Page 29 of Wicked and Bound

“Maybe. I don’t know.” Her voice cracked. “Last night…”

Of course she was reeling.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t have a choice.”

She nodded…but still steadfastly kept her eyes on her plate. “How much longer?”

“We’re doing everything we can. I promise. Look, I’m sorry about the Jasper business. If I had a do-over, I wouldn’t do it at all. When you got back to town, I just…wanted to talk to you. I missed you like hell.”

Haisley hesitated. “I get it. I know you weren’t deceiving me maliciously, but…”

Fuck. “Look, I?—”

“I know you’ve risked everything to rescue me?—”

“I don’t regret it. I’d do it again and again.”

Haisley bit her lip. “I’m trying to remember that and not…everything else.”

The seconds they had left to talk were counting down. He couldn’t scramble the signal again without raising questions, and they were nowhere near resolved. “Why won’t you talk to me about your pregnancy? What happened?”

She leapt to her feet and looked out the window, as if she were a million miles away. “It’s in the past. Leave it there.”

“Not when it’s affecting our present.” He crossed the room to her and grabbed her shoulders so she couldn’t run from him again. “And our future.”

Across the room, the device beeped in warning. Security had already reset their “glitching” surveillance, ending the signal scramble. Back to silence. Back to pretending she was a stranger he owned.

Frustration tore through him. He’d barely been here twenty-four hours, and he already hated every minute of this shit.

They spent the afternoon in strained silence. Nash pretended to watch reruns while Haisley curled in a window seat with a book she wasn’t really reading. They sat less than ten feet apart, but the distance between them felt vast. Occasionally, their eyes would meet, then quickly dart away. So much unsaid. So much he didn’t know when they would get to say.

Darkness fell. After another dinner in their suite, they went through the motions of preparing for bed. Tension lay thick between them. Nash waited until Haisley’s breathing evened out before he shut his eyes.

They popped open a few hours later when his sat phone dinged. Kane’s distraction—a carefully orchestrated power surge in the main building that would take down surveillance for precious minutes without raising major alarms—right on schedule.

Nash reached for Haisley, to clue her in. Then he pulled his hand back. Why wake her? He couldn’t tell her anything, and shewould only worry. Instead, he dressed and slipped out of their suite.

As he crossed the compound, the lights flickered. They stabilized as he approached the building that housed the spa. Perfect. The security cameras should take a few minutes more to finish rebooting, giving him the window he needed to slip inside.

The service tunnel was situated exactly where Kane described, camouflaged behind tropical foliage and a maintenance door. The musty space smelled of mold and stagnant salt air.

Nash’s sat phone connected to his brother’s cell on the first try, the encryption bypassing the island’s security. Thankfully, he didn’t see any surveillance equipment in the dusty tunnel.

“In position?” Trees asked without preamble.

“Yeah. Talk me through it.”

Nash withdrew the flash drive and adapter he’d smuggled in his luggage. His brother guided him through the complex upload sequence in low tones.

As they waited, Trees filled him in on the investigation stateside. “Bad news. We found nothing useful or incriminating from the servers in Benedict’s office. And the police can’t confirm IDs on the bodies without dental records, so those IDs will take time. Fire department saved what they could, but…”

Another setback. “Damn it.” Nash watched the progress bar creep forward with agonizing slowness, sweat trickling down his spine in the humid tunnel. “Once we’re in, how long before you can access the system on this island?”

“If everything goes perfectly? Hours. Realistically? Days. This is serious military-grade encryption, definitely partitioned. Might even have quantum security protocols. I’ll have to move like a ghost—one wrong step and they’ll detect the intrusion.”

“Just…be as quick as you can. And careful.”

“You too, little brother.” Trees’s voice softened. “How’s Haisley holding up?”

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