Chapter 34 #2
“He’s received no odd payments, he hasn’t gone through any files he shouldn’t, and he seems to just clock in, do his training and his job, then go home.” Jaxon shrugged. “If it wasn’t for the way he keeps getting set up, he’d be pretty boring.”
From the way Jaxon phrased it, he wasn’t convinced of Zeus’ guilt. Neither was Mason to be honest, but he wasn’t going to presume innocence either.
The elevator doors opened, and the man himself stepped out, along with Jensen and Miguel from Harris’ team. All of them looked grim, so Zeus’ expression indicated nothing out of the ordinary.
Grant stepped forward to open the door for them, so they didn’t have to use their key cards. If Zeus noticed that almost everyone was looking at him, his expression didn’t show it. He zeroed right in on Drew, who had dropped his head down again and was letting Darcie tend to him.
“What the fuck happened?” Zeus asked in apparent bewilderment. “I was barely gone for an hour.”
“Someone came in during that time. The cameras looped, so we don’t know who, and they got the drop on Drew.” Claudia went through the events in a clipped tone, her gaze focused on Zeus, as was Mason’s. He wanted to see the other man’s reaction.
Drew grunted again, unhappy at being reminded of the fact that someone had managed to get him from behind. On the other hand, going at someone Drew’s size made most people take pause, even highly trained operatives. Maybe especially highly trained operatives.
“Why did you leave when you did?” Lincoln asked, and despite the circumstances, he managed to make himself sound curious rather than accusatory.
Still, Zeus stood a little straighter. He was no fool; he realized what it looked like. To be fair, it made it more improbable that he’d have set things up like this, when Mason thought about it.
“Noelle called me. She said she got home and thought there was someone in her house, and she was scared.” Zeus’ tone was wooden. Flat.
Mason had the feeling he was angry, though it was debatable whether he was angry at Lincoln for questioning him, the situation in general, or Noelle. He would be stupid not to wonder if it was a setup, considering the reason they’d broken up. It could easily be Devlin again.
But she must have sounded convincing.
“I thought you two broke up,” Jensen said with a frown.
Zeus shot an exasperated glance at him.
“We did.”
“Tell me you wouldn’t go check out your ex’s house if they called you saying they were scared,” Darcie said, frowning at Jensen and then shooting that frown around at everyone else. “Every single one of you.”
“Yeah, but… she cheated on him.” Jensen was still frowning.
“I told her to call the cops, but she said she had, and it had been ten minutes, and they still weren’t there.” Zeus’ tone still had no inflection. He could have been recounting the weather. It was clear he didn’t feel like he should have to share all this information.
“Did she seem truly scared?” Harris asked, frowning.
“She did, or I wouldn’t have gone.”
“It could have been a double setup,” Mason offered. “If Devlin didn’t care about scaring her, he could have sent someone to her house to mess with her, figuring she would call Zeus if she couldn’t get in touch with him.”
Everyone looked at him.
“The way your mind works is scary sometimes,” Miguel muttered.
“Only sometimes?” Jensen asked, shaking his head. “That’s so fucking convoluted… how could he be sure she would call Zeus?”
“Maybe that’s not what happened, and she’s just a really good actress.” Mason shrugged. “We might never know.”
Zeus stood silently. He was watching Lincoln and no one else. While the trust of the team mattered, it was Lincoln who would make the final decision. If he was worried, it didn’t show on his face.
In some ways, that had likely been to his benefit for a lot of his service, but Mason wished he was a little easier to read. It would help right now if he wasn’t so closed off.
On the other hand, he couldn’t really blame the guy.
Either he was being set up and was indignant about being mistrusted, or he was actually working for the other team and needed to act like he was being set up and indignant about being mistrusted.
Sunday turned into a workday.
With the cameras looped, everyone had to check everything. They had no idea what the intruder had gotten into, where they might have gone. The whole afternoon was spent going over the office with a fine-tooth comb. Everyone was grim, Zeus particularly so.
If anything, he’d become more closed off than ever after this incident.
At this rate, even if the guy was innocent, Mason wasn’t sure how long he was going to last at Black Fox. This was a hell of a lot of pressure to work under, with everyone mistrusting him.
The most unnerving part was that no one found anything.
Nothing had been taken that they could tell.
Lincoln and Harris had double-teamed Devlin’s old office, even taking the paintings off the walls in case he’d hidden something behind them.
No one could figure out why there might have been an intruder, which meant that they were all feeling particularly paranoid.
For all they knew, the only reason had been to set Zeus up.
Which was a suggestion Jensen made while they were eating dinner around the conference room table.
It was clear, he wanted to believe in Zeus’ innocence.
Mason and Drew were more skeptical. David and Claudia were hard to read, though Mason had a feeling they both were swayed more toward his and Drew’s skepticism; they just did a good job of hiding it.
“What if—” Claudia was just starting to talk—probably to present another option of why someone might have broken in, since that’s all they’d been talking about, round and round—when Mason’s phone blared.
Loudly.
His heart jumped into his throat as he jumped to his feet, shoving his chair back and leaving his half-eaten dinner in front of him.
“What the fuck is that?”
“The bakery alarm!” Mason was already on his way out the conference room door when he heard David roar behind him.
“The what?”