“Unfortunately not.” Wyatt had already collected the boxes from the storage unit, but I wasn’t sure if they’d done anything with them yet.
“Good. The teddy bear you won for me on our third date at Six Flags ... inside is a flash drive. When Will was sleeping, I downloaded a copy of his hard drive. You just never know who you can trust, and in case he ever turned his back on me, I needed something to hold over his head. He never betrayed me, so I never had the need to try and decipher what I’d downloaded. Everything is heavily encrypted. You’ll need the best cyber expert out there to make sense of the files.”
I called her out on that. “Bullshit. A woman like you doesn’t sit on leverage like that. The file may be encrypted, but like hell would you not have taken a look yourself.”
She lifted one shoulder, trying to act innocent.
“Check on the story,” I asked Reed, but he didn’t budge. Hesitancy crossed his face. The man was afraid to leave me alone with her. “It’s fine, go.”
“Time’s about up,” the guard said once Reed had finally left. He circled her chair and unhooked her cuffs from the table before forcing her to stand.
I was waiting for the moment when she’d try to escape. That moment didn’t come, and that made me more uneasy.
“Alex,” she said, thankfully not using my full name that time. “I do hope you take that bastard down, but don’t die doing it. I still want that meeting.”
“Why?” I couldn’t help but ask. “Why do you need to see me in person?”
Now that she was closer to the screen, I could see something there I couldn’t before. Something that didn’t make any sense. Either my eyes were playing tricks on me, or the ice queen was—
“To apologize to the only man in my life who ever actually gave a damn about me.” There was a touch of humanity in her tone I wasn’t sure I could believe. “It took me being thrown in here to remember the woman I was before I became jaded by work. And now I remember the girl I was on that date when you won that bear. And while I don’t think I deserve your forgiveness, I’m hoping that maybe because of that big, trusting heart of yours, you just might do it anyway.”
“You’re sure?” Ryder paced the living room by the fireplace in front of the couch where Audrey was sitting, raking a hand through his hair.
“It looks like Mitch was part of the Stratos reboot. In fact, he could have provided this security company everything they needed to kick it off, since he was part of the original group. It may have been all his idea.” I thought back to what Beth had shared. “That’s, of course, assuming what Beth said checks out.”
Ryder stopped walking and faced me, but he remained quiet. Not ready to believe my ex—and who could blame him? I couldn’t believe I was standing there doing exactly that myself.
“Helix International is on the list of PMC’s Gwen and Natasha drew up as possibilities, and Beth was on that mission with Mitch along with Helix,” I pointed out. “Mitch is clearly good at collecting dirt on people and using it to apply pressure to get what he wants. If Beth didn’t lie, it looks like Mitch was manipulating people into helping Helixwhen they couldn’t buy them off. And since this wasn’t funded or run by the government, they couldn’t erase identities of operatives and send them on their own missions.”
“Mitch would’ve had the list of ghost operatives from the OG Stratos and could’ve dragged some out of retirement as well. Like Rhett,” Reed pointed out, shockingly sounding as though he was on the same believing-Beth page as me.
Had the woman Jedi mind–tricked us?“But whatever Arlo told Mitch before he died changed things and made Mitch paranoid. Had Mitch wanting out before he wound up dead, too, even if he did hand Stratos over to Helix on a silver platter.” I dropped down into the armchair by the couch.
Reed propped a hand on the mantel, eyes on me. “That’s what happens when you create a monster—eventually it turns on you.”
“We need to have Natasha and Gwen confirm if Helix is truly our mark. My guess is, Mitch is baiting them down to New Zealand like he is with us,” Ryder said.
“If Beth was telling the truth, then there’s a good chance Mitch not only has intel on Stratos, both old and new, but he might have—”
“The identities of everyone on Bravo and Echo teams since he’d been blackmailing Will back in the day,” Ryder said, cutting me off as that horrible news sunk in. “This mission is now about protecting them, too.” He removed his phone from his pocket. “If their identities get released, then they’ll be forced to go off-grid.”
“We have to do the plan we talked about, then,” Audrey murmured as I got my ass back to standing. “We have no choice.”
“And what plan might that be?”What conversation did I miss while I was dealing with my own past?
Ryder looked at me, ordering, “You’ll need to sit for this.” He closed his eyes. “The plan includes Audrey going with us to New Zealand, and you going as my sister’s husband.”
Chapter Forty
Audrey
Ryder dumped my plan on Alejandro in one breath, casually tossing in the Hollis revelation like it was an afterthought. He barely paused between bullet-point beats. Then came the rapid-fire back-and-forth between the three of them. Everything from theories to power plays and the logistics of going from A to B to C were discussed while I sat there silently, as if I weren’t at the center of it all.
I was on the verge of losing it as their words blurred in my mind. I also knew if I started rocking like I was having a nervous breakdown, there’d be no way Ryder would agree to let me go to New Zealand, so I needed to pull myself together.
A few words from Alejandro pushed through the noise in my head:auctionandabsolutely no fake wedding.
“No wedding, just the honeymoon,” I corrected, though it was doubtful anyone had heard me.
