Page 164 of The Reluctant Hero

Tera clears her throat with a blush while Shade gives him a flat stare. Cade gets quiet quickly. We all know what Shade is capable of, and, brother or not, he’ll finish whatever he starts. I have the same instinct without the bloodshed.

“South saw Amanda get arrested yesterday morning,” she starts hesitantly. “She asked me to look into it.”

A tearing feeling goes through my chest at the reminder. It’s been twenty-four hours since I saw her. She was crying and quiet for the first time since I met her. All of this is wrong. She closed herself away from us as if we had attacked her unprovoked.

“You could have called and asked me,” I scowl, dropping into my chair, trying to refocus.

“I wanted fresh eyes. No emotion or judgment. South says it’s the best way to investigate, and she’s always good with that stuff.” Tera cringes as she explains.

“I don’t doubt it,” I loosen my tie. I forgot that South had basically adopted Amanda. I wonder what she thinks of her now. Obviously well enough to have Tera look into it and send her here with the findings. I don’t think South is the type to get fooled easily.

That cursed hope begins to build, and I try my best to choke it out.

“She’s innocent. All of your accusations against her are BS.”

I stare at her blankly even as that hope begins to struggle underneath the concrete I’m trying to bury it in. She has all of our undivided attention even though Ace doesn’t look up. His body has tensed as if he’s readying himself for another blow.

“That’s not possible, Tera,” I protest roughly. “We had people looking at this all weekend to make absolutely sure before we did anything.”

We all wanted it to be a lie so badly.

I can’t get the look on her face out of my head when she said she trusted me. The tremble of her lips and the way her voice broke. Her response had startled me before I realized it was probably another damn trick. I’m circling from depression to anger so quickly I can’t keep up.

“Ace took a look around her place and found the bank statements confirming the deposit. The bus tickets to get out of town,” Cade adds in a deadened tone. He sounds defeated.

“Youdidbreak in then,” Tera says as her gaze narrows on Ace. He doesn’t look up to see her anger, but it startles me. Her voice has taken a sterner tone when she speaks again. “Someoneplantedthat. Amanda Blake doesn’t have an account with that bank.”

“She does. We investigated it,” I point out softly. I can’t get any volume to my voice, the ice deserting me when I need it most.

“Everything Amanda has done since she left her ex’s house has been under Jefferson, not Blake. She fudged her paperwork for the real account. She’s fanatical about it.”

“Maybe. But she filled out her paperworkherewith her old address, just like the statements,” Cade points out.

“Well, yeah,” Tera rolls her eyes. “A fancy place like this? If someone saw my old address on a resume, it would get thrown in the trash. She hedged her bets to get hired, so what?”

“She’s been lying from the start,” I mutter darkly. I can’t glare at innocent Tera, but my desk is another story.

“Let me show you, Gabe,” she begs quietly. “Please? She’s in big trouble. Someone is out to get her.”

I frown as I look at her. Out to get her? She called all weekend with increasing frequency. We took Ace’s phone from him so he wouldn’t answer. Cade’s ribs are bruised black from the fight. We assumed she was panicking over the lack of contact and the fact that the money had been returned to me by then. One whispered conversation with Mikael seemed to drain all the fight out of Ace after that.

What if she wasn’t paranoid about the money? What if sheneededus? What if she took the money because she was being threatened and without it…

She was filthy. Hurt. She had something to tell us, but we wouldn’t let her distract us. We had to shut her down before she could spin more lies to have us falling at her feet.

Dread is starting to build in my stomach. What if it wasn’t an act? And her concern about Jake’s absence. Did she think something happened to him as well?

“Show them,” Ace says in a rough voice, speaking up for the first time.

“Iwill,” Tera tells Ace pointedly with a dark look.

She boots the laptop up and spins the screen to face me.

“See here?” She points to some sort of code I couldn’t understand with a manual.

“Yes?” I ask warily. Shade smirks at me as he finishes gathering up the folders, enjoying my obvious confusion. The urge to flip him off rises again, and this time, I give into it. He blinks and looks away. For a second, pity flashes across his face again, and then it’s gone.

“It’s a backdoor. It leads from your personal account to a ghost account. There was never an account under Amanda Blake’s name. It was a loop.Datadisappeared, not money. The alert showed missing money that never left and showed back up when they said it was returned. The backdoor closed, but it left tracks. I have your bank statements printed out if you need to verify it. They didn’t think to infect the bank’s database, too.”

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