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“Then we’ll be starting back at square one with the trafficking investigation.” Hell, they’d be starting a dozen squares before square one since they’d lost time and the Diehls would no longer be an option to use.

But that didn’t matter. After what she now knew, Cassie had a right to decide she’d had enough. He would not try to talk her out of it.

“We can do it. But it has to be tonight. I’m not sure I can keep…pretending in front of everyone. Not anymore.”

“We don’t have to.” He said it before she could go further. “One call to Rogue and Fallon will have the extraction team here in a few hours.”

She looked at him.

“I mean it,” he continued. “You want out, we leave. I’ll make the call right now.”

She was quiet long enough that he thought she might take it.

“No.”

“Cassie—”

“Those kids don’t have time for me to work through what kind of man you are.” She held his gaze. “We break in to the computer and get what we need tonight.”

Chapter 22

The computer room was dark except for the glow of the screen, and the only sound was Cassandra’s fingers on the keys.

She sat at the air-gapped terminal with her back to him, her hands moving across the keyboard without pause. He stood against the doorframe, half in the room and half in the short hallway, listening to the lodge behind him.

She hadn’t looked at him once since they’d left the bedroom. Hadn’t spoken except to nod when he’d told her the lock was clear.

The silent treatment had been much better than earlier this evening.

She’d performed the D/s cover for dinner and the common area routine without a single mistake. Knelt when she was supposed to kneel. Eyes down. Silent unless he spoke to her first. She’d eaten from the plate in her lap without flinching, sat at his feet on the floor while Arlo talked business, let Ryder rest his hand on the back of her neck when they walked to the room.

Every gesture technically perfect, every beat of the performance landing exactly where it needed to.

Except two nights ago, she’d leaned into his hand when he’d touched her neck. Tonight, she’d gone still under it, the way a person went still when they were enduring something.

The Diehls hadn’t noticed. Why would they? The whole performance looked the same from the outside.

But Ryder had noticed. Or maybe recognized was the better term.

Because she’d performed perfectly, the exact way he used to do his work. Sit across from a target, build the rapport, watch for the opening. You didn’t have to mean any of it. You just had to be good enough that the other person couldn’t tell the difference.

And he hated knowing that, because it meant she could be hurting and still perform, and that was a skill nobody should have to be good at.

Back in the room afterward, she’d gone straight to the bed and turned toward the wall. He’d sat in the chair. Hours of nothing between them. No talking, no pretending, no attempt from either side to reach across the quiet.

He’d stared at the ceiling and listened to her breathe and tried not to think about the fact that twenty-four hours ago he’d woken up with her back against his chest and thought he was the luckiest man alive.

She’d gotten up at 4:30 a.m. and said three words. “Let’s do this.” That was it.

Now the only sound in the room was her fingers on the keys, and he was watching a woman who wouldn’t look at him do something extraordinary.

He had no idea what she was doing. He was the man who’d needed salt shakers and a ketchup bottle to learn a basic login sequence. Whatever was on that screen was beyond him and always would be. Lines of text scrolled and rearranged themselves under her hands, and he couldn’t have said whether she was winning or losing.

But he could read her. Her posture was settled, weight forward, shoulders loose. Her hands moved without hesitation, without searching, without the pauses that meant doubt. She knew where she was going even if the system fought her.

Then something slowed her down. Her fingers stopped. Her head tilted a fraction to the left, and she held there for two seconds, three, studying something he couldn’t read from where he stood. A moment later, she was past it, hands moving again, the obstacle already behind her.

And she was doing all of it in a building full of men who would kill her if they found her here.