Maya looked up at them, her mind still reeling. “Is this real?”
“It’s not a bribe,” Gray rumbled. “Just what your team was promised at the outset of this whole fucking mess.”
“Good, because absolution isn’t something you can buy.” She glared at them both, but only for the few seconds before her eyes were drawn back down to the tablet as if by gravity. Her fingers almost trembled as she paged through the first few files and found the coordinates.
Shit. The damn thing was in Atlanta. It had been under their feet the whole time.
“Knox wants Nina to have it,” Conall said. “My uncle was a member of the RLOC. Protecting this was his life’s mission, but I think he’d agree with Knox. Nina will do right by it. Give it back to the people.”
Still stunned, Maya glanced at Conall. He shot her a jittery smile before bouncing to his feet. “And I am going to go get some of that pie. It smells amazing.”
Maya watched him stroll into the shop, conflicted emotions churning through her. Conall looked like he’d been reborn, all traces of neural overload and pain stripped away, his steps light even though the target on his back should be weighing him down.
Gray, on the other hand, looked exactly the same. Solid, implacable, unreadable. Either the degradation of his implant hadn’t impacted him, or he simply hadn’t shown the discomfort. Somehow, she guessed it was the latter.
“How are you?”
It could have been small talk, but Gray didn’t seem like the small-talk type. The memory came too easily, still tinged with terror and embarrassment. The mercenary approaching her to tie her hands. Panic shredding through her. And Gray’s arms closing around her, his chest hard at her back, his dreamy voice a low, urgent warning against her ear.
Lock it down, or bad things are going to happen.
It took supreme self-control not to rub at her wrists. Med-gel had long since healed the evidence of her bonds, but she could still feel the cool plastic digging into her skin. “I’m okay. I never thanked you for—for what you did. I mean, you don’t deserve a lot of thanks because you kind of got me kidnapped. But thanks for helping me keep it together.”
“It was the least I could do.” His gaze roved over her, and it felt like he was actually looking at her. Seeing her.
It felt like he’d wrapped himself around her again, and she refused to like it. “Listen, I know what it’s like to have someone you care about held against you. I had someone I would have done almost anything to save. So I get it. But I’m Team Nina. Like, I would ride the express train to hell for her. And I may have shown up to save your sorry asses, but I still want to take my stun-stick to your boss’s balls for how bad he hurt her.”
He inclined his head. “That’s fair.”
The sheer reasonableness of it irritated her. Anger would have been a convenient shield against her annoying, frustrating awareness of him. Maybe she wouldn’t need to hold out for long. “Just tell me you’re getting the hell out of town soon.”
Instead of answering, Gray smiled. A slow smile, a knowing one, the kind of smile that made Rafe’s flirtation seem as shallow as a stone skipping across a reservoir. The kind of smile Gothic heroes didn’t bestow until the ends of books, when they wanted the hapless heroines to forget how scary they were.
Oh, that was a bad smile. The warm velvet of his voice was worse. “Why? Are you worried about me, Maya?”
No, right now she was worried about her pants. And not falling out of them. Frantically, she tried to recall every damning thing Birgitte had ever said about the possibility of Gray being a psycho serial killer.
It didn’t help. God damn it, why didn’t it help?
Without waiting for an answer, he rose and headed toward the café, barely hesitating beside her chair. “Thanks for your help the other day. I owe you. May not be around much longer for you to collect, but I owe you, just the same.”
Maya waited until the café door shut behind him. Then she snatched up the tablet and her stun gun and bolted without regard for dignity. She made it two blocks before she felt steady enough to stop and slip in her earbuds. FlowMac Pop filled her ears, drowning out the chaos of the city.