Abandoned and Unseen (Branded Packs #2)(44)

She blinked. “What?”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“But I’m so close.” Without warning, she pulled away and turned to open her large leather bag. Reaching in, she pulled out a sheet of paper. “Look what I brought.”

Sinclair unfolded the paper, his lips twisting at the letters and numbers that were dotted in random spots.

“I’m looking, but you’re going to have to decipher this.”

She moved to stand close to his side, her light floral scent teasing his senses.

“It’s fragmented,” she said. “I pulled it off an old CDC hard drive.”

Sinclair sent her a startled glance. The outbreak had happened so quickly and with such virulence that there hadn’t been time for anything but survival. And even after the vaccine was created, there’d still been years of turmoil. The last thing anyone cared about was keeping records. So when the SAU had started their crusade to destroy all evidence of the human’s culpability in manufacturing the virus, or the shifter’s assistance in saving their asses, no one did anything to stop them.

“How did you get your hands on it?” he breathed in shock. “I thought the computers had all been destroyed in the fire?”

The shadows were momentarily banished from her hazel eyes as they shimmered with excitement. Once Mira had committed herself to helping the shifters discover the truth, she’d jumped into her task with a passion that had both amused and intrigued Sinclair.

“I told you the last time we spoke that I’d had an idea of how to resurrect the dead,” she reminded him.

Unable to resist temptation, he reached up to tug on one of her satiny curls.

“I thought you meant zombies.”

She looked startled before giving a soft laugh. His humor was so rare it always caught people off guard.

“Not zombies,” she corrected. “Novo-Auction.”

Sinclair had heard of the online website where you could buy and sell items from pre-virus days.

“I don’t understand.”

“I developed a program that would run a search for the recycling service that was contracted by the CDC.”

Sinclair shook his head. “What kind of recycling?”

“The old CDC electronics before the fire. I figured there had to be a few computers that were sent to the recycling center that had research about the virus still on the hard drives.” She flashed a shy smile. “It took a long time. In fact, I’d given up hope. But I finally got a hit.”

“Fuck.” He studied her with a renewed sense of wonder. Sometimes he forgot just how smart she was. “That was brilliant.”

She blushed. “I was lucky.”

“No. There was no luck involved,” he murmured. “Only skill.”

Her blush deepened. He’d never met a woman who was so uncomfortable with compliments. “There were two old computers listed for sale, and I bought both of them,” she hastily continued. “In one, the hard drive had been replaced, but the second one was original.” She pointed toward the sheet of paper in his hand. “That’s how I managed to retrieve that small bit of the original files that hadn’t been fully overwritten.”

Sinclair didn’t even glance at the paper. He’d just realized the sheer depths of the risk she’d taken. She might as well have put a target on her back.

“Shit,” he snarled, glaring at her pale face. “You didn’t have the computers sent to your house, did you?”

“Of course not.” She made a sound of impatience. “I’m not stupid. I used a false identity to buy them and had them delivered to a temporary mailbox.”

“Hmm.” Sinclair swallowed his cutting words.

She’d only been trying to help him. Even though she had to know that she was putting her life in danger.

“Do you want to discuss what I discovered or not?” she demanded.

He forced himself to nod. She would learn soon enough that she’d taken her last risk.

“Tell me.”

She pointed to the top line that was printed on the paper.

“This is an email that’s dated one year before the virus hit. It’s addressed to a Dr. Lowman. I can’t tell whom it’s from, but it mentions the words ‘unstable’ and ‘pandemic.’"

Sinclair studied the garbled note, trying not to jump to conclusions. The CDC, after all, had worked with dozens—maybe even hundreds—of pandemics over the years. Still, if this Dr. Lowman had known anything at all about the Verona Virus before it started to spread, they needed to see if they could track him or her down.

“Did you do a search on Dr. Lowman?”

“Of course.”

“And?”

“He was a doctor at the CDC,” Mira said. “He died of an unexpected heart attack just six months before the virus started to spread.”

Sinclair sucked in a sharp breath. He didn’t want to leap to conclusions, but then again, he didn’t believe in coincidences.

Had someone tried to warn the doctor about the dangers of the research going on at the Verona clinic? And had the doctor tried to stop it? Or had he known too much?

“Any family?”

“He had a wife and two sons.” She paused, tilting back her head to meet his gaze. “One of the sons worked for a private research lab.”