send a shiver of anticipation down her spine. “I’m fine.”
“I doubt that.” He frowned. “I want to hold your hand, but I don’t think you want that right now.”
The desire to sit in his lap and wrap her arms around him was almost overwhelming. But she forced herself to sit in her own chair. They had specific parameters, and that was all she could be comfortable with right now. Any feelings she had for him could only be indulged during those hours they’d agreed on. Anything else and she would drown. If she let herself, she would end up marrying him all over again and living the life he wanted to live.
Or you could figure out what you want and ask him to go with you. You knew all those years ago you should get out and try something else. You knew it would make you miserable. You stayed because he was there and then you stayed because that damn job was the only thing that connected you to him. Let him make the sacrifice this time.
“I’m fine. Just worried, but I think I have every right to be.” She kept her tone calm and it was an effort because she found herself restless. Things were happening fast. Faster than she was ready for.
“You’ve got that look,” Beck said. “The one that lets me know you think it’s all about to go to hell.”
The conference door opened, and Hutch had the brightest grin on his face. He held up a thick stack of papers. “We got him.”
Yep, all the pieces were falling into place, and that was when everything exploded.
* * * *
The conference room was full of smiling faces, with the exception of one. It was the grim expression of Kim’s that made Beck wary.
“Okay, explain this again with actual words people outside of the computer world use and slower,” Ian instructed Hutch. He glanced Adam’s way. “How much sugar did you feed him?”
Adam grinned. “A lot. I had to keep him going.”
Hutch was practically vibrating. “So it took me a couple of hours, but I managed to get in contact with Reva. She’s in hiding. Changed her name and everything.”
“Is she hiding from Levi?” Kim asked with a weariness that made his heart ache because he didn’t think she was tired from lack of sleep.
She was tired from all the intrigue, exhausted from people pulling her one way or another. She’d been Levi’s chew toy for years.
And he himself had done a lot of damage, too.
“She didn’t know his real name, of course, and everything they did was online.” Hutch seemed to force himself to go slower. “But after the job was done some scary stuff started to happen, and lucky for us like many hackers, Reva’s completely paranoid. So to put it plainly, Levi hired a hacker to get into Kronberg’s systems and upload material he wanted there. At the time Reva needed the cash, and it didn’t seem to be such a crazy thing to put a couple of names in a pharmaceutical company’s backlog of investors. She admitted she didn’t read a lot of it. She knew what she was doing was wrong, but she considered it to be rich people fucking each other over.”
“When did she figure out it was something more?” Ezra asked.
“Is she safe?” Kim asked at the same time. “You said she had kids.”
“Answer Kim first, please.” Hutch would likely answer the question that interested him first, but Beck wanted Kim to be comfortable.
Hutch stopped and looked Kim’s way. “Reva’s good. I don’t even know where she is. She’s changed her name, moved, and she told me she feels comfortable that whoever hired her back then doesn’t know where she is.”
“Then why is she willing to come forward?” Kim asked. “She would have to testify.”
“Ah, but she won’t,” Hutch said. “Because she’s got this, and she’s still got the original.”
“And what is that?” Beck was pretty good with computers, but even he didn’t quite understand all the tech stuff Hutch and Jax and Adam had spewed in the first frenzied moments after they’d walked into the conference room.
“She basically took a snapshot of Kronberg’s systems before she touched them. She’s got everything. It’s a beautiful job,” Hutch said with excitement. “She didn’t leave anything behind. It proves what she put in and what was real. This was as much a cover-up as it was a reveal.”
Damn, he’d worried about that. “If he could prove some of it was true, he could