Wicked as Lies (Wicked & Devoted #3) - Shayla Black Page 0,52

I’m old and wizened, I’ll be with you, surrounded by your wife, your half-dozen kids, and all your grandbabies.”

“I wish.”

“Seriously. Once you fall, it will last forever.” While Zy knew he’d still be thinking about that one time he’d almost gotten his shit together enough to deserve the woman he loved.

Zy unlocked the truck, then snatched the duffel from Trees’s hand and hoisted it into the bed. “Want to grab a bite on the way back to your place?”

“I still can’t eat much and I can’t go back to the ranch. Take me to the office.”

“Did you leave something there?” But Zy knew better. The noble bastard wanted to help Walker.

“Don’t play dumb. If I went home, I’d just pace the fucking floor and try to come up with a rescue plan.”

True, but Zy hated to take his buddy back to the same office where they suspected he might be a mole. He didn’t mention that, though. Trees didn’t need more shit right now. If he knew, he’d only decide to prove the Edgington-Muñoz gang wrong by hauling ass to Mexico alone. And he’d get himself killed trying to rescue One-Mile.

The truth was, the bosses were so frantic and fried that they were grasping at straws. Trees was just one of them, and they’d soon figure out they were wrong.

Right?

“Okay, but I’m starving. And if I’m stopping for me, you have to eat something.”

“If you’ll quit nagging me to death, I’ll choke down a few bites, Mommy.”

Zy shot him a middle finger as he slid behind the wheel of Trees’s beat-up truck and rolled out of the parking lot. As they stopped at the first light, he turned to his buddy. “So what happened out there?”

“Shortly after we landed in Acapulco, we decided to grab an early dinner before we headed to our hotel. Along the way, we found a seafood place on the shore. There were a few tourists there. It seemed fine.” Trees paused and frowned. “Where did the bosses tell you Walker and I were going?”

“After you’d gone, Logan pulled me aside and said you two were scheduled to be in Petalán for a little reconnaissance tomorrow night.”

Trees breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s not you, then. Not that I thought it was, but—”

“Did one of them tell you they thought I was a mole?”

“Not in so many words, but they definitely think we have one in the office.”

“Joaquin told me that today.”

“Did he have any theories who?”

From that question, Zy got the idea the bosses were playing one against the other, trying to get to the bottom of this mess. And Zy didn’t want anything to do with that shit. “Nope.”

Trees shrugged. “I don’t think this mission to Mexico told them anything valuable, either. You, Josiah, and Cutter were all supposed to hear that Emilo Montilla’s wife, Valeria, the one the colonel and his former team smuggled out a while back, had given us information so we could rescue her sister, who’s still trapped. Each of you were supposed to get a different story. Wherever the shit went down, that would help pinpoint the guilty party. But we didn’t get jumped in any of the locations at the pre-scheduled times. So I don’t know what to think.”

“Let’s get real. You know it’s not me.”

“Never thought that for an instant. I told Hunter that.”

And Zy would have to figure out later why they’d sent Trees on this mission if they thought he might be the leak. “And now it doesn’t seem like either Cutter or Josiah. Neither of them is the type anyway. Cutter is totally the Boy Scout Walker always sneers at him for being. And Josiah, despite being former CIA, seems like a solid teammate all the way around.”

“Yeah. To be honest, if anyone had asked me which of the five of us was the mole, I would have put my money on Walker.”

“Same.”

“If he was secretly working for the cartel, they did a really good job of beating the shit out of him and making it look good. I believed it one hundred percent.”

Zy guessed it was possible, but Occam’s razor suggested that the simplest solution was usually the right one. If he applied that principle to this situation, One-Mile was being held against his will, and he would fucking die if they didn’t do something soon.

“Joaquin also suggested it was possible that Montilla had the jump on our information because we’d been hacked.”

Trees turned to him. “You know…maybe. On Tuesday, the day before