Page 58 of Hidden Attraction

She caught Julian’s eyes and held them until she saw a shift in him.

“Tell us how it all began.”

Hyde had broken out in a sweat. The room was warm, but the pressure was getting to him. He swiped the back of his hand over his forehead, and his throat worked as if the words were choking him.

“I’ve never told anybody about that day. But…I’m ready to talk.” He met Julian’s glare with a sort of braveness that touched Alyssa.

“We’re listening,” she said in a tone that sounded more like her.

Hyde gulped again. “I received an email from a Proton Mail account. Anonymous.”

A flutter took up residence in her stomach. “Go on.”

“It was untraceable. I tried after…”

“What did the email say?” she pressed.

His brow creased like a slash of pain. “It was a picture of my mother taken while she was receiving her first chemo infusion.”

All the air sucked out of the room. She couldn’t spell out everything that was coming, yet she knew. Blackmail.

“She wasn’t born in the United States. She came from Colombia on a visa to attend college. There she met a guy, got pregnant with me. The guy vanished, and she had me. But she didn’t leave after her visa ran out. She worked and raised me.”

“You didn’t know that she was allowed to remain in the US?” Alyssa asked him.

His eyes fixed on her face, wide. “I was born a citizen, but she wasn’t. I understood that she would have to leave the US for a number of years before she was allowed to return legally. Or I had to prove I could support her…and I couldn’t at the time. I was afraid everything would be found out and she’d be bounced.”

He spread his hands in a helpless manner.

Alyssa changed paths. “Did the email contain anything else? Or only the picture of your mother?”

He nodded. In a clear voice, he recited the words as if he’d gone over them a million times while he sat alone in this cell. “It said, ‘How bad do you want her to live?’”

Alyssa didn’t dare look at Julian. She didn’t want him to see that the story was pulling at her heart.

“The person who emailed never identified himself. He just told me that he had the power to send her back to Colombia. If she went back, she couldn’t receive her cancer treatments and she’d die.”

“What did he ask you to do in order to keep your mother in the country, Specialist Hyde?”

“He said all I had to do was open a portal on the computer. He’d add spyware. H-he never said he was going to hurt anyone.” He grew agitated, hands spreading wide in a gesture of helplessness. “I thought he was selling secrets.”

Julian stirred. He pushed away from the wall, fists clenched at his sides.

She extended a hand toward him to stop him from saying what was most definitely on his mind—selling secrets caused people to die.

He took a quick step toward Hyde, and the man shrank back.

“Julian!” She jerked to her feet.

“I’m going to break his neck. He killed my teammates. My friends. Mygoddamn brothers.”

She crossed the short span of the room to grasp Julian’s arm. Head tipped up, she held his gaze. “You asked me to question him. Let me do my job.”

Though she pitched her voice in a low murmur, he heard. His muscle under her hand flexed, and he stepped backward, spine pressed against the wall once more.

Trying to shake off how ruffled she felt, Alyssa returned to her seat and continued questioning Hyde using all of her psychology skills and reassuring him often to keep him talking.

She didn’t think he was a villain in this tale. Only a desperate and unaware pawn.

---