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Kamola tried to twist free, his left hand clawing at Ryder’s wrist. Ryder drove his arm higher up his back until the man’s knees buckled, then secured his wrists with a zip tie. The man’s breathing was ragged, his cheek pressed flat against the wallpaper.

“Mitchell Kamola. We’re with Zodiac Tactical, working on behalf of your former employer. The one you stole all that information from that you’re trying to sell.” Ryder kept his voice level. “The drive, your phone, and your full cooperation. That’s what happens next.”

Kamola started talking. Some combination of denial and bargaining that Ryder had heard a hundred times from men who’d just run out of options. He let it run. The words didn’t matter. The outcome had been decided the moment Nolan shook his hand two hours ago.

Ryder held him against the wall and waited for the man to exhaust himself. His hands knew exactly where to be. The grip, the angle, the distribution of pressure that kept a body immobile without doing damage. Clean and practiced. Ryder knew how to not cause damage.

He also knew how to cause exceptional damage. The most painful kind.

On people who hadn’t stolen anything. In rooms where the person pinned against the wall hadn’t done anything to deserve it.

Ryder’s jaw tightened as he pushed the black thoughts away and handed Kamola off to Ian, who had come up the corridor behind him. They began walking Kamola and the bodyguard farther down the hall toward the back entrance.

“Nice work in there,” Ian said.

Nolan shrugged, but the corner of his mouth pulled up. “He almost spooked about twenty minutes in. Could feel him start to recalculate.”

Nolan was already shedding the cover. He rolled his neck and tugged his collar straight, his voice settling back into its real register, lower and with less polish than the man who’d been sitting across from Kamola.

That man was gone. The one standing in the corridor looked like someone else entirely, and it had nothing to do with any sort of disguise.

Nolan was very, very good at what he did.

“What tripped him?” Ryder asked.

“Asked me if I knew a name. Jameson. Someone he’d pitched to before.” Nolan paused. “I didn’t, of course.”

“But you answered like you did?” Lilah asked.

“Took me about four seconds to build a guy I’d never met. Gave him a firm in Atlanta, a preference for his namesake Irish whiskey, and a bad habit of name-dropping.” Nolan glanced toward the service entrance. “Kamola needed to believe I moved in his world. Jameson was the test, and I passed it.”

Ryder grinned. “Four seconds.”

Nolan winked. “You know me. I’m a fast thinker.”

The bodyguard slowed down, and Lilah gave him a little push between his zip-tied hands. First time working with Lilah Collingwood, and she’d laid to rest whether she was qualified to be on the Zodiac Tactical team.

Word around Zodiac was that Ian DeRose had brought her in based on the fact that he and Lilah’s father, Gabe Collingwood, had known each other for decades and served together as SEALs back in the day.

Evidently, whatever Gabe had passed down to his daughter, it had taken. Ryder wouldn’t hesitate to work with her again.

Kamola was still protesting his innocence when they got to the service entrance. Nolan and Lilah moved to handle transport, placing both Kamola and the bodyguard in the waiting vehicle. The corridor went quiet.

Ian stopped, blocking Ryder’s progress toward the door in the subtlest of ways. “Nolan’s good at what he does.”

Okay. Wasn’t the sort of thing Ryder would expect Ian to bring up here in this hallway right when an op had just wrapped.

“He is. One of the best.”

Ian turned to look at him. The gaze held, steady and patient and aimed. “Not the same, but… That bring anything up for you?”

Quiet words delivered with the care of a man who knew what lived underneath the surface he was asking about.

Ian was the only man on the planet Ryder would even consider answering the question for.

Because Ian had once been in a room with Ryder’s darkest side. Because Ian carried a scar from it that nobody else in the world knew the origin of.

“I’m okay,” Ryder said. “Steady.”