Not the Mira that Maren had last seen—tired and stressed, evasive and short-tempered, all things that Maren had chalked up to an overworked new mom with a stressful job. This was a younger Mira not long after she’d been hired by LRH, laughing at something just off camera, one hand touching the arm of the woman beside her, comfortable in her own skin, lighting up the room. Maren didn’t know a single other person in the photo.
The part of her life she never shared.
But knowing it andseeingit were different things entirely, and the gap between them turned Maren’s grief to rage. Not at Mira. At the people who had taken all of this from her. From Juni. From Sean. From everyone in this room.
She kept her face blank but she was shaking. She felt the side of Colin’s knee press against hers. He was clocking every little thing about her and telling herI’m here for you.
Elissa’s face appeared on the screen again. “We’re trying to identify everyone in all the work photos we have of Mira, going back to the beginning. Anyone she worked with even remotely atLRH. We’re going to keep pulling. Flint and I have two threads that are starting to converge.”
“I want everyone in this room to understand what we’re risking and why,” Kyle said. “Maren’s getting briefed on everything.” He paused. “She’s family. She gets answers.”
Maren exhaled.
Colin’s knee pressed against hers.Still here.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
Elissa walked her through it. Some things she knew about her sister, some things she didn’t, thanks to her sister’s clearance level. Mira had been at LRH Defense Systems for three years. Naval weapons procurement—contracts, compliance, the kind of mid-level position that puts you in rooms where decisions are made without putting your name on anything important.
The job looked ordinary from the outside. Maren had thought it was ordinary. She’d sat across from her sister at holidays and listened to her complain about the commute and the parking and the vending machine that stole money and never had the right chips anyway.
“She came to NCIS two years into her job,” Elissa said. “What they call self-initiated contact. She’d found something and she knew what it was and she knew she needed help. That takes nerve.”
“She had nerve,” Maren said quietly. “She had more nerve than anyone I’ve ever known. I’m the quiet, boring one.” She scoffed. “Well, until recently.”
Elissa gave her a sympathetic smile before going on. “Like I said, Raymond Castillo’s files were buried deep, but I did manage to poke around some. Ray was her handler. They worked together for approximately fourteen months before she died.” Elissa paused. “He was good at his job, good at handling Mira. I read some of his notes. He really did want to keep her assafe as he could. Especially once she had Juniper. She was the one who insisted on staying longer with LRH.”
Mira’s voice filled Maren’s head.Just a little longer. I almost had everything.
“The staged accident,” Lachlan said.
“Yeah, Boss, getting to it. The investigation into Mira’s death was opened and closed in eleven days. The lead investigator retired six months later. Two witnesses who initially reported the vehicle that hit her changed their statements.”
“I remember that,” Maren said. “When I asked about it, I was told that witnesses do it all the time once they realize they didn’t see what they thought they saw.”
Elissa smirked. “Just for funsies, I checked out their financial situations shortly after that and both seemed to have come into some money.” She rolled her eyes. “The hit-and-run case went cold, and so did the NCIS investigation into LRH. Shortly after that, Ray was out on his ass.
“He’s spent all this time fighting the allegations,” she went on. “He never stopped working the case, either, even if it was just from an armchair. He must have found something, because he was actually starting to get somewhere with clearing his name. He realized his life was in danger, so he made the recording that got sent to you after they captured him. He was trying to reach you directly—to get you and Juni to Lyons before anything happened to him.” She paused. “He ran out of time.”
Ray had been alive when Maren crossed the Nevada border with Juni asleep in the back seat. He’d been alive when they stopped for pancakes in Grand Junction, when Juni saw snow for the first time, when Maren finally let herself breathe in the Watchdog parking lot.
He’d been alive and they’d been hurting him all that time. Because of her.
He didn’t tell them where he sent me.
She didn’t know how she knew that either, but she did. She knew the man who’d made that recording, who’d spent years keeping a dead woman’s promise, had not told them anything.
They killed him anyway.
TWENTY-SIX
Kyle had beenin the kennels since oh-six-hundred.
Not because he needed to be. Alex had everything handled—had always had everything handled, which was one of the reasons Kyle had spent considerable effort convincing the man who had trained Kyle to be a dog handler back when they were both SEALs to come be his kennel master in Colorado. Alex’s evaluation was clear—the latest litter of Malinois pups was sharp. Kyle thought about the previous litter. Bennie had already been placed and was doing things that Kyle wouldn’t have believed possible from a dog that had nearly washed out of the program entirely. Kevin Foti deserved about eighty percent of the credit for that, which Kyle intended to tell him someday when the kid was old enough not to let it go to his head.
No, Kyle was in the kennels because after yesterday’s news about Ray Castillo, he needed to be near the dogs. Simple as that. Dogs always calmed his nerves, reassured him that not everything in the world was evil, not as long as there were dogs inhabiting the same planet.
His other reason was because the thing he’d worked so hard for, the Lackland AFB inspection date, was eleven days out. Kyle had made sure every radiograph was filed, everymicrochip number logged, behavioral assessments documented to the letter of the SOW—because Kyle had read that document so many times he could probably recite sections of it in his sleep, and because the one thing he was not going to do was give Lackland a paperwork reason to look sideways at Watchdog’s breeding program.
