“You want to break out one of your fancy computers and see if your dad was able to give them anything helpful last night?”

Ari straightened in my arms. “Do you think they would’ve filed a report already?”

I considered her question. “Not normally, but given that your dad is who he is and with your brother being on the force, I bet they filed it right away.”

“On it.” With a practiced hand, she poured herself a mug of coffee and scooped a laptop off the counter before making her way to the table with it under her arm.

Her fingers flew as soon as she laid them on the keyboard. A tiny concentration line appeared between her brows as she worked, her attention focused on the screen.

Once I had my own cup of coffee in hand, I walked around the table to watch. Lines of gibberish appeared on a black screen as her hands worked some kind of magic spell I would never understand.

Until . . . I did.

The police department’s internal search screen popped up in a window.

“Wait a minute. You just hacked into the system in less than five minutes?”

A huff escaped her lips. “Less than two. Five would be sad. It didn’t even take me that long the first time.”

I blinked twice, and my gaze darted between her still-flying fingers and the screen. When she said she was good, she was telling the truth.

“Shouldn’t it be harder? Do they have any idea that people can do that? It seems wrong.”

Ari shrugged. “What’s wrong is the fact that the government won’t spend the money to secure its own sites, even though it knows about the vulnerabilities. A baby hacker could get in, although they might not be as good at covering their tracks as I am.”

The implications of what she was doing settled like lead in my gut. “You’re sure no one can trace this back to you?”

“It all leads back to an IP address in Bangladesh this time. I never use the same one twice,” she replied absently as she scanned the screen.

Her body was sexy. Her face was beautiful. But her brain blew me away.

“You’re incredible.”

She shrugged off the compliment. “We’ll see. I haven’t found anything useful yet.” She returned her attention to the keyboard. “But I will.”

Within moments, she had a police report on the screen that was filed in the early hours of the morning by the detective in charge of her father’s case, and I read over her shoulder.

“Your father reported that there were two assailants. Hispanic. In their twenties. Both speaking Spanish. Distinctive tattoos that have surfaced as being associated with a certain Mexican drug cartel in the last several years.” They’d also stolen his Saint Michael medallion, and I remembered Ari saying he’d never taken it off for as long as she remembered. Her mom had given it to him the day he’d graduated from the academy.

I could tell when she got to that part of the report by the tensing of her body. Silence hung between us as we both processed the details.

“I don’t get it. Was it random? Or are they trying to say there’s a connection to a prior case?”

I reread it. The report was incomplete, which wasn’t surprising given the time it was filed. “He was homicide and retired before the cartel became the issue it is today.”

“So it was random,” she concluded.

“It could’ve been.”

I didn’t tell her the rest of what I was thinking because I didn’t understand how all the pieces fit together yet, but my gut said this wasn’t random. These guys didn’t just go around beating up retired cops. They might have been arrogant, but they weren’t stupid.

My brother was killed in a cartel drug raid gone wrong, and my dad died while the cops were on their way to arrest him for being on the cartel payroll. This connection hit way too close to home, even if it didn’t make sense yet.

I read through the description Mr. Sampson had given again and committed everything to memory.

Ari finally lifted her hands from the keyboard. “This doesn’t make any sense, does it? Maybe they were just out and saw him as an easy target?”

“Maybe.”

Again, the answer didn’t sit right in my gut. Heath was IA, and his department was investigating my father’s cartel connection. He’d taken himself off the case, but maybe they thought he was involved and getting too close?

Ari turned to look at me, her eyes narrowed. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“I don’t know anything for sure, but something here isn’t making sense.”

She crossed her arms. “Tell me. We’re a team in this, right?” Her eyebrow rose, and I had a feeling this was a test.

“Yeah, we are. But this team keeps Ari safe and lets Rhett do the stuff that could be dangerous. If we’re talking about Mexican drug cartels, there’s nothing that’s safe about this, which means half our team is on the bench until I figure out exactly what the hell is going on.”

“But—”

“But nothing. This isn’t a game.” I met her gaze. “You have to promise me that you won’t go trying to hack into the cartel’s networks. Imagine the biggest, most lethal and ruthless corporation in the world, twist it up so it’s worse than even your nightmares can imagine, and then maybe you’ve come a tenth of the way toward understanding how friggin’ dangerous these people are. You don’t fuck with them. You do nothing. I don’t want them knowing you exist.”

“But if I can find a connection—”

I shook my head. “Absolutely fucking not. What they did to your dad would be nothing compared to what they’d do to you if you got caught snooping around. This isn’t a challenge, Ari. It would be a suicide mission, and I’m not letting you put yourself in danger like that. We’ll find another way.”

My seriousness finally sank in, and she nodded. “Okay, so no trying to hack the Mexican drug cartels. Got it.”

“Promise me.” I needed to hear her say it.

“I promise.” She paused. “But how are we going to find out who did this to Dad?”

I squeezed her shoulder. “You let me do what I’m good at—investigate.”

* * *

With the threat of a cartel connection, there was no way I wanted to leave Ari alone, and I wouldn’t have if Carver hadn’t been there.