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Ryder didn’t pull his punches. “After this mission, I’m out. Zodiac, Rogue, all of it.”

“What’s your plan?”

“I don’t have a plan. I just know I don’t belong here.”

Ian didn’t react. “This about Cassandra?”

“It’s about me.” He kept his voice level because Ian deserved a clean conversation, not a mess of guilt and self-pity. “I can’t be trusted with this work. The things that make me good at it are the things that make me a liability. I told myself using them here, for this, made them something different. It doesn’t. I’m who I was in those rooms. I just point it in a different direction now.”

“You haven’t been that man in a long time.”

“I haven’t had to be. That doesn’t mean I won’t be again. There are lines that shouldn’t be crossed, and I can’t be trusted not to move them when it comes to what’s inside me.”

Ian was quiet. He didn’t argue, didn’t push.

“Like I said, this op doesn’t change.” Ryder leaned forward. “I’ll see this through. Those kids come home. But after that, I’m done.”

“All right.” Ian stood and moved toward the door. Ryder watched him go.

That was it. Four years working for the man and all he had to say was all right, as if Ryder had announced he was going to try to get more protein in his diet.

Maybe somewhere Ian had been hoping for this. Maybe he knew he’d been running a liability risk by keeping Ryder on the team and this announcement brought more relief than anything else.

Couldn’t blame him there.

Ian stopped at the door with his hand on the frame. “I’m not going to try to talk you into anything. You have to make the choices that are right for you. But I will say this: if the line is really what worries you, you ever ask yourself why it hasn’t moved in four years? Not once?”

Ian didn’t wait for an answer. He turned around and left.

Ryder sat in the empty room. The screens were still running, still showing the network Cassandra had torn open. Names and routes and schedules that would bring six kids home on Friday.

He could answer Ian’s question. The line hadn’t moved because he’d kept everyone at arm’s length. Nobody at Zodiac knew what he’d been, so nobody looked at him and saw it, and the lie did the work for him.

Then Cassandra had seen through it. And the second she had, she’d stepped back. And he’d let her, because she was right to do that.

That was his answer: the line held when nobody got close enough to test it.

After Friday, he was done. He’d get the kids home and go. He reached over and turned off the screens.

Chapter 26

Ian’s words wouldn’t leave Cassandra alone.

She’d been at the encryption terminal for six hours, running secondary analysis on the supplier data in case she’d missed something in the first pass. She hadn’t. The data was clean, the network was mapped, and she was sitting in this lab because it was the one place in this compound where she didn’t have to risk seeing Ryder in a hallway.

His past made him who he is.

Damn it.

Her fingers stopped on the keyboard. She’d pushed Ian’s words out of her mind until she broke the decryption. But once she’d done that, she’d been cycling through Ian’s visit pretty much nonstop. Every time she pushed it down, it surfaced again, patient and relentless, like her own brain had decided she wasn’t done with the conversation yet. She was just having it with herself now, instead of Ian.

His past made him who he is.

She rubbed her hands over her face. Of course Ryder’s past had made him who he was now. Everybody’s past made them who they were. Everyone was the sum of their choices. Her included.

But it also made him someone worth having.

That was the crux of it, wasn’t it.