Nothing else worked, so Talia typed a reply.
I’m not playing your game.
Then she got on her phone and sent a message to her former team over at the NSA. Could they trace the signal coming to this computer—this location? If they were able to figure out where Alvarez was, by zeroing in on the landscape around him, then someone could go to him. Before he was taken out by a rifle.
In her head, she could almost hear the hacker’s laughter. Amused at her futile attempts to find him and get Alvarez out of danger. She texted the marshal to alert him to the danger. One word:
Crosshairs.
Dakota crouched in the doorway. “Can I?”
“Why?”
“So I can hand this guy the piece of my mind I’ve wanted to give him for weeks.”
Talia clenched her jaw. Dakota wanted to shoulder it, as well as vent her frustration. The team was around her. Mason was here. She wasn’t alone, trapped.
She sucked in a breath. “I got it.”
She typed.
Enough. I’m done. Do what you will, I’m not going to be part of it anymore.
His reply came straight away.
Spoil sport.
Talia shut the laptop. If he was going to kill Alvarez, she didn’t want to watch it happen. She’d warned her friend. The NSA were going to have to do whatever they could. She had to stand her ground. She couldn’t bend to his will anymore.
“Let’s go.” She moved so fast she almost knocked Dakota on her butt. But her friend was agile. Talia took the laptop out of the garage. She wanted to throw the thing on the ground, but resisted the allure.
She dialed Victoria as she walked and handed the laptop off to Haley.
“Uh…thanks?” Her roommate held it.
The phone was answered mid-ring, “Director Bramlyn.”
“Get somewhere you can talk.” Talia stopped. She dipped her head and used her free arm to squeeze the back of her neck. Tears threatened to choke her, but she swallowed them back and cleared her throat.
“What is it?” Victoria’s voice echoed like she was in a hallway.
“Alvarez needs cover. He was in the hacker’s crosshairs.” She had to stop and take a breath to push back the sparks at the edges of her vision. Passing out would not be helpful.
“You think I let him go unprotected?”
Dakota tapped Talia on the shoulder. “What’s she saying?”
Talia turned. The whole team watched her. Great, an audience for her breakdown. He thought he was tormenting her, putting people in danger? This was worse. Their concern, and the fact they weren’t off bringing in bad guys right now. Rounding up evil. No, they were taking care of her.
That wasn’t how their team was supposed to work.
Talia did the support stuff. Not the parts where she was in the middle of everything, the center of attention.
“Put me on speaker.”
Talia lowered the phone and tapped the button. “Go ahead.”
“Everyone is there?”
Haley called out, “Yes.”
“And Special Agent Armstrong?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Victoria chuckled. “You make your mama proud.”
Josh snorted. Talia wanted to smile, but she couldn’t. “Alvarez.”
Another one of her teammates was in danger. Well, given the cases they took, it was probably true that they were always in danger. It was how their line of work went. No social media presence. Living quietly. Being careful. Safe.
She’d done so much to help them in this, never thinking it would be her turn next. That they would be here, determined to keep her safe. But she still had to do that for Alvarez. As much as he knew the life he lived was not a safe one, she wasn’t going to stand around and do nothing.
“As I was about to say to you, Talia, I made a call a few hours ago. Welvern has a friend. He’s been a help in the past and has private investigator papers. His skills are in the neighborhood of contract undercover work for the FBI.”
“Hours ago?”
“Alvarez has protection, and the guy is already in play.”
Talia said, “We need that guy’s number. So we can warn him.
“I’ll send him a text.” Victoria paused. “Okay, done. Our marshal shut off his work phone. He has the burner you gave him, and that’s all.” She went quiet again for a few seconds. “Drew says they’re both good.”
“Oh.” So Alvarez hadn’t even gotten her message? “He’s okay?” She could text the other cell, though. She could mask her information and get him secure communication. She’d be able to let him know again if his life was in imminent danger.
“There’s nothing to worry about, Talia. He’s good.”
Talia blew out a long breath. There was plenty to worry about. “I’ll keep you posted if my old team finds this hacker’s whereabouts.” Because it apparently wasn’t here.
