Page 38 of Heartless

She glared up at him but took them from his hand without argument.

He went back for his coffee, took a sip.

“Dammit, Hawke.”

Blowing out a breath, he went to the closest chair and dropped into it. His leg ached like a sore tooth, but he refused to try to rub the pain away. She would ask questions, and hell if he wanted to get into that. Not with everything else she had to face.

“What did Kate tell you?”

“She said Layla was monitoring all of us at your request. That after the team disbanded, you asked Kate for help. She gave Layla’s notes and programs to her people. These emails were found.”

“And that’s the way it was with one exception. A lot of those emails were found while the team was still together.”

“And you didn’t think the fact that I was implicated was something I should have been told about?”

“As team leader, it was my responsibility to protect each member. I believed they were bogus and had Layla digging for the truth.”

She glanced down at the papers still clutched in her hand. “A lot of the emails are dated right after I arrived to work with the team.”

“They’re made to look that way. Layla did some back-tracing. She said even though the emails looked like they were written in the early days, all the ones she found were actually generated right after the Gonzalez operation.”

“How could she know that?”

“I don’t pretend to know the technology she used to determine that. I just know it’s what she believed, and I believed her.”

“And it never occurred to you to tell me? Did you ever think that I might have been able to give you some ideas, some suggestions for who might be behind them?”

Hawke shrugged. She made some good points, but he refused to apologize for how he’d handled things. Nothing would have really changed, and she would soon learn why.

“As team leader, I made the decision not to.”

“All right, Mr. Team Leader. Fine. But what about when you were no longer team leader? What about when you were my husband? Did you ever consider saying, ‘Hey, honey, someone’s trying to frame you for being a traitor. You have any idea who that might be?’”

Instead of answering, he nodded toward the pages. “You see a difference between the emails that were sent during the time the team was together and after we disbanded?”

She gave him a scathing glare and then shuffled through the emails again. He watched her demeanor change as realization hit her. “There’s no real detail to them.”

The emails that were sent while the team was together contained specific information about locations, dates, and times. Some even had kill and capture numbers. The ones sent after the team disbanded were vague and uninformative. Maybe to the casual observer, they would look authentic, but to someone who knew the facts, it was obvious that the writer had had no clue at that point what was going on in Olivia’s life.

After the team dissolved, he and Olivia had created their own operation. It had been the best year and a half of his life. They had taken only the jobs they’d felt strongly about and had enjoyed every moment.

“Whoever created them,” she said softly, “had to have been on the team.”

Hawke nodded. “Note that the later ones, after we started working for OZ and you were working with LCR, are even vaguer. This person had no clue what you were doing or who you worked for.”

A look of horror flashed across her face. “Mack, Trevor, and Deacon… Do they think I betrayed them?”

“No. No one knew about the earlier emails except Layla. Kate’s hacker found the later ones.”

“Then would you please answer my initial question? Why didn’t you tell me about them?”

“Because it could have been anyone on the team. Yeah, your code name, Dove22, was being used, but all of them knew it. There was nothing that pointed directly to you other than that name. Until something did.”

“Rio’s death,” she said.

“Yeah. Until those last emails were found, I actually suspected Rio was the mole. He’d requested his own team and got denied. There was always a little friction between him and everyone else.” Hawke took a breath. He’d promised full disclosure, and this was as close as he could get. “A while after his death, I brought them with me to show you…”

“And?”

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