Page 53 of The Verdict

The computer made a loud noise when the screen lit up, a warning in the center:Disk not ejected properly.

“She found the drive,” I said.

“And took it with her,” Harm mumbled when he reached my side.

My nod felt like a guillotine to my neck.How could I have been so fucking blind?

“What happened? Did you catch her looking for it?” Dare banded his arms across his chest and motioned at the state of the room. “Tell me she tried to fight you for it…”

“No,” I replied with a beat of hesitation, the image of Merritt and that man fighting—the knife going into her side overwhelming me. I squeezed my eyes closed and let out a hiss.Fuck, my head hurt.

“Rhys,” Dare clipped. “What happened?”

I opened my eyes and looked at him, forcing myself to hold on to the tether of the memory. “When I got here, she was already fighting someone else.”

“Fighting?”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, but they were fighting. Combat fighting,” I said, my voice deepening with each word. “I don’t know who the fuck Merritt Manning is, but she’s not a fucking schoolteacher. Not with the way I saw her handle herself.”

Their eyes went wide.

“I assume they were fighting over the flash drive.”Because what else would it be?“When I got here, he had her pinned down to the desk and stabbed her in the side. I fired off a shot into his shoulder which shifted his attention to me and freed Merritt.” I recounted the series of events like I was writing up an after-action report. “I demanded to know who he was. He resisted. I fired two warning shots and hit the window behind him. When I asked again, he turned and threatened Merritt and then jumped through the window. At that point, it waseither pursue him and lose Merritt or stay…”And lose her anyway.

“Did she say anything?”

“No,” I clipped. “I didn’t get a chance to ask for an explanation before she hit me and everything went black.”

“What did her attacker say?”

Pain sliced through my scalp, and I hissed. I tried to access those last moments so many times that my brain stripped like a screw, leaving only pain spinning in my head.

“I’ll call Rorik and have him meet us back at Sherwood.” Ace stepped out of the room to give a call to the doctor on his team.

Rorik Nilsen had been with us—the medical attaché on our last mission. War broke everyone differently. We’d returned with a hunger for vigilante justice, and Rorik had become a medical examiner in the city. Completely different on the surface, but underneath, both were excuses to avoid the outside world.

“Let’s head back to the garage,” Harm decided. “I’ll have Ace send over some of his guys to sweep the house for anything, but if you’re right—if she took the drive with her, there’s nothing left to find.”

“Harm…”

“We’ll find her. She’s injured and wanted by every cop in Northern California for murder, she can’t go far.” He gripped my shoulder and looked at me like he knew. “We’ll find her.”

“Damn. What happened?” Ty asked as soon as we walked into his office.

“Rhys didn’t listen to me,” Dare muttered and walked by me, settling into his distant corner of the room while Harm took his place next to his woman. Daria had stayed here with Ty while Harm and Dare came to find me.

I made a low noise of displeasure. Thankfully, Harm gave him the rundown. The fight. The players.Merritt’s lies.

“She has the flash drive,” I said, beginning the discussion of what the fuck we were going to do now.

“Do you think she’s one of them?” Dare muttered.

“A criminal or a client?” I grunted.Between the beach house and the garage, I’d toiled through a hundred scenarios in my mind, but they all boiled down to one excruciating, infuriating thought: we had to find her. We needed that information—and I needed the fucking truth.

“I doubt Wheaton would let anyone on that flash drive around his kid,” Ty injected reason from behind his computer.

“Or maybe lust blinded him,” I snarled low.

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