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Lies. He was not steady. He had not been steady for a while. The nightmares had been dragging him out of sleep at three a.m. for the past six weeks, and every morning was the same slow, deliberate work of putting it all back where nobody could see it.

The weight was old and familiar. When he’d pinned Kamola against that wall, the calm had come without being invited. The quiet precision that settled over Ryder whenever another person’s body was under his control. It had felt easy.

It always did.

Clean work. Professional. There was nothing wrong with what he’d done tonight.

But that calm had been built in rooms where everything was wrong, and no amount of clean work since would change the filth that was always going to cover Ryder.

But Ian didn’t need to carry that. He’d done enough already. This was something Ryder had to carry alone. He’d been carrying it for four years, and the weight hadn’t killed him yet.

Ian nodded. “Okay, good. I’m glad to hear it, because we need you for an op at Rogue.”

Every muscle in Ryder’s body went tight.

Ian saw it. Whatever crossed Ryder’s face, Ian caught it and held up a hand before Ryder could speak.

“Not for what you were. Something different. We’ll brief it tomorrow afternoon.”

Ryder didn’t answer right away. The corridor was quiet. Nolan and Lilah were gone, Kamola was gone, and the only thing left was the word Rogue sitting in the space between him and the one man who knew exactly why that word would hit the way it just had.

“I’ll be there,” Ryder finally said. For Ian. Only for Ian.

The other man gave him one last look, then headed for the service entrance. Ryder stood alone in the corridor.

He’d said he was steady. He’d said he was okay. He’d lied about both.

And tomorrow afternoon, he’d be walking back into the place where he’d been a monster.

But who was he kidding?

He was a monster whether he was in Rogue or not.

Chapter 2

“There you are.”

Cassandra Leuenberger leaned toward her left monitor, where a transaction chain she’d been tracing for eleven days had finally connected to a routing number she’d flagged the week before. She pulled up the account history on her center screen and cross-referenced it with shell company records on her right.

Her left hand scrolled while her right typed a query string, and the two systems talked to each other through her.

“Awwwww, you thought four shell companies would be enough to hide.” She sat back. “That’s so adorable.”

She didn’t care that she was talking to a hedge fund manager who would never hear her, from an apartment he would never find. All she cared about was that he was about to lose a significant amount of money.

She’d been on this particular project for three weeks, tracing his skimming operation through layered accounts, rerouting stolen funds from a veterans’ pension back to the people it belonged to. One small transfer at a time. One row at a time.

She called them her knitting projects because that’s what the work felt like: the same careful stitch over and over, building something you couldn’t see until you stepped back from it.

Also, because it was boring as hell.

Disco music, Cassandra’s downfall, was playing, bass heavy enough to feel in her chest. If anyone could see her, they’d probably fall over laughing: her hips rotating and shaking to the beat between keystrokes, barefoot on the tile, occasionally getting up and dancing her way to the kitchen for coffee like right now.

She had three more knitting projects in her queue, and they were all the same. Important work. Necessary work. The kind of work that absolutely nobody would ever make a movie about, unless it was deliberately to put someone to sleep.

She refilled her mug and danced her way back to the desk, singing about letting someone ring her bell, and dropped into her chair on the downbeat.

Two keyboards sat side by side on a desk that was nothing more than a door resting across two filing cabinets. Her monitors were propped on stacked textbooks, and a red velvet armchair sat three feet from an industrial shelving unit that had no business being in the same room with it.