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“Does it matter what I say?” His voice came out rough. “I can’t give you an answer you’d be able to verify. Anything I say right now, the man I used to be could have said just as convincingly. You’d have no way to tell the difference.”

She didn’t ask again. Probably better that way. It would keep him from begging her to believe him when he said what they had, despite the circumstances, was the realest thing he could ever remember feeling.

“Why? Why were you an interrogator?”

He didn’t defend himself. Didn’t tell her he’d been young or that he’d had no choice or that some of the people had deserved it. Maybe that was true. But none of it would change what he’d done or what he’d hidden from her.

“I had a talent. I used it.”

She was standing four feet away with her arms crossed and her breathing even. She’d already finished whatever she needed to finish, and the verdict was in her posture. The room was quiet enough that he could hear the hum of the AC unit in the window and someone laughing faintly in the common area. Life going on down the hall while everything in here came apart.

He looked at the bed. Sheets still tangled from this morning. He’d woken up with her back pressed against his chest and his arm around her waist, and he’d lain there for ten minutes just breathing, feeling her weight against him, thinking he might be the luckiest man alive.

That had been six hours ago. A different lifetime.

“How did you get out? How did you become a Zodiac Tactical agent?”

“Ian DeRose recruited me about five years ago.”

She froze.

“He was working undercover, and somebody suspected. I was brought in to interrogate him. He played me, start to finish, even when it got violent.” Ryder didn’t like to think about that part. He considered Ian a friend now. Someone he respected to his very core. When he thought about what he’d done⁠—

“You tortured Ian DeRose.”

“Yes. And he never cracked, to the point where everyone believed he wasn’t undercover. The man was fucking unflappable.”

She shook her head. “If you tortured him, how exactly did you end up working for him?”

“After the bust, he found me and offered me a job. Said my skill set was wasted where I was. I actually worked as an interrogator for Rogue for about a year.”

“What?” For the first time, she seemed legitimately shocked.

“Rogue plays in the shadows. Does the hard stuff when needed. That’s why it’s almost completely covert. They don’t hire your average operative. They need people comfortable in the gray.”

“That’s why they recruited Fallon,” she whispered. “The work she and I did together wasn’t exactly legal.”

“Those tricks she could do with her body certainly helped too.”

“Ian hired you to interrogate people on Rogue’s behalf?”

“Yes. Mostly psychological stuff, but on extreme occasions where lives were at stake, I used…other methods. Eventually, I told him I was done with that kind of work, and he moved me over to regular Zodiac instead.”

She fisted a hand against her stomach like this part was the most difficult to understand. Maybe it was. He reached out to touch her, unable to bear the hurt accumulating in her eyes.

He dropped his hand as she turned away. She didn’t want him to touch her. Who could blame her?

The room was quiet for a long time. He stood there unmoving. His talents and training had taught him how to live within a silence, to wait it out.

She sat down on the corner of the bed. “So what do we do now?”

“We can leave. Right now.”

“How?”

He shrugged one shoulder. “Well, I could use any of the methods that have had you looking at me the way you are, based on what you’ve found out today. I can play them and get us out. Hell, I could take them out one by one, and we could mosey right out the front door.”

“But if you do any of that…”