Page 3 of Broken Trust
She wasn’t supposed to be here. Not inhisworld. Not where blood and secrets were thicker than anything he’deverseen in the world of the living.
And yet here she was.
Looking at him like he was a ghost.
* * * * *
The minute Elin laid eyes on Liam, the floor dropped out from under her.
God. He’s alive.
Every ounce of healing she’d clawed her way through felt undone in an instant. So much therapy. So many months of rebuilding her life from the smoke and ashes he left behind.
She’d received hisflag. Hispersonaleffects. A military commander had handed them over with sad eyes and a tight jaw and told her Liam died in action. The circumstances were, of course, classified.
She grieved him. She hit rock bottom, couldn’t function for several months. Then she forced herself to dust herself off and get back to work, because what choice did she have?
Immersing herself in work helped. Work was rules and logic and patterns she could depend on, and she’d always been apattern person. Even as a kid, she saw order in chaos and caught threads others missed. Later, that instinct made her one hell of a hacker. She was able to slip into people’s heads, predict their moves and follow the digital breadcrumbs they didn’t even know they left behind.
But that only made her delve into Liam’s head more. She questioned what his moves would be if he were alive. And what kind of breadcrumbs had he left behind?
One night, while tangled together in the sheets, talk turned to what Liam’s strengths were as a SEAL. He told her he preferred knives because close combat was silent and efficient.
“You’d be surprised what can go down when the lights go out,” he’d rumbled, then kissed her neck and made her forget the dark edge in those words.
At the time, she thought it was just pillow talk, some warrior bravado mixed with the kind of intensity that made her pulse race.
But later, after they told her he was dead, those words haunted her.
And led her straight to him.
The “how” of it was complicated, but months after his “death,” she was on a layover while traveling for work, and saw something on the news—a man killed on a subway platform. Reports were that the lights blinked out, chaos erupted on the train and when the lights came back on, they discovered someone died from a stab wound.
No suspect was ever found, and the cameras caught nothing useful. But the real breadcrumb was the victim himself—what looked like an unfortunate traveler was actually a known terrorist the FBI had been hunting for months.
Her first thought? The deed had the mark of a man trained to eliminate threats with exactly the kind of quiet strike Liamwas known for. Everything she found about the incident pointed straight at the hero she’d known.
Her mind raced through scenarios and probabilities, falling back on the patterns she’d always trusted to make sense of the disorder.
That was when she started digging. If she had confided in anyone, they would have told her she was being obsessive when she checked flight records of the last day she had contact with Liam.
Every plane left a data trail. Every minute they were in flight, they were in contact—unless they went dark for classified reasons. So when she discovered that a military plane had been in the vicinity the day Liam vanished from her life—and that it too disappeared from the radar for several minutes—she dug even deeper.
It had taken her eighteen months. Eighteen months of late nights, of chasing ghosts through encrypted channels, of learning to cover her own tracks so thoroughly that even she sometimes lost her trail. Eighteen months of wondering if she was losing her damn mind. If grief had twisted her into someone who saw conspiracies where there were only coincidences.
But the patterns didn’t lie. And Elin trusted patterns more than she trusted people.
Now here she was on a hidden military base, brought here wearing a black hood over her head like a prisoner.
All that, only to prove she was right.
Liam Mason was alive.
She stood in a war room full of massive men, testosterone thick in the air, and Liam Mason stared at her as ifhe’dseen a ghost.
God, his eyes—smoky blue with darker gray rims. When the sun caught them, they were pure gravity, pulling her in before she remembered why she should resist.
He didn’t look at her like a boyfriend caught in the act. No, his brand of regret and remorse looked completely different.
