there had to be another file about her. It was the only thing that would make sense.

Perhaps she was collateral damage from an operation the CIA had run. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d had to bring someone back. However, normally after a few weeks, they were returned to family members. If that was the case with her, then why hadn’t she been returned?

“I can see the wheels turning in your mind. Want to share what you’re thinking?” Irish asked, taking the seat beside her again.

“Just thinking through the problem. Trying to pinpoint different avenues of where I might be able to find information about me.” Cass shared her theory about being part of an operation.

“It’s not a bad idea to consider it.” He leaned forward and grabbed a pen and one of the many notepads she had piled on the left-hand corner of her desk, always within easy reach when she needed to scribble something down. “The earliest memory of yours is your first day of school. So that’s either August, or September, depending on where you lived. ”

“Or earlier. Some go back late July.”

“Right. You can put keywords in, yeah? You don’t need full sentences to find out information.”

“Correct.”

“Let’s start with these words—July, August, September, Cassandra, your parents name, and maybe the elementary school you went to.”

Cass would be lying if she said his help was annoying; it wasn’t. Her job was mostly solitary, although ever since Eveline had joined Alliez, she’d been working with her more, which she’d enjoyed.

Yet there something different about having Irish sitting next to her, throwing out names and ideas. It was natural, as though they’d done it a million times instead of this being the first time he’d helped her.

For the next fifteen minutes, they threw up different scenarios, but nothing seemed to hit.

No files turned up.

“What if we try another year or something? I mean this is the CIA. They could’ve created a fake birth certificate for me.” Cass didn’t like the idea that she could be older or younger than she actually was. That would be too weird.

“Worth a shot.”

At this stage, she was willing to try anything. The CIA was hiding something, which really wasn’t strange, considering who they were. There were many secrets in government agencies.

As well as the military. Just about every mission Irish had gone on while as a Delta had been top secret. She knew that because she’d worked on a couple, not his but other Delta missions.

Cass hit enter on the latest keywords she put in and waited. Her expectations were pretty low that something would come of these words, and if that was the case, then she’d try again.

This time when the computer beeped, it didn’t announce that the search was unsuccessful. The name of two operations turned up— Operation Fido and Operation Castle .

“Fuck, which one?” Irish muttered.

“Both. One or none. That’s the odds.” Cass’s fingers trembled as they hovered above her keyboard. “Which one should we choose?”

“Which is calling to you, Cass? Use your instincts. I know there has to be one.”

How had he known that about her?

That one of the names twigged a lost memory in her mind.

Cass closed her eyes and considered the two names, even though she’d already made a choice .

Without saying a word, she opened her eyes and clicked on the folder named Operation Castle.

Not surprisingly, it was password protected, but she had the password decoded in seconds and the file opened. Images filled the screen.

She gasped; her hands covered her mouth again.

Staring back at her was a man and a child.

A little girl.

Her.

It was her.

“Cass?”

She faced Irish, her tears causing his face to be blurry. “It’s me.”

“Yeah, Alastronia , it’s you.”

Why did he sound like he was sorry that it was her? Why did he look like he wanted to take her away from her office?

What was she missing?

Wiping away the tears, Cass redirected her attention back to the screen and read the names listed below the pictures— Manuel Ramirez. Daughter—Cassandra Ramirez.

Cassandra Ramirez.

No, it can’t be. I can’t be her.

She was, though .

Pain bloomed in her head again as the reality of who she really was sunk in.

She wasn’t Cassandra Whitehall, but Cassandra Ramirez. Daughter of Manual Ramirez. The former head of the Ramirez Cartel. Niece of Gomez Ramirez, current head of the cartel.

Cass was the daughter of a drug lord.