Page 36 of Heartless

A new worry hit Olivia, one that she had not considered until now. And one that would finish her if it was true.

“Are you and Hawke…” She swallowed, took a deep breath to better handle the blow, and tried again. “Are you and Hawke having an affair?”

The surprise on the other woman’s face was authentic, and something like compassion temporarily softened her features. “No, Olivia. Hawke is my friend and nothing more.”

The relief was instantaneous. Her knees trembling, Olivia dropped into a chair to avoid falling. She believed her, which might be stupid since Kate was such a good liar, but her surprise at the question had seemed genuine.

“Please tell me why, Kate.”

“I had doubts about you.”

“You believed it, too? You think I’m responsible for Rio’s and Layla’s deaths? For the attempts on Deacon, Mack, and Trevor?”

“I didn’t want to.”

So tired of being considered a traitor when she had done nothing wrong, she shouted, “Then why the hell did you?”

“The evidence pointed to you.”

“What evidence?”

“As you know, Hawke tasked Layla with finding the person who sabotaged the Gonzalez op. She looked at everyone on the team.”

Yes, they had all discussed this. The op had been compromised, and no matter that it ultimately had achieved their objectives, they’d known there was a rat in their midst. Even though the team had disbanded soon after that mission, she’d known Hawke had continued to try to find the traitor.

“When Layla went off the grid,” Kate continued, “Hawke sent me her hacking programs, and all the intel she’d been able to dig up on the possible identity of the mole. I gave everything to a trusted associate for analysis. He took it and found even more intel. I then gave everything to Hawke.”

For the first time, Olivia noticed a small stack of papers in Kate’s hands. She held them up. “These are my copies. Hawke doesn’t know I’m here, and he’ll be pissed at me for bringing this to you. But if I were branded a traitor, then I’d want to know why, no matter how much it hurt. Can you handle that, Liv?”

“As it’s been pointed out to me several times,” Olivia said coolly, “I’m a stone-cold bitch. That means I can handle anything that’s dished out. Let me have it.”

“Very well. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She handed the papers to Olivia, stood, and walked to the door.

“Do you still think I’m a traitor?”

Kate looked at her for a long moment and said, “I don’t know.” She walked out, shutting the door behind her.

The pages gripped in her hand, Olivia went to the giant window of her bedroom. It was way past dark, and the view was no longer visible. All she could see was her reflection, a tired and bruised woman whose face showed a weary soul and a broken spirit. She was self-aware enough to know she had many faults. She was sometimes selfish, acted like a petulant child if her feelings were bruised, and on occasion, she could be bitchy. But the one thing she always relied on above all others was her integrity. Every important decision she’d ever made was with an eye toward doing the right thing.

But somehow all of that was being questioned. Somehow the man she loved and trusted above all others had doubted her. He’d actually believed she could be, for lack of a better word, evil. And she had no idea why.

The papers in her hands could well hold the key to how he’d come to that conclusion. She would read them, study them, but no matter what they said, she could not come to terms with his lack of faith in her. If the roles were reversed, there was nothing he could do, nothing anyone could say to make her believe the same of him. She had believed his love and faith in her was rock-solid. Instead, she had discovered, it was made of clay.

She went back to her chair in the corner, turned on the bright floor lamp beside it, sat, and began to read.

At first, the conglomeration of words made no sense. She rubbed her tired eyes and refocused. They were emails. Friendly, chatty, but there was no real content or context. There were also a lot of letters used instead of actual words. Nothing made sense.

She shuffled through several pages, still not seeing anything that would condemn her or anything even related to her. She glanced at the top of one email to see if she recognized the sender or recipient’s name. Her breath caught in her throat. The email handle was Dove22. That had been her code name when she’d first started working with Hawke and his team. No one should know that name except the people on her team.

With that new knowledge, she went back to the first page and reread the lines. As she read, a cold lump of dread grew in her belly. The emails referred to H, L, R, M, T, and D. Those letters obviously represented Hawke, Layla, Rio, Mack, Trevor, and Deacon. The emails also referenced locations, jobs, and degree of difficulty. One exchange in particular caught her attention.

Dove22: H is such a hard-ass. Saved his life twice, and he’s harder on me than anyone.

Z: Get what you need and get out. Don’t whine.

Whoever this mysterious Z was, it was obvious there was something he did not know. There was no mention of her having met Hawke six months earlier in Munich. That was because she’d told no one. She had kept that amazing connection to herself.

She scrolled through several more pages, her horror growing as she read details of missions that no one but the team should have known about. She stopped on what was obviously the Gonzalez job. This fake Dove was furious about being almost killed on that mission. And that was true. Olivia had almost died protecting Tomás Ramirez.

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