Free The Reveal by Julie Leto Page A

damn her, she didn’t resist.
    “If someone was anticipating my moves, I need to warn my people,” she said. “They could be in danger.”
    “Or they could be the source of information.”
    Brynn did not argue. Unlike the CIA, Titan likely didn’t have loyalty oaths or threats of treason to keep people from spilling their guts for the right price.
    “You’ve had people betray you before,” he guessed.
    Her glare was hard and cold. “Not many, but yes. It’s the price of doing business. Some of my European team resented my spending more time and resources in the North American market.”
    He forced himself to focus on her knee, running his fingers in a circle around the cap. “Let me guess. It all started with Marisela?”
    Brynn grinned. “She does make an impression, doesn’t she?”
    He shrugged. “The fact that you and she get along made an impression on me.”
    “A good one?”
    He tried to keep his touch light, but the more they explored the topic of his admiration, the more of her he wanted to touch. “What do you think?”
    She pressed the small of her back against the wall. “I think Marisela could be at risk. If they tracked me, they could have tracked her.”
    She sounded worried, but not about her colleague. Her gaze remained latched on his hand. He drew lazy figure eights on the side of her knee, undeterred by her less-than-subtle shift out of his reach.
    “She’s in the States and working an unrelated case, right?” he asked. “I doubt they’ll bother with her. And even if they did, I’d put my money on Marisela. Wouldn’t you?”
    Despite the incremental resistance he felt against his touch, Sean ran his hand down to her toes, running his fingers over the glossy toenails, painted nude but with tiny glints of sparkle that captured the light from the fire.
    “Titan has an international reputation,” he said. “I can’t imagine they’d poke a sleeping beast. As long as your team doesn’t know where you are, they’re not only out of danger, but they’re out of the way.”
    “You don’t know where Jayda is. That doesn’t make you less a target.”
    Sean released her leg, almost before he realized it. He hated when Brynn talked about Jayda—hated when she forced him to think about her, even though, rationally, he knew his former lover was the cornerstone of their predicament.
    But she was dead. Dead and buried. Evidence to the contrary was circumstantial at best—and Sean’s proof was solid. It wasn’t that he trusted Dante’s information—he trusted no one that implicitly—but he did trust his gut.
    Even before Dante had come to New Orleans with the news, Sean had known she was gone. Maybe he was a fool or maybe he’d hung out with too many voodoo practitioners during his misspent youth, but when her light had gone out, the balance in his world had changed.
    For the first time in years, he’d felt…safe.
    “She’s dead.”
    “You keep saying that, but in light of what’s happened, how can you still be so sure?”
    “I’m sure.”
    “Why? Did you see her body?”
    “No,” he confessed. “I didn’t need to.”
    “Did you see an autopsy report? Review DNA evidence? Read the official CIA report on the loss of a major asset?”
    He grabbed her by the upper arms. He shook her, not out of anger but because he was shaking himself. “You need to drop this. Jayda is gone. I know this, not because of reports that can be manufactured or because I trust Dante not to lie.”
    “Then you know because you had some sort of psychic connection that broke when she stopped breathing air?”
    He released her. No matter how hard he tried, he could not make her understand something he didn’t himself.
    “Something like that,” he muttered.
    “Did you love her?”
    Sean’s chest tightened. For a split second, he felt as if he were tied to the metal chair again, this time with a vice clamping around him from his midsection to his ribs. He searched Brynn’s face for any sign of