Page 82 of Heist in Paradise

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know, I swear.”

“Jax.” Nate’s voice was tinged with unease. “What did you find?”

I didn’t loosen my grip. The knife was sharp, beads of blood already welling around the tip. I could see his pulse hammering beneath his skin. “You have five seconds,” I warned him. “You will tell me everything. Starting with the burner phone.”

Ryle’s eyes bugged. “What burner phone?”

With my free hand, I pulled out the cursed device from my pocket. Ryle gawked at it, not in panic but in stark disbelief, like I was presenting him with a dead fish. “This yours?”

“No,” he said, face furrowing in confusion. “No, Jax. I swear.”

I pressed the button on the side, illuminating his pale face. His eyes whizzed over the message thread.

14:01: is the package secured?

14:03: ?

“Funny,” I said humorlessly as he blanched under my knife. “Can you guess what the passcode was?”

“Jax, plea—”

“It was the same combination to the safe.”

Ryle was shaking. Sweat dripped down his temples, catching fragments of moonlight where it siphoned through the overhead canopy. I looked at him, and for a moment all I saw was my kid brother—the same kid who rescued old cats and injured birds, who made us watch Christmas movies all year round, who insisted on eating at the dining table like a real family because he’d never had one, because that was all he’d ever wanted.

Family.

My chest tightened. I blamed myself as much as him. I should’ve seen it earlier—I should’ve protected him from whatever manipulative influence had got to him. Ryle was impressionable. He was eager to please, more eager to prove himself.

He’d betrayed me, but in a way, I’d betrayed him.

I sucked in a brutal breath, my throat working around the grisly lump. “Five,” I warned.

Ryle just stared at me.

“Four.”

He stared and stared, and then his eyes filled with tears and his mouth opened, but there was no sound.

“Three.”

“Where,” he choked, then wet his lips. “Where did you find it, Jax?”

“Your backpack.”

Ryle shuddered, like that was the last thing he wanted to hear. He looked down, tears clinging to his lashes. “I swapped out my pack before we left the motel,” he said in a quiet, wounded voice. “I carried the tech instead.”

I stared at him, processing that. “Then who carried your pack?”

Something clicked behind me.

My spine stiffened before my brain made the connection between the sound and the immediate danger. Slowly, I loosened my grip on the knife and turned, keeping it slotted in my palm. With each second that went by, a new crack opened, the foundations of everything I knew becoming unreliable beneath me.

Nate didn’t smile as he leveled the gun at me.

There was no hint of amusement or warmth on his face as he aimed it. My heart splintered, and I moved on autopilot, taking a purposeful step in front of a wide-eyed Ryle. The knife weighed like an anvil in my hand. But the betrayal sat heavier.