Chapter 10 #2
Elin folded her legs beneath her and tugged her cardigan tight around her middle as if it could hold in the sensations still buzzing through her system.
Work should have settled her. Instead, her brain ran sparked a live wire, and her traitorous body still hummed from the way Liam coaxed her past the point of all thought and into the forbidden territory of feeling.
She forced her attention back to the email headers. Charles Silverton’s inbox was just a landfill of normal work correspondence. But one thread…that was the diamond found in the trash.
She isolated the path. Then she went still. “I got it.”
Dante rolled his chair over until his shoulder nearly brushed hers. “Pentagon.” The word came out as murmur.
She puffed out a breath. “He mentioned the Pentagon.”
“So he did.” He reached for her keyboard, then stopped himself before taking over her job. “Mind if I?”
She pushed the keyboard his direction so he could set his fingers to the keys. Sure enough, Dante uncovered the same pathway she had—an email account leading directly to a man who worked in the Pentagon.
The room seemed to hold its breath with them.
After a long beat, Dante exhaled, slow and even.
“Wouldn’t be the first time a businessman was moonlighting as a villain.
” His mouth tipped at one corner with a smile that was absolutely humorless.
“Cipher wasn’t born under a rock. He was CIA before he took the job of worldwide terrorist. It’s a classic comic book villain story really—mild-mannered analyst meets radioactive classified file, wakes up convinced he’s the new manager of global chaos. ”
Against her will, a corner of her mouth twitched. “You’re not wrong.”
He gave her a brotherly nudge. “If there’s a thread, you’ll find it. Let’s keep at it.”
They jumped back into their work, and the deeper she dug, the more she began to see the situation with the handlers was as instable as a gas pipeline built on top of a volcano.
The clock rolled past 0100. She should have been yawning after the long day she’d already put in. But her mind was too alert to shut down and her skin was hypersensitized from Liam’s thorough, mind-blowing touch.
She needed some distance, not only for the op, but for her heart. And so far, he hadn’t given her any indication that they weren’t just falling into bed for old time’s sake.
Sex was just sex. Except her chest ached in a way that called her a liar.
Focus. She split the thread she’d been working to unravel, losing herself for endless minutes before she let out a gasp.
Dante spun his chair to look at her. “What ya got?”
“The Pentagon contact. He’s the handler of all the handlers.”
He whizzed his chair over to her station to stare at her screen. “Or the hand that feeds the handlers.”
“You think it’s Cipher himself?”
“No. He’s too smart to put himself in the line of direct fire that way. Who is this guy?”
She typed in a hasty search that brought up his government ID. “Name’s Adrian Douglas Kent. Only the bare basic of social media accounts. Doesn’t look like he posts anything but the occasional photo of an office picnic.”
“Clean. Too clean. Any ties to Daniel Sheen? Cipher’s real name.”
For long minutes, there was only the clack of the keys as Elin searched under hidden layers. Finally, she shook her head. “Nothing on record.” The hair on her nape prickled anyway. “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
Dante leaned back in his seat, arms folded. He stared at the wall of feeds as if the answer might pulse on the monitor if he looked hard enough.
“What are our options?” she asked.
“Ping this Kent guy and see who answers.”
“That could set off a chain of events we aren’t prepared for.”
He nodded. “We send a team in the way we did with the Canadian.”
The screen swam in front of her vision and she only saw a foyer, small shoes by a door and heard a dog’s panicked bark.
“No.” Her voice cracked. “Not that. Not again.”
He nodded once. “We have to consider the risk.” He pitched his voice lower. “If we stop him, all the fail-safes could pop. If he’s removed from the string of command, the eleven handlers could act.”
She pressed her thumb into the hinge of her jaw until it hurt. “Then there’s only one other way.”
Their gazes met.
“Face to face,” she said. “He won’t click a link. He won’t take a call. He’ll go to ground. So someone has to go in person.”
In her head, she saw Liam in that interrogation room with Silverton. While it was terrifying, his confidence, his control, was hot as hell.
“It’s risky, but it’s our only shot.” Dante nodded as if solidifying the plan in his mind. “You can continue following every email from Kent to the other eleven handlers…or we go straight to the source.”
“It could be bait.” She bit down on her bottom lip.
“I’ll flag it to Con.”
She brought up a fresh document and began to summarize everything she found and she and Dante had discussed so it was on the record.
When footsteps sounded in the hall, Elin’s entire body jolted with electricity. She’d been listening hard to every set of footsteps in the house, just waiting for the pattern that belonged to one man.
Don’t, she told herself. She looked up anyway.
Liam stepped into the lab and stopped, gaze raking over her like she sat there as naked as she’d left the bed hours before.
On the surface he appeared composed, but the tightness around the corners of his smoky blue eyes gave him away.
Her heart seemed to grow legs and climb the rungs of her ribs to lodge in her throat.
“Con wants a brief.” His gaze was steady on her. He didn’t look at Dante.
Dante pushed to his feet and walked to the printer. Realizing he required the paperwork to hand to his CO, Elin hit the print button. The soft whoosh of the paper moving into the machine was quiet beneath the throb of her heart.
Liam’s focus locked on her. Did she imagine that glint in his eyes? Had she imagined the same glint when he hovered over her…moved inside her?
With the fresh printout in hand, Dante paused in the doorway. “Elin?”
She looked up, past the wall of chiseled man who rocked her universe.
“Yes?”
“You did good. Get some sleep.”
She nodded at Dante’s praise, but she saw his gaze shift to Liam, questioning if it was a good idea to leave them alone.
She gave him a slight nod, and he walked out.
She flattened her palms on the desk to ground herself. Unsure what to say or even do next, she stood with the intention to skirt past Liam and rush to bed.
Alone, she told herself firmly.
He had other ideas. In one step, he blocked her path.
“Liam.”
Their gazes held for too many heartbeats to keep track of, especially when hers was fluttering in her chest.
“I need to sleep.” She took a step around him, and his long fingers shot out and lashed around her wrist. Gentle. So damn gentle that tears prickled in her eyes.
He ran his fingertip over her pulse point, and the corner of his lips tipped at finding her pulse tripping so fast. “Sleep with me tonight.”
It wasn’t a request. It came out as a rasp that strummed every nerve in her body.
Her throat ached on words that would sting and hurt him the way he’d hurt her.
But the way he was looking at her made all of them die in her throat.
She felt herself nodding.
Was she walking into another heartbreak…or into the one place she’d always belonged?