“So Tessa probably downloaded this?”

  “Most likely. What is it?”

  “Looks like some sort of spyware maybe.”

  “Let me see.”

  Zy shoved the computer toward Trees, who craned over to study the screen, his face growing more concerned. “Fuck. This is some hand-coded shit that collects every keystroke, but it also enables stealth remote access from anywhere in the world.”

  Was he serious? “So whoever installed this could tap into Tessa’s computer at will and could see every time she or Aspen hit a key? And they could access our servers without anyone being the wiser?”

  “Yep. I begged Aspen to let me scan that computer a couple of times. Every time she said it crashed or she finger-flubbed whatever she’d been typing and ended up somewhere in the computer she shouldn’t be, like at a command prompt.”

  Zy sat up. “Tessa couldn’t have had anything to do with this. She’s not a computer whiz, and she definitely doesn’t know anything about writing code, especially something that involved.”

  “You think Aspen does?”

  Probably not. “Is it possible neither of them did this?”

  “Possible? Anything is. Improbable? Yeah. Keep digging. See if you can find any traces of contact in March, around the time we went to Mexico and damn near got ambushed.”

  “Getting there. After that software is installed, there isn’t much in the way of sent emails except to the bosses. It’s like…Aspen didn’t do that much.”

  “No, it’s not ‘like’ that. She actually didn’t do much. But no fishy communications around the time of our mission?”

  “Not that I see.”

  Trees sighed. “Then again, with remote access and keystroke recording, all anyone had to do was log in to our server themselves and they could mine almost anything.”

  “Do you think that spyware/remote-access garbage is still on Tessa’s computer?” Maybe she had been passing on information without even knowing it.

  “No. As soon as Aspen cleared the building, I restored Tessa’s computer back to the factory settings, then carefully rebuilt her profile. I didn’t trust Aspen not to have unwittingly screwed everything up.”

  “So the rogue software is gone? And we have no way of knowing who might have been accessing our systems and where the information was going?”

  Trees winced. “When you put it that way, I should have looked to see what was on the computer before I wiped it, but I had no idea…”

  “You couldn’t have.” But that didn’t help prove that Tessa wasn’t their mole…if they could prove that at all. “You finding anything else?”

  “Let me finish. Then…we’ll talk.”

  Given Trees’s scowl, that was a yes.

  His friend worked in silence, seemingly a lot faster now that he knew what to look for. Zy stood and ambled to the coffeepot, flipping it on. He wondered what Tessa was doing right now and if she’d cried when he’d left…or just shrugged and moved on with her life.

  He wished to fuck he understood why she’d lied to him, tossed them aside, and sold him to the enemy for a buck. Then again, he’d never understand that behavior.

  “Coffee?” he asked Trees.

  “Yeah. It’s going to be a long night.”

  Zy glanced down the hall. Laila’s light was still on. “Should I encourage her to go to sleep?”

  “You can try, but she won’t.”

  With a grim press of his lips, Zy shook his head, made two cups of coffee, and headed back to the table where Trees furiously scribbled notes, peering at the screen, then his list of chicken scratchings growing longer.

  Zy was on the last swallow of his java—along with his last nerve—when Trees finally looked up. His friend’s grave expression told Zy he wasn’t going to like whatever Trees had to say.

  Fuck. His heart nose-dived to his belly. His throat tightened. “What?”

  “There are footprints of communications from what looks like a Gmail account to an external mail host with its servers in Switzerland.”

  “Why is that important? Why does the server location matter?”

  “Because the Swiss have some of the strictest tech privacy laws in the world. No one is getting their hands on that information. A lot of people use this kind of service. People who don’t like their emails being scanned for key words so that online retailers can market to them, for instance. People who don’t love government intrusion into their personal life.”

  “So you have one of these email addresses?”

  “Not this particular provider. This one is expensive. But I have one like it. It’s also commonly used by people who have something to hide.”

  “Like criminals?”

  “Exactly.” Trees shrugged. “Obviously, I’m not saying that anyone who has one of these is up to something nefarious, but I am saying that anyone up to something nefarious probably has one of these email addresses, rather than a simple freebie.”

  “Let me recap: Someone with Gmail sent messages to a party with a super secure email address who might be a criminal?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “Because the information packet passed through our server, and I have some goodies residing there just in case, I can read the contents of the emails. But I can’t prove who the Gmail address belongs to.”

  Maybe they could figure it out. If they could read the contents of the outgoing messages, they might be able to glean who the Gmail belonged to—and thus, the identity of their mole.

  “Are the communications from this Gmail something to worry about?”

  Trees scanned, frowned, then sighed. “August eighteenth. The Gmail account owner wrote a summation of the plan Hunter outlined for Walker and me to spy in Mexico. The mission in which he was taken in the parking lot.”

  Zy’s blood ran cold. That breach had definitely been the work of their mole. And the bosses probably would have come to Trees sooner to have him run this down if they hadn’t suspected him. “Shit.”

  “Yep. Shit,” Trees confirmed. “There’s just one thing about this that’s a little weird: the message was sent in the middle of the night.”