“Good.” Victoria paused. “You guys all right?”
“Yes.”
A couple of the others chimed in. Mason said, “Yes, ma’am.”
Victoria’s voice came through the phone speaker again. “The hacker is just trying to get you riled up. You know that, right?”
Talia figured that question was for her. “It’s working. And we’re still two steps behind, the same way we’ve been this entire time.”
A hand touched her shoulder. She knew without looking that it was Mason, so she reached up and squeezed his fingers. The urge to run was strong.
People she loved kept getting caught in the crossfire. She could hardly stand to think about watching Mason get washed away again. Right there behind her one second, helping her out, and then he was gone. Whooshed out of sight by a rush of water.
She swallowed down the lump in her throat.
Victoria said, “I’ll light a fire under the NSA director. He owes me a favor.”
Who didn’t? Talia certainly couldn’t repay her for everything she’d done. “Okay.”
“We are going to find him.”
Talia bit her lip. Her vision blurred as tears filled her eyes. Victoria didn’t know that. Since the bank, she had assumed they would get him. Eventually. Soon. Now. None of those things had happened so far.
Maybe they weren’t going to catch him at all. He would continue tormenting Talia for years to come. Until he had destroyed her career, the people she cared about…everything.
Gone.
Talia hung up on her. She couldn’t talk about this anymore. Not if she wanted to keep from screaming out her frustration at all of them. Given Victoria was the one who had rescued her from the worst day of her life, that wasn’t exactly a showing of grateful thanks. Not that her boss would regret having done it. But still, Talia didn’t want her to have to deal with that.
None of them were supposed to.
“Talia—”
She shook her head, already moving away. She figured they all saw it on her face. That urge she had to just up and run. Get as far away from them as fast as she could.
If he was going to keep coming after her—and wasn’t it just delay tactics to keep them busy?—then maybe he should find her alone when he did. The rest of the team could get back to work.
In fact, that was a great idea.
Talia spun around to face them all. She lifted her chin. “You guys should go.”
“We only brought one car.” Dakota stuck her hand on her hip. Beside her, the dog shifted into a sit and leaned against her leg.
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”
Mason glanced between them. “I’ll stay with you.”
“No—”
Before she could finish, he cut her off.
. . .
“You really think any of us are going to let you go off by yourself?”
“I’m not a child.” The pain in her eyes was stark. Plain for any of them to see. “It’s not like I want to be by myself. But it’s safer.”
He tugged her away from the others.
Dakota saw his intention and jerked her thumb in the direction of the trail. “We’ll see you guys at the car.” In her gaze was a direct order for him to make sure Talia got there, whole and hearty.
Mason gave her a tight nod and wandered a couple of steps to the side with Talia. He was drenched, head to foot and shivering from the cold, but he still didn’t want to be anywhere else except here. Talking to Talia. Helping her through this.
She looked down and surveyed the state of him.
“I probably look like a sorry sight.”
The corner of her mouth shifted. Not quite a smile, but he took it for the victory it was.
“I’m not going to tell you that everything will be fine. Not when I don’t know that for sure.”
She bit her lip.
“But I’ll be with you. Even if that means you and me, together, while the team goes and does their thing.”
He just couldn’t bear to think what might happen to her if she went off on her own. Probably exactly what she was worried would happen to him, considering he’d been abducted. But that guy was dead now. The threat was still real, though. This hacker definitely had something going on, and Prometheus was loose.
“You’d really do that?” She looked up at him.
“I don’t want you out there, alone, swinging in the breeze.”
“Neither do I.” She started to say something else, but evidently thought better of it.
“But..?”
She sighed. “I don’t want anyone else getting hurt because of me. It’s too much. Too—” She ran her fingers through the hair on the sides of her face and grasped handfuls.
“Talia.” He had to shake her out of her own world. This mess she felt like she was drowning in.
Mason dragged her toward him and slid his arms loosely around her. “You’re not doing this alone.”
“And if something happens to Rayna? What then?”
