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“Do you want something, or are you just going to stand there?”
She said it without looking up. Someone had been hovering at the edge of her vision for at least thirty seconds, and she was too deep in the protocol to care about manners.
“Standing here, mostly. Didn’t want to interrupt.” A male voice she didn’t recognize.
She looked up and found Ian DeRose in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.
“Sorry.” She straightened. “I didn’t realize it was you, Mr. DeRose.”
“Ian, please. Would it have changed the tone?”
“Probably not. I’m on a pretty important deadline here.”
He pulled a chair from the nearest empty workstation and sat down. Not too close.
“I understand. Got a second to take a break? I find sometimes that helps.”
He was right. Plus, he was the boss, so…
“True.” She eased her chair back and blinked after staring at screens for so long.
“And I won’t take much of your time.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“Ryder came to see me after the debrief last night. Said he’d told you what he used to do.” No preamble.
She froze in her chair. “He did.”
“And that you didn’t take it well. Which he insisted was not only understandable, but logical. That you don’t want to be around him and he doesn’t blame you for that.”
“It’s…complicated.”
“Also understandable. Believe me, I’ve worked enough undercover cases to know that situations are rarely simple. I’m not here to tell you how to feel about Ryder’s past. That’s yours.”
She waited. There was more. She could hear it in the space left after the sentence.
“But I think you deserve the full picture before you make that decision. Not because you owe him. Because incomplete information leads to bad conclusions, and I think you know that better than most.”
She turned her chair to face him fully. “Okay.”
“I hired Ryder Sutton after he spent two days interrogating me. Did he tell you that?”
“He told me a little. He said it got violent.”
Ian rolled up the sleeve of his shirt. The scar was there, a thin, pale line running along his forearm. “Ryder gave me this during the worst forty-eight hours of my life.”
Her stomach turned.
“And six months later, I found him and offered him a job.”
She couldn’t wrap her head around it. Hadn’t been able to when Ryder had told her the same thing. “Why?”
Ian rolled his sleeve back down. “Because I’d spent two days in a room with the most skilled interrogator I’d ever seen. But the thing that stood out wasn’t the skill; it was that the work was tearing him apart. He was so good at reading people but couldn’t read himself.”
He leaned forward, forearms on his knees. “He didn’t want to do it anymore but couldn’t see a way out. Plus, I recognize an asset when I see one. That’s how I built Zodiac.”
“So you offered him a job. Just like that.”
