Page 16 of Broken Trust
That didn’t even garner a response from him.
“Exactly how well did you know her?” Sophie tried again.
Bingo.
He inflated his lungs with too much air, but it didn’t calm the flap of nerves. “Well enough.”
Kennedy shifted on her barstool as if settling in for a long chat he had no intention of having.
Compassion softened Sophie’s eyes. “She must have been really upset when you vanished from her life.” She shook her head. “I can’t even imagine how I’d feel if that had been Con.”
Using the spatula, he scooped up a cinnamon roll and practically threw it on the plate.
“Have you talked to her yet? Really talked to her?” Kennedy’s question made him drop the spatula on the granite counter with a loud clank.
He settled his stare on both women. “No. I haven’t talked to her. Because she hates me. And who can blame her? I left without telling her anything, without even breaking things off. But there wasn’t time, and going back would have put her in danger. I wasn’t going to do that again.”
They blinked at him, and saw that he’d played into their game. They got him to talk.
Only he hadn’t spilled even a smallkernelof his guts, and he should have spilled them toElin.
“That has to be a heavy weight to carry.”
He almost couldn’t bear to see the sadness in Sophie’s eyes. It reminded him too much of what he’d put Elin through.
Bowing his head, he scrubbed a finger between his brows. “She was working with my team, and we dated for a few months. It was getting…serious. And she came too close to danger. If she hadn’t been stuck in traffic that day, I would have lost her.”
“Instead, she lost you.”
His head snapped up. For a heavy beat, he met Kennedy’s eyes.
“I got attacked. My team jumped in, and we ended it. But when I returned to the safehouse, a Blackout recruiter was waiting for me.”
“So you left, and Elin stayed safe,” Sophie said softly.
His chest burned. “Yes.” He couldn’t do this. He shoved the plate away and started out of the kitchen without the coffee.
“Mason, wait!” Kennedy called out.
Against his better judgment, he stopped and slowly turned around.
To his surprise, Kennedy was smiling. “I have an idea.”
He should have kept walking because he knew that idea would lead straight back to Elin.
* * * * *
Elin barely noticed the ache in her eyes anymore. The world had narrowed to numbers, encrypted data in cold blue and white light from the monitors.
Her fingers moved fast, tracing the root of the breach and rewriting the power plant system that had almost given Cipher a way in. Each keystroke was a stitch sealing a wound no one else could see.
Con stood behind her, arms folded, the quiet weight of command radiating from him.
“This is buried deep,” she told him without removing her focus on the screen. “It bypassed all their firewalls.”
He didn’t speak until she hit Enter and the scrolling lines finally stilled.
“It’s fixed.” She leaned back, stretching the stiffness from her shoulders. “He can’t get through that channel again.”
