Page 24 of Shadow Lies

His nostrils flared at her mention of the cluster fuck that had cost him his career. “This conversation is over.”

He reached for the cell to disconnect the call when she said, “I know what happened, Kane. I know you were set up. And I can clear you. Get you your old life back.”

His hand stopped, but only long enough to say, “I don’t want it back.”

He hit the button to disconnect and glanced up at Alexis.

Secrecy was ingrained in him from years of watching what he said around family and friends, hiding what his team did because so much was classified.

And although he didn’t give a fuck about the Navy or their rules anymore, the Warner Group op had been so highly classified that his discussing it with Charley in front of Alexis, even here, could probably get him court martialed—again—if the Navy ever found out.

“The Warner Group…” she whispered.

Shit. “You need to forget you ever heard that name. And never, ever repeat it—”

“I worked on that case,” Alexis continued as she raised her agony-filled gaze to meet his.

He stared at her. “Excuse me?”

What did she mean, she worked that case?

“At the CIA, I was on the Warner Group team.”

It still didn’t make sense to him. “Wait. Stop. You need to back up and explain.”

“I worked on a team beneath the chief of staff for the Directorate of Analysis. She supervises teams that put together intelligence sent in by CIA officers around the world. While I was there, I was assigned to compile information on the Warner Group.”

His head spun from that information.

She went on, “The Warner Group is basically Moscow’s personal team of mercenaries. It’s so secret no one ever even heard the name until a tablet was discovered with info—”

“I know what the Warner Group is,” he cut her off.

He had so many questions, he didn’t know where to start. That seemed to be happening to him a lot since his reunion with Alexis. He chose one, for now.

“How the hell did you end up working for the CIA?”

“I saw an ad on Twitter.First year college students are invited to apply to the Directorate of Operations clandestine internship program. Plan and guide challenging foreign intelligence collection operations, counter-intelligence activities and covert action programs. I applied just for fun.”

The CIA was recruiting college kids on Twitter? Jesus Christ. No wonder they’d fucked up the Warner op. Worse, Alexis had responded and gotten the damn job. For fun.

He shook his head and stared at her. “Fun?” he repeated.

She shrugged. “What did I know? I was nineteen at the time. I got into the internship. Then dropped out of college after my junior year, trained and started working full time.”

He started to pace, traversing the small space between the walls caging him in while trying to wrap his head around little Alexis in the CIA. And more, that she’d worked on the very project that had ruined his career.

“While I was compiling all the information, I started to suspect we’d marked the wrong man as leader of the group,” she continued.

He stopped moving. He stopped breathing. He barely had air to say, “You what?”

“Things just weren’t adding up for me for the guy they had targeted as the leader. I reported what I suspected to my superiors, but I don’t know if I was right or not—”

“You were right,” he said, the taste of bile in his throat.

He knew she was right because he’d killed the wrong man.

He’d taken down the target he had been ordered to. The man in the photo he’d been given. The man in the place where the target—the leader of the Warner Group—was supposed to be.

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