He’d been right. This was about her fear for his daughter. “Rayna might be fine, or she could get hurt tomorrow in a way she’d never recover. But I still have to live my life—even though the possibility is literally in my mind every single day. That’s what parenting is. It can’t paralyze me with worry over what might happen to her. I have to live now.” A tear fell from her eye and tracked its way down her cheek. He swiped it with his thumb. “Please don’t turn out to not be the woman I thought you were.”
“What does that mean?”
“Stick with me,” he implored her. “I know you’ve gone through so much.”
Whispered words spilled from her lips. “I thought you were dead.”
Mason leaned his forehead against hers and shut his eyes. “I know. For a second there I thought I was as well.”
“He’s never going to quit.” She sucked in a breath that hitched in the middle. “He’ll keep coming and coming, giving me the runaround until I lose my mind. It’s never going to end.”
This guy had to have some sick obsession with her. Mixed up with a furious need to compete with her in the realm of network security. They’d been wrapped in a battle since he’d met her in the bank, and before.
Talia said, “Your hands are freezing.”
He let go of her face. “Sorry.” Had she heard what he was saying? Mason needed her to understand. To be the kind of woman he could trust to not leave when things got intense. The need to know whether she would or not was driving this passion in him. He could almost understand this guy, in a weird way. Mason wanted something from her, and he was going to stick around until he got it.
The two were not the same, at all. But he had to admit that he did understand the hacker’s persistence.
Talia snagged his hand and held it with hers. “It’s okay.”
“Promise me something?”
He watched her lips form the word. “What?”
“Talk to me first. Because if you go, I want to go with you.” He’d say they should do it right now, only they’d all shown up here in one car. “I just need you to talk to me.”
“That’s all? Just communication?”
He nodded, and her expression softened. She liked that. A fact which warmed his freezing body from the inside. “We should catch up with the others.”
“First…” She shifted closer to him. “There’s just one thing.”
Talia set her hands on his shoulders. She lifted up and pressed her lips to his. All thought escaped his mind for a few seconds, but he had the wherewithal to not pull her against his freezing wet body. She didn’t need to show back up to her teammates with her clothes soaked all down the front. They’d know exactly what happened.
But he pulled her close enough. Tilted his head to the side and stayed there for a minute. When he could feel it wane, he leaned back. Opened his eyes. “Wow.”
Talia giggled.
“That was nice, too.” Before she needed to ask, he said, “Hearing you laugh.”
“We should go. They’ll wonder what we’ve been up to.”
Mason rubbed at his lips with the back of his hand. When he lowered his arm, he saw purple lip color on his skin, “I doubt it.”
She reapplied as they walked, then stowed the makeup tube back in her purse. “Maybe I should just leave my devices out here.”
“My phone probably won’t recover, given how waterlogged it is.”
“We could both get new phones. I could try and catch him from a new source.” Her voice had a thread of exhaustion running through it.
Mason squeezed her hand. “It’s not just you. It’s all of us, and your old team at the NSA. Right?” When she nodded, he continued, “I know it feels like it’s aimed at only you. But we’re all standing here, trying to shield you. We aren’t going to let anything happen to you. Not like what happened before.”
A shadow crossed her gaze. “I hope so.”
They neared the SUV, door open. The team probably all buckled in. Mason slid his arm around her and kissed her temple. He’d made enough promises. It probably wouldn’t be good to make any more and not be able to keep them. He didn’t know what would happen, but he trusted that God had both of them—and everyone they cared about—in His hands.
Mason caught a muffled sound.
He twisted around and saw two men holding Haley, one with a hand over her mouth. He drew his gun and spun to see where the rest of the team were. He had to get Talia behind him.
Then he saw Niall lying on the grass, face down, blood in his hair. Gun discarded a few feet away. Was he dead, or just out cold?
Talia let out a sound, full of fear.
Mason shifted both of them so that he faced what was coming first. Always. He looked at the man walking toward him and lifted his chin. “Whatever you’re doing, it’s over. You’re done.”
The man grinned. “I’m just getting started.”