  Zy tried to puzzle that through. “Tessa takes her laptop home with her more often than not. She always said it was in case the bosses needed something during evening and weekends.”

  “Or maybe she does that in case a certain cartel needs answers day or night.”

  As much as Zy hated to think it, yeah. “How do we prove whether that message came from Tessa?”

  “Without her computer, we don’t.”

  That wasn’t what Zy wanted to hear, but maybe there was another way to attack this. “What about Walker’s rescue mission in September? That went off without a hitch.”

  “The one I missed because of truck-stop sushi. Right…” Trees tapped on his keyboard again, waited for a few tense seconds, then started scanning whatever filled his screen. Zy felt as if he waited forever before Trees shook his head. “No. Nothing.”

  She hadn’t sent the enemy any plans about the rescue mission? Hadn’t told them when and where and how they were planning to extract One-Mile and hopefully Laila with him? There must be some reason. “Were the bosses keeping the details of that rescue mission better under wraps? Or…” Then Zy remembered. “Wait. Wasn’t that when she went to Tennessee because her father died?”

  Trees snapped his fingers, clicked onto a calendar, then nodded. “You’re right. She wasn’t around to learn about the plan and pass it on.”

  Now that he’d gotten over hating to think of Tessa being guilty, anger set in. With every detail they unturned, he was beginning to see her step-by-step betrayal. It crushed him. It made him want to nail her for her deception. “But she was back in plenty of time to rat out the location of Valeria’s safe house in St. Louis.”

  His buddy clicked a few more times, then nodded. “I just accessed the server’s October backup. Sure enough, here’s another communication from the Gmail account to the secure mail host, forwarding the email Walker sent me—via Tessa—with the location’s floor plan. And like before, she sent the email in the middle of the night.”

  “She told the drug lord exactly where to find his estranged wife?”

  “Yep. All the way down to the location of her bedroom.”

  What the absolute fuck? It was one thing for Tessa to sell him out and put his fellow operators at risk. But to take a buck for the location of a woman running for her life from the very man who had threatened her, knowing it would probably mean the end of the woman’s life and the murder of a little boy’s mommy? That made him fucking furious and sick. Zy would have sworn that Tessa would never stoop that low. But if this Gmail account belonged to her, this was irrefutable proof, in binary form, all stored in backup, that he’d been dead wrong.

  The woman he’d fallen in love with? There was a good chance she was a myth, and he’d never known her at all. The single mom scraping by to do her best by her daughter and taking care of those around her with a warm smile? A facade coated in a whole bunch of bullshit. For weeks, he’d stubbornly refused to believe that Tessa could be guilty of anything more than an inadvertent parking violation. Now that he’d seemingly exposed the schemer who could betray anyone if it suited her purposes? He would happily serve as her judge, jury, and executioner.

  “Anything else? Did she divulge the location of Valeria’s safe house in Orlando, too? And who would she be talking to now that Emilo is dead?”

  “I can’t tell.” Trees clicked a few more times, then scowled. “I don’t see specific communications this month, but she might have realized someone was on to her and switched up her mode of talk. I won’t know until I get my hands on her computer. You gotta get it for me, man. Now.”

  Yeah, he did. Whatever it took.

  That meant he had to go back to Tessa’s place. And after their ugly parting, what excuse could he possibly give her to let him back in? If she acquiesced, if she welcomed him in any way, how would he keep his hands off of her? His lips from her lush mouth? His body from invading hers?

  “I know this is going to fuck you up for a while,” Trees said. “I hate that like hell for you, but without her computer, I can’t prove what Tessa is up to or how she’s doing it. And if I can’t do that, more people may die.” Trees looked down the hall, at the light from Laila’s room shining this way. “People who deserve to finally live.”

  Zy stood. Trees was right, and he had to stop thinking like a sap with a broken heart and start thinking like a fucking operator, trained to do whatever he must. “I’m on it.”

  Zy felt the wintery wind zip through him as he headed down Trees’s country road back to town. It was late. So late almost no one was out. He encountered a total of two cars in thirty minutes and didn’t hit a single red light. Part of him wished he had. It would take longer to reach Tessa’s place that way.

  Fuck, what was he going to do if the mysterious Gmail account belonged to her? If he could prove that she was guilty of both not caring whether he lived or died and selling out the bosses, too?

  He tried not to dwell on that. He had objectives: Get into Tessa’s house. Locate her computer, usually in her bedroom. Find a hidden corner to pry it open. Depending on what he found, he’d plan accordingly. If the Gmail didn’t belong to her, he’d still have to deal with her other lies. But if it did…

  Heaven help her because all kinds of hell would rain down.

  His phone rang as he pulled to the curb. A normal person would wonder if Trees had a sixth sense, but Zy knew his buddy had calculated exactly how long the trip should take this time of night and had set himself a reminder.

  “Right on time, you uncanny bastard.”

  “You made it?”

  “Yeah. Heading up her walk now.”

  “On standby here.”

  “Hooking up my earbuds…” Zy pushed the attachment into the port, then fitted the piece in his ear. “Ready. Going in with the key now.”

