“Did the key open the hard drive?” he asked.
Dreya nodded. “I didn’t get a chance to see much of it, but what I did see was enough to convince me that what we saw tonight is just the tip of the iceberg. Thorn is responsible for hundreds of crimes, not to mention hundreds of deaths.”
Braden was off the couch and pulling her into his arms. Thank God that when he was on the phone with Coleman, about to tell him everything, he had done the right thing and trusted her.
Somewhere, Tommy was smiling his ass off. Then Braden started laughing as a crazy thought struck him.
Dreya pulled back to look at him. “What’s so funny?”
“I think I finally figured out what Tommy meant when he said, ‘don’t be scared,’” Braden said. “He was trying to tell me not to be scared of trusting with my gut instead of my head. It was the one thing he’d tried to teach me from the moment we met, but it was the first thing I stopped doing after he died. Everything changed when I met you, though. You didn’t give me a choice. I had to learn to go with my instincts and trust you.” He grinned. “I admit, it was hard for a while. I thought you were going to start stealing stuff again to satisfy the animal in you.”
Dreya smiled. “Don’t get a big head about this, but my inner kitty hasn’t been interested in stealing for the thrill of it ever since I met you. I think she found something else to keep her occupied.”
Braden pushed her hair from her face. “I can trust you, and so can Coleman.”
Dreya gave him a confused look. “What do you mean?”
He felt like crap telling her about the conversations he’d had with Coleman and the man’s concerns about her. “He was worried that you wouldn’t be able to live without the adrenaline rush that comes with climbing high-rise buildings and stealing. We’d been talking about setting up an intervention in case I saw anything suspicious. At least he knows that’s not an issue now.”
Her face drained of color. “You didn’t tell him where I was tonight, did you?”
“Yeah. I told him you slipped into Chadwick-Thorn and swiped something for John and that you dropped it off a while ago at a warehouse in east Alexandria.”
Dreya lifted a hand to cover her mouth, a look of pure terror in her eyes.
Braden suddenly felt like he was swimming in Jell-O. He couldn’t seem to figure out which direction was up and which was down. “What’s wrong? Is there a reason I shouldn’t have told Coleman?”
Dreya didn’t answer. She took her phone out of her pocket and pulled up her contacts.
“Who are you calling?” he asked.
“John.”
When no one answered, Dreya ran for the door. Braden caught her arm.
“Dammit, Dreya. You’re scaring me. What the hell is wrong?”
Her eyes flashed green, and for a moment, he thought she was going to push him away, but then the glow disappeared.
“Dick didn’t know anything about any of this because he’s Thorn’s personal spy in the DCO,” she said. “By telling Dick what you saw, you told Thorn that John has enough information to put him in prison for the rest of his life.”
Braden’s heart stopped. There was no way Coleman could have played him like that. He would have seen it coming from a mile away. But Coleman had played him, and the reason he hadn’t seen it coming was because the deputy director recognized how much Braden cared about Dreya and had used that against him.
“I didn’t know,” he said softly.
Dreya shook her head. “It doesn’t matter now. When we left the warehouse, John was heading to the DCO complex to set up a meeting with a prosecutor who would be willing to go after someone as big as Thorn. I need to get there and warn him that Thorn knows everything.”
“Weneed to get there,” Braden said. “I screwed this up; I have to help fix it. I have a light and a siren in my car. I can get us there faster. You keep trying him on the phone.”
Chapter 20
The flashing lights in the grill did a good job of getting most of the traffic out of the way. Braden even managed to get a police cruiser to pull ahead of him and help them make better time. But with all that and the worst of the traffic thinning after they got outside the belt loop, it still took forever to get to the complex.
Dreya’s heart raced as fast as the engine on Braden’s Charger as she dialed John’s cell number again and left yet another message. Why the hell wasn’t he answering his phone? It was like something was sending her calls straight to voice mail.
She’d called Ivy, Kendra, and Lucy, but Ivy and Landon were still cleaning up the mess in Maine, while Kendra and Lucy were fighting morning traffic as they headed to the complex themselves. Kendra said she’d try to get a warning to a few other people, but none of them could get to John any faster than Dreya and Braden.
While Dreya was mad at Braden, she was smart enough to realize Dick was a manipulative son of a bitch who’d started working Braden the second they’d met. Plus, she was honest enough to admit that she’d given her partner plenty of reason to doubt her. Hell, she’d doubted herself for a while there.
