The room went quiet as everyone processed the unprocessable. Our two enemy number ones might not be what they’d seemed. Not when it came to all this, at least.
And that reminded me: Trevor had to confront what had happened to him in Afghanistan, and why, all over again. “Are you doing okay, Trevor?” I broke the quiet and asked, eyes on the phone as I waited for him to respond.
“I’ll be fine. Past is past, right?” Trevor said over the line, then redirected before I could shut down that lie. “If Mitch was really alive, I’d still kill him for what he did to you, though.”
“And what did he do?” Hollis pierced me with her concerned gaze.
I’d forgotten she didn’t know what had happened before Mitch’s last deployment or that I’d been planning to get divorced. I wasn’t looking to relive that night right now—not with Gwen on the call trying to save the day.
“Something I kept from you to protect you,” I admitted, staying vague for now. “I was worried you’d want to do what Trevor still does and kill him. Now that I know the real you, it’s probably good I didn’t say anything.”
Hollis’s green eyes narrowed on me, hands flexing at her sides. Ready to do battle with a dead man. I’d been right.
“Anything yet, Gwen?” I needed to deflect, and fast.
“I’m almost there. Give me another minute. I’m close to solving this,” Gwen responded, and hopefully she’d save me from opening up about Mitch to Hollis.
I didn’t even know what to think about that man anymore.
What he did to me was still horrible and deserving of divorce, but did he deserve death? I didn’t think so.
Plus, hadn’t he died trying to do the right thing? Though, from the sounds of it, he wound up putting a target on my head whether he meant to or not by hiding the key with me, also requiring me to be there to unlock the—
“Wait,” I blurted, forgetting no one was in on my thoughts. “If the vault requires both Mitch and I to unlock it, then how do we get in? And Rhett must know that by now, right?” The blanket became a distant memory as I tossed it to stand. “Beau and Rhett didn’t know where to look for the key because they didn’t even know what the key was, right?”
“Rhett and Beau would’ve realized you didn’t know, either. So questioning you would’ve been pointless. They probably even discreetly searched your house back in Virginia while I was still in the navy. Maybe even before I started poking—” Trevor dropped his words and cursed. “I did it again, didn’t I?”
“Did what?” I spun around, staring at the phone as if Trevor was physically with us instead.
“I woke a sleeping giant. Rhett found out I was digging into Arlo’s death and Mitch’s crash. That prompted Rhett to dig deeper. He thought he shut everything down when he killed Mitch on the way to the safehouse after Chandler faked the crash, but then he discovered Mitch hid something in New Zealand prior to that.”
“And that’s when Rhett realized his mistake. He killed the only person who could tell him where and how to get the damning evidence,” Gwen chimed in.
“Which brings us back to how will any of us unlock the vault without Mitch?” Ryder asked, standing up.
“There has to be a loophole clause,” Hollis said. “Doubt the company wants anyone to know about that fine print to prevent people from taking advantage of it. But I bet if one party dies, legal death certification will trigger a fail-safe, allowing the surviving partner conditional access.”
“And that’d be me.”
“They knew they had a time limit in locating the key for the vault. They played the long game by placing Beau into your life,” my brother said as if all thehow’s andwhy’s were now clicking. “Get on the insideand try to find the key that way. But they ran out of time and had to accelerate the process.”
“Beau was the best choice. He knew Mitch the most. Stayed in contact over the years.” Hollis reminded us of what Hobbs’s files had revealed. “He’d know about hisHellsignature. Nickname for you. They twisted this all around to blame a dead man who couldn’t defend himself. And set the trap.”
“And we walked right in it,” Alejandro noted bitterly.
“Mitch went to my grandfather because of Trevor’s connection to him. He didn’t know who to trust until after he was in a safe location.” Gwen softened her tone when adding, “And maybe in Mitch’s own weird way, he was also trying to keep Audrey safe. You have to be alive to open the vault for whoever had the key, which made you off-limits from harm. For the year, at least.”
“Mitch had counted on Trevor to keep Audrey safe if the worst happened,” Alejandro commented. “He was relying on you two working together to finish what he started.”
“And now I know how Rhett convinced Beth to help,” Gwen shared, cutting through the tension in the room here. “He didn’t blackmail her; he threatened her.”
“You’re serious?” Alejandro scoffed, and I went over to stand next to him.
“Cipheria hacked a government-sanctioned mental health app embedded in a prison-simulation game that the Agency allows their inmates access to for an hour a week to help reduce behavioral issues. Text chat is supposed to be disabled.”
Gwen zoomed in on lines of code as they flashed across the screen. All gibberish to me.
“Cipheria reverse-engineered the platform. Built a hidden back door into the app’s code, then used a cached server log to find Beth’s ID.” She paused to let us absorb what I never would. I knew piano notes, not cyber code. “Reconstructing the deleted conversations now. One second.”
