Page 42 of Wicked Obsession

She stared at him. Langley was in shadow since she held the light, but he didn’t need to see her to recognize that the synapses in her brain were firing. He’d never met anyone who was as good as she was at taking scant facts, piecing them together, and coming up with the correct answer. She did it this time too. “Andy Harper? Your former teammate.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize Bent Tree hired their operatives out as hitmen.”

“Me either.” It was hard to believe they’d risk those lucrative government contracts for this. WasHarper freelancing? Somehow that idea was worse than his former teammate being assigned the job. “It doesn’t matter now. Let’s move.”

Langley moved, but as she walked, she asked quietly, “With the cars disabled, am I to assume we’re headed through the tunnels and into the woods surrounding the cabin?”

Cabin? She called this place a cabin? Ryder grimaced. “You got it. I don’t suppose you know how to get to the exit, do you?”

“No, when we played here, we were never allowed to go that far. You don’t have that information?”

“Your father only let me review the schematics for a couple minutes. It’s okay. I’ll figure it out.” He might make a few mistakes, but he’d get them out of here. Eventually.

He fucking hoped that the mercenaries didn’t know about the secret passages because the last thing he wanted to do was go around a corner and run into one of them. The damn thing was that even if the escape system was a secret now, the longer they stayed in here, the greater the risk of discovery. Harper didn’t give up and sooner or later he’d question if there were more than one set of tunnels. He’d start testing the walls, and once he got in, there’d be nowhere for them to hide.

The tunnels were a maze and they wound their way around and through the house. It hadbeen a bitch to keep the turns they’d taken straight in his head as they’d made their way to the garage, but if he remembered correctly, once they got far enough away from the house, it should be a straight shot to the forest.Ifhe could guide them to that point.

They reached a section where there was enough room for them to walk side-by-side and Ryder took Langley’s free hand. He needed to hold her, needed to reassure himself that she was alive. Her fingers squeezed his, taking comfort and giving it as well.

Voice gentle, Langley asked, “Does knowing it’s Andy help narrow down which of your teammates is assisting him?”

After a moment’s consideration, he said, “I don’t think so. Harper mentored everyone on the team in some way or another and everyone liked and trusted him.”

There were many times that Griff stayed up late into the night talking shit with Harper. Mako had spent time hanging out with Harp and his family. Stony had considered the man to be the father he’d never had. Any of the three of them could be helping him. The million-dollar question was which one?

And could there be more than one?

Griff and Mako were best friends. Would they work together against him? In the next instant,Ryder discarded that idea. Special Forces weren’t disloyal. One traitor was a surprise. Two would be almost impossible. Right?

But the last time he’d seen Harper, he’d been feeling members of the team out, trying to see who’d be interested in working for Bent Tree. A memory stabbed into Ryder’s brain. Rowland wasn’t going to re-up, he’d already said he was done when this enlistment was finished. Had he chosen to join Harper’s band of mercenaries?

Stony had always been quiet, inscrutable, and he kept his thoughts to himself. Was he the one working with Harper?

“Ryder.”

“What?”

“One member of your team is a traitor. That means the other two men are completely on their own against the squad of mercenaries because they can’t trust anyone, not even each other, and they must realize that we won’t trust them either.”

He grunted. Yeah, he’d thought of that, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it, not while he was protecting Langley. It didn’t surprise him that she’d figured out Harper hadn’t come here alone. “They’re Special Forces. They’ll take care of themselves.”

“He was a Green Beret, too. He knows how they were trained.”

“I’m aware of that,” he said more harshlythan he intended. Ryder took a deep breath and gave her hand a gentle squeeze of apology. “Sorry. I know you’re worried about my friends, but there’s nothing we can do.”

“Yes, but if something happens to one of the guys on our side, you’re going to blame yourself when this is over.”

Ryder shook his head. First, Langley had tried to rescue her friend from a kidnapper and now she wanted to save his buddies—the ones not betraying them—from mercenaries. She didn’t seem to understand that the mission was to protect her.

“I’ll deal with it later if I have to.” He had another concern. “How are your legs holding up?”

“About as well as I expected,” Langley said.

“Which is probably about fifty percent worse than what you admitted to when I asked you about them earlier today.”

Her shrug pretty much confirmed what he’d guessed—she’d underplayed the amount of pain she was in. And he was dragging her into the woods. Great.

---