She picked up her phone and opened his contact. She stared at his number out of habit.
Then an idea struck. The old phone dial layout with letters under numbers.
4—G H I
5—J K L
9-W XY
She went still as the message emerged.
ILY. The shortened abbreviation used in text messages.
I love you.
Swallowing a soft cry that was almost a sob, she placed the phone face down on the desk. Picked it back up. Set it down again. She pressed both hands flat against the surface and sucked in a shaky breath.
The tears came quietly and without drama, just her eyes filling up and spilling over before she could try to stop them. She covered her mouth with her fingers and let them fall because fighting it was pointless.
She might have an analytical mind, but she couldn’t logic her way out of her feelings.
She’d just found Angelo. She’d found her person. Now he was running straight into danger—it was what he did, and he loved it, but that wouldn’t stop her from worrying.
She wiped her face with the back of her hand. Taking a deep breath, she turned back to her screen.
Numbers had always been calming to her, and she let them pull her back in, and she picked up the trail she’d been exploring for days.
She was deeper in Cipher’s financial network than ever, peeling up the edges and locating information outside what most people would see.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that what she was looking for existed outside the pattern. Cipher liked patterns, but he wasn’t stupid—every transaction was designed to send anyone looking in circles, never straight to the next target.
Weeks ago, she’d flagged a dormant account in Pennsylvania and kept moving. She pulled it up now for the sake of thoroughness and circled back to run the full transaction history again.
Her hands stopped moving.
She stared wide-eyed at the screen, unsure of what she was seeing.
The opening date on the account was well before the timeline that had anything to do with Daniel Sheen, aka Cipher.
But three days after his mother was killed in the event that kicked off his reign of terror?
The account had woken up.
She sucked in a breath.
Deposits—big enough but not so big it would draw attention to them—were staggered across two weeks. Each deposit was routed through a different shell. Each shell a different dead end.
The address associated with the account wasn’t the house his mother owned when she died. It was a property outside a town in rural Pennsylvania.
Ellory jerked her head up, staring at nothing while her brain sifted through files.
Why did that location sound familiar?
A dormant account waking up three days after his mother was killed was Cipher returning to his origins. And his mother grew up in Pennsylvania—but where?
Her hands shook as she dug into her file on the terrorist. Five minutes turned into ten.
Then she landed on the one piece of intel that connectedallthe dots.
