Page 11

Ian put up a picture of two men. “We’ve traced our source’s information back to two brothers running a diversified criminal operation. Heath and Arlo Diehl. They deal in drugs, weapons, information. And we believe they’re providing the logistics for the trafficking.

“We happen to have a connection to the Diehl brothers,” Ian continued. “So we’ll be putting someone undercover inside their organization who has a prior relationship with them. This gives us more advantage than any law enforcement group, so we’re running with it. These guys were already assholes before they started dealing with children. We’re going to make sure they go down.”

The more she heard, the angrier she got. These jerks were even worse than the ones she and Fallon had gone after. It felt good to be part of something bigger than her knitting projects. Something meaningful.

Then a man two seats over adjusted in her peripheral vision, and her eyes shifted to him before she could stop it.

Pen cap chewed through. Water bottle empty even though the pitcher sat two feet away. Stubble past the point of intentional, creeping toward neglect.

Someone running on fumes who’d been living inside this case long enough to stop taking care of himself.

She wrenched her eyes back to the screen before her brain could continue filing details about the pattern, but a full minute had passed and she’d missed something. Ian had moved on, and she’d lost the transition. Damn it.

Ian turned the briefing over to Fallon. She stood and spoke with ease.

“Beyond the Diehl brothers connection, we’re close to blind. We don’t know the scope. We don’t know how many children. We don’t know how the operation is structured or where to start pulling it apart. We need someone who can dig into the data and find connections the rest of us can’t see. That’s why I brought in outside help.”

Shit, shit, shit.

“This is Cassandra.” Fallon’s hand fell on her shoulder. “She’s the best pattern analyst I’ve ever worked with, and she’s the reason we’re going to take these bastards down and get these children home.”

Cassandra kept her gaze on the table. She knew what would happen if she looked up.

She could feel the weight of a dozen people waiting for her to acknowledge them, to make eye contact, to be a normal person receiving an introduction. Instead, she kept her eyes on the wood grain of the table and did nothing.

She knew what it looked like. Standoffish at best. Complete idiot at worst. Her dark glasses weren’t helping.

And the worst part of it all was knowing Ryder was one of the people looking at her. She didn’t need to look at him and give her brain’s pattern recognition ability free rein to know he also disapproved of her behavior like everybody else.

“Thanks,” she finally muttered. Realizing she wasn’t going to say anything else, Fallon sat down.

Cassandra sank deeper in her chair, hoping it might swallow her like a black hole. Her right temple started to throb, now making looking at anything, even screens or papers, nearly impossible. She just kept her gaze centered in front of her and let the information float past.

“You okay?” Fallon whispered.

She nodded, hiding the cringe of pain from the motion. “I’m fine.”

The lie was so old it had its own muscle memory. She had been delivering it since childhood. To teachers who thought she was anxious. To doctors who believed her when she said it was just headaches. To the one person on this earth she would walk through traffic for.

I’m fine. I’m just shy. I just get migraines. It’s nothing.

Fallon gave her arm a single squeeze and turned back to the briefing.

Cassandra shouldn’t have come.

Chapter 4

Those fucking sunglasses were pissing him off.

He’d been staring at them since she walked in, and halfway through this briefing, he still couldn’t make sense of them. Nearly opaque, black as welding lenses, sitting on Cassandra Leuenberger’s face in a fluorescent-lit conference room while Ian talked about stolen children.

Who the hell wore sunglasses indoors during a briefing about missing kids?

He already knew everything Ian was saying. Ian had pulled him aside an hour before the briefing, walked him through the Diehls, the trafficking, the plan. Wanted to make sure Ryder was okay going undercover.

For a second, he’d damned near panicked. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t go running back to his past.

But it was kids they were talking about. What kind of a bastard would he be if he said no?