  “Roger that,” Trees said, then fell silent. “Tell me when you find her machine.”

  With his heart hammering, Zy focused on using the light from his phone in one hand to illuminate the lock so he could slip the key into it with the other. It snicked inside on the first try and turned with almost no discernible sound. He knew the door didn’t creak and Tessa didn’t have an alarm system. So once he was inside, the only thing he had to worry about was either waking her up or somehow fucking up.

  Zy knew the layout of her unit well, but he was surprised when he didn’t walk into a darkened living room. Instead, the little light over her stove a dozen feet away glowed softly. A glance around—which he hadn’t taken earlier tonight—told him that Tessa hadn’t picked up much lately. Her shoes looked as if they lay exactly where she’d kicked them off when she got home from the office. She’d doffed her work clothes and draped them over the arm of the sofa, forgotten. Her keys sat on the end table, half hanging out of her purse. A collection of empty water bottles and soda cans littered the coffee table.

  Zy frowned. Months ago when he’d stayed here with her and Hallie, when she had been at her most frayed and exhausted, she’d picked up the house meticulously every night. Now it looked as if she hadn’t bothered in a while, as if she no longer gave a shit. Why?

  It was also unlike her not to be in her bedroom, door closed, at three a.m. But Tessa reclined on the sofa, curled into a ball, head lolling onto the back as she slept under one of Hallie’s baby blankets. What the hell? She must be uncomfortable, not to mention freezing. Why was she here instead of on her cozy, queen-size marshmallow of a mattress? And why, even in the shadows, did her eyes look puffy and red?

  Was something bothering her? Guilt maybe?

  He shouldn’t worry about her housecleaning habits any more than he should worry about her feelings now. But even as he told himself that, he lifted the quilt lying on the back of an armchair and spread it open, softly draping it over her body. For a moment, she stiffened. Stifling a curse, Zy retreated to a dark corner of the room, but she settled again moments later, sighing as she melted back into sleep.

  Bent and stupid; those were the best words to describe him now. He was too focused on Tessa and her comfort when he should be figuring out just how corrupt she was. He had a fucking traitor to catch before she could endanger any other team members’ lives.

  On the heels of that came another terrible thought, but he’d shelve it until he had her computer wide open for him to examine. He didn’t have a choice.

  Antsy now, Zy zoomed from the living room to her bedroom, looking for the laptop. Sure enough, it sat on the corner of her dresser, where she usually stashed the device at night.

  “Got it,” he whispered into the earbud’s microphone.

  “Good. Find a quiet place to set up.”

  Zy needed to think. When they’d planned this, he and Trees had both agreed it made sense for Zy to scan the machine at Tessa’s with Trees’s remote help, rather than schlepping it back and forth. He’d only bring it to the ranch—and potentially tip their hand—if necessary. After all, if Tessa woke up while he was gone and realized her computer was missing, the jig was up. But all along, he’d been sure Tessa would be in her bed, so he’d intended to tuck himself in the little dining alcove or even hang out on the sofa she currently occupied.

  Time to improvise.

  He didn’t dare go into her bedroom or bathroom in case she woke up and headed that way. Ditto with anywhere in the open area of the living room, dining room, or kitchen. That left Hallie’s bedroom and the guest bath. Well, he supposed he could try her laundry, but it was more of a closet than a room. And the tight space of her garage wouldn’t give him anywhere to work unless he sat in her car…which would beep as soon as he opened the door.

  Fuck.

  He crept out of the master bedroom, past Tessa, bypassing her damn shoes, which would have been easy to trip on, then straight through the kitchen. He stopped in the little hallway then. Hallie’s bedroom—the chances of waking the little girl with a computer light seemed slim—with the glider? Or the postage-stamp guest bath?

  Staring back and forth between the side-by-side doors, Zy deliberated, then reached for the knob on the left and pushed into the little bathroom. He might not wake Hallie with the computer light, but if Tessa had the baby monitor tucked under her blanket and he woke her by being here in her daughter’s room…there would be no logical explanation.

  Slowly, he shut the bathroom door, quietly closed the lid on the commode, then flipped on the light. “All right. Let’s go.”

  “Got the USB drive?”

  “Yep.” Trees had given him the device before he’d left his buddy’s place. “Inserting it now.”

  “Since this allows me to bypass her log-in and password requirements, once I remote connect, I can take down any other security she might have and get into any program she’s loaded.”

  Zy had figured as much.

  The light on the USB drive lit up. Her computer zipped past the log-in screen and quickly loaded her desktop. Damn, Trees was good.

  “You’re a go.”

  “Perfect. Give me a minute with it. You don’t have to babysit. If you need to check on something out there—”

  “I don’t.” If he looked at Tessa again, he’d only feel sympathy she didn’t deserve. Even now, he could all but feel her across the house, soft and warm and upset about something she wouldn’t explain. And it was killing him.

  In the next five minutes, he would probably know just how duplicitous she was…and suddenly, he didn’t want to. Instead, he wanted to grab her, throttle her, understand her, fuck her within an inch of her life, pleasure her until she didn’t have the strength to lie to him anymore, then love her so much she could never hurt him again.