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“Yeah, shut up,” Wren teased. She sat. “Louisa, go on.”

She didn’t stand, but she cleared her throat and started talking. I couldn’t hold back on this pride. This was the first time she was stepping in like this, taking charge of a part of our operations, and I fucking loved it. It was just one more sign that she was ours, she was mine.

“Um, well, first things first. Gregori is alive.”

Lev cursed under his breath.

Adrik nodded, rolling his hand impatiently. “We figured as much.”

“Now you don’t have to figure it out. You can know.” Louisa went through a series of showing live streams of surveillance. Between her and Trojan, they orchestrated a cyber attack on multiple agencies’ surveillance databases, piggybacking their way in to maintain a nearly constant watch on several properties that we’d had on our radar. One belonged to the governor. Another was a villa that a congressman owned. Yet another was a condo that one of the tech bros in Silicon Valley rented out to elite guests.

With careful attention to detail, she pointed out the routes that Gregori used to stay mobile. She had vehicles tagged. She identified the transportation service provider, and she even had a list of deliveries he had made that further indicated where he was likely staying next.

“God damn…” Lev said, shaking his head once she paused.

“I know, right?” Wren said. “She’s like a bloodhound.”

“Trojan has helped a lot,” Louisa admitted. “However, it’s clear that Gregori is paranoid about being tracked. Since he moves so much. And the decoys.” She went into even more detail about the body doubles he used. Even then, she could dial in the focus and demonstrate how there were subtle differences to notice. A slightly shifted swagger in his stride. Small tidbits of how his face looked from beneath hats and from behind sunglasses.

“So in conclusion,” Maksim said, raising his brows to mark it as a question.

“In conclusion, you have proof that Gregori is alive. But pinning him at any one location will prove difficult.”

“He has to know that he’s a dead man walking—again,” Viktor quipped.

“Definitely,” Luisa said. “Now the other thing is about Rico Johnson.” She shifted into another window, walking us through how she and Wren lucked out with Igor’s spontaneous idea of how to track the communication coming in and out of the several properties she was zeroing in on.

“That’s how we got into this,” Louisa said, pulling up an image of emails. “And how we found this.” She ended with a copy of an email that looked encoded. With a tap of her button, though, the contents scrambled and unscrambled, shifting to a binary coded screen before reverting to common text.

“Rico Johnson is alive as well, since he’s still actively sending messages through this account. With activity as recent as this morning.” Louisa paused to sip water. “He’s the one who originally put the hit on you.” She glanced at Adrik, highlighting the text that spelled it out as a “requested favor” to kill him. “And also an Agent Smithson.”

“That fucker,” Adrik said, shaking his head. “What a pain in the ass.”

“Wait. How can we know that Rico Johnson is in charge of those messages?” I asked.

“Yeah. If he’s working with Gregori, it still funnels back to him,” Viktor said. “He has the most to gain by putting a hit on Adrik.”

I shrugged. “Then again, what does it really matter? We can safely assume Rico Johnson’s been bought like everyone else.”

Adrik put his hand on Elena’s lap. She frowned, looking down, and I knew that even though she tried to look strong, she still struggled with the fact that someone had wanted her husband dead.

For the rest of the meeting, I couldn’t ignore how I had already started down that path of thinking.

If something happened to me, what would that do to Louisa and Brady?

I never wanted them to be saddened by my death.

I hated the idea of them suffering, too.

Yet, as I caught Louisa’s gaze and we experienced that click of a connection—that awareness of each other that never needed spoken words to convey that we were there for each other—I had to respect that this was just one more law of that before-and-after conflict.

Before her, I saw myself as expendable.

After meeting her and possessing her as a crucial part of my life, I wanted to resist any threat of our ever losing each other.

Then make it happen.

Let’s find that asshole and end him.