“Well, you look good for forty-three.” Ryder gave me a hesitant smile, clearly trying to lighten the mood. “Are you, uh, okay, though?” He reached for my arm. “You actually look a little pale now that I’m—”
“I do feel lightheaded,” I admitted.
“Why don’t you get a bite to eat? You didn’t have breakfast yet.” Ryder gestured with his head toward Reed. “Will you take her to the kitchen and make sure she’s taken care of?”
Reed stepped around Ryder and offered his arm, clearly worried I couldn’t walk without help.
“It’s going to be okay,” Ryder reassured me as I remained frozen, stuck there in shock at everything I’d learned.
I wanted to believe him. To cling to his words as fact, not just hopeful sentiment. But from the sounds of it, Mitch had sucked us deep into hell. And last I checked, no one ever made it out of there alive.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Alejandro
Ryder rested his hands on the back of the couch, letting go of a steady breath, and I felt something coming. Something I didn’t want to hear. “There’s something we need to consider doing.”
My blood went cold, and I clenched my back teeth as I waited for the wound at my side to be peeled open again. “I’m not talking to her. I can’t.”
“Doesn’t have to be you, but right now, we have one close lead tied to Stratos. And while Will Hobbs may be dead, Beth’s not.” Ryder circled the couch to confront me head-on. “If she was close to him, maybe he told her something he shouldn’t have?”
I tore my hands through my hair, doing my best not to spin out. “I’d rather talk about the conversation you overheard upstairs than discuss my ex.” Totally normal morning. Nothing weird at all about any of this.
“You want to talk aboutthat?”
My hands landed at my sides like two grenades, pins pulled. “Pick your poison. But one woman makes me want to jump from a cliff, and the other one makes me feel like I already fell.”Shit.
Ryder lifted his hands, nostrils flaring. Anger or concern? I wasn’t in the best state of mind to get a good read on my team leader. “Which woman is which?”
Forget grenades in hand—Iwas the ticking time bomb. Ready to go off. “Ignore me.”
Ryder gripped the front of his neck and rotated his head. At least he wasn’t wrapping a hand around my throat.
“What about Beth’s stuff?” I forced out as a memory punched through me. “I have a few boxes in a storage unit in DC. Stuff the government gave me of hers after she was locked up since she has no living family. I said I didn’t want it, that I was her ex, but they made me take it anyway.”
“You think there could be something in there that might help? Notes? Calendar and shit like that?” Ryder adjusted course back to where I needed him to be. You know, out of my head and not talking about my feelings.
“Maybe?” I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s stuff I should’ve just burned.” Including our wedding album. Our life together had somehow fit into one box, and the things the government had forced me to take fit into the other two.
“I’ll ask Natasha to send someone to your storage unit and go through everything. We may have more luck with those boxes than talking to her.”
I rattled off the information for my storage unit and then demanded, “If it comes to talking to Beth, though, let me make myself crystal-fucking-clear: no immunity deal.”
“Trust me when I tell you that I’d never let that woman go free. You have my word.”
“Good. Glad to hear,” I grunted.
Eyes on his phone, he shared, “Just got a text from the Secret Service, checking in to let me know all is still good on the home front. Our families are secure.”
Thank God for that.“Audrey’s mom know she has eyes on her?”
“No, Audrey doesn’t want her to know anything. Guess she takes after Trevor there, thinking it’s safer for her to be in the dark. But she also mentioned to me on the drive here yesterday that she’s barely spoken to her mom since Thanksgiving, so her silence might be for other reasons.”
He needed to wipe that guilty look from his face pronto.
“Thirty-three years growing up thinking one thing, only to find out another ... Plus, she missed out on having you as her brother all that time. I can’t say I blame her.”
“I’m not her mom’s greatest fan, since she knew my dad was married when she hooked up with my old man, but at least Audrey didn’t have to feel abandoned her whole life the way I did most of mine.” He blinked a few times as if shocked he’d made that confession to anyone other than the woman he loved. “Anyway,” he said after an awkward throat clear.
