Riding The Edge - Elise Faber Page 0,14

been impatient and driven Ava away, and now I’d spent the last two weeks pouring over some fucking files on a flash drive that made up a puzzle I didn’t have any clue how to solve.

Now, I itched to apologize, even knowing she would dismiss it, that she would pretend I had nothing to say sorry for.

And as stupid as it was, as clear as she’d made it to me she didn’t want it, I still wanted to hug her.

To hold her close and erase whatever had made her so sad.

Which was laughable, I knew that.

Still, even with me knowing that, the urge to comfort didn’t go away. I was a protector by nature. She was a teammate, and that alone would have been enough for me to put my life on the line for her. But she was also a person I respected, and just because she could hit a target from over a thousand meters and could kick my ass in hand-to-hand combat didn’t mean that the urge to protect just disappeared.

Of course, all of that was complicated by the fact that she was a woman I wanted with a need that bordered on desperation.

I’d had a glimpse of that oasis in the desert, and I wanted more.

“Thanks for coming,” the object of that desperation said to the small group that had gathered in the conference room.

Our whole team was there—Laila and her husband, Ryker, Olive, me, and Ava.

Five people with one goal. Five people who made up one of many teams at KTS, all with that same goal.

To protect the innocent.

In whatever format that required.

We all murmured our greetings then sat back and got ready to listen. Ava hooked up a laptop to a dongle, and the familiar files I’d been going through line-by-line over the last two weeks appeared on the monitor on the wall.

Lettuce.

Fucking lettuce shipments.

It made no sense. We all knew the data on the USB couldn’t just simply be lettuce shipments, but neither our team, nor the specialized technical arm of KTS had been able to unearth any hidden data or deduce a code that indicated the seemingly innocuous shipments and invoices were more than produce.

We would keep working, of course, but none of us had made any headway to date.

Except, perhaps, Ava.

Because she had heavy dark circles under her eyes, and though her cheeks were pinkened as if she’d spent too much time in the sun, her skin beneath that reddened patch was pale.

She glanced at Laila, who nodded encouragingly.

“We all know this isn’t about lettuce.” She tapped a button on the keyboard, and lines appeared on the screen, circling and highlighting data. I watched as the program ran, rearranging columns and shifting rows, pooling the information within until . . . holy shit.

My mouth dropped open. Because was that really—?

“This isn’t just about the Mikhailova clan,” she said. “It’s also about the Toscalo family.”

Eight

KTS Headquarters

Northeast England

15:09hrs local time

Ava

I stared at the screen, watching the program I’d spent every minute of the last week writing work. From the moment I’d first seen the correlation, the possibility that this ring had involved my family had been churning around in my head.

It was why I’d been so rattled during the incident with Dan.

The possibility had occurred to me that morning, one that seemed all too likely based on the knowledge I carried from my childhood. And even though I’d wanted to pretend it wasn’t the truth, wanted to avoid the reality that my family had dipped low even on their scale of despicable, the evidence was there.

They were working with the Mikhailova clan, and they were trading in people.

In. People.

Fucking disgusting.

And I’d grown up in their painful embrace.

I wanted to pretend to be unaffected and unbothered that the people who were responsible for my being on this planet were fucking evil.

Turned out, pretending didn’t make a fucking bit of difference.

Two weeks ago in Germany, I’d deduced the first piece, the tendril of a memory coming to the surface as my eyes had fallen onto a line of data. I’d remembered a code shown to me in boastful pride to hide protection money my family collected from the businesses on their streets, and . . . it had fit.

I’d needed to move, to take a break, to avoid the truth.

I’d gone to the gym that morning and I’d stumbled upon the very man who could so easily deduce that truth, could see too deeply, could perceive what was lurking beneath my calm mask.

Now I was