Page 37 of Run

“What’s this?” Elle stared at the plate and the milk.

“We, in the trade, like to call it food.”

“I wanted pizza.” She didn’t. Not really. What she wanted was chocolate cake, David naked and pressed against her, and a father who wasn’t trying to kill her—although not necessarily in that order.

“I know, but somebody has to do something about all the junk you eat. If you have a heart attack while we’re trying to save your life, the irony will kill me.”

“Back to you hacking your family business,” Callum said.

“What he means to say is he’s sorry about your mom.” Joe shot their boss a pointed glare.

It didn’t faze Callum at all. “Elle knows I’m sorry; I don’t need to say it. What I will say, though, is that I’d like to put a bullet in the bastard who killed her. Although, I’m thinking you’d be a wee bit conflicted about that, seeing as he’s your father.” The scary expression on Callum’s face was one of the reasons she loved him, that and his fierce need to protect anyone he considered family. In many ways, he was the father she’d never really had.

“I’m not conflicted.” Reluctantly, she picked up a slice of banana. “Tommy James is a psychopath. Seriously, I even spoke to a psychiatrist about this once. He’s textbook material. He delights in making people suffer purely for his own pleasure. It’s only the fact he’s smart as well as ruthless that lets him get away with it. Trust me. The world would be a much better place without him.”

There was no argument to the contrary from the men.

“So, when you hacked their phones,” Joe said, “other than what happened to your mom, what else did you discover?”

“Everything.” She took a sip of the milk and had to fight not to tear up. It’d been a long time since someone had cared enough to think about such a trivial aspect of her comfort. Man, she must be exhausted if warm milk was making her emotional. “I was thirteen at the time. My dad had been using my programing talent for years, getting me to hack things for him or write apps and malware that he’d sell to his partners or use to destroy them. Of course, I didn’t know any of that at the time; the truth of the family business had pretty much been hidden from me. Probably because I’m a girl. On top of everything else, Tommy’s a chauvinist.”

David shifted in his seat, making her aware that his full attention was focused on her. “More likely it was because he knew how smart you were and that you’d become a threat to him.”

Yeah, that sounded more like wishful thinking than fact. “I was a young kid when he asked me to code for him. I thought if I did a good job, he’d be proud of me. Plus, honestly, I was bored and enjoyed the challenge. Up until then, he’d only ever approved of me if I wore pretty dresses and talked about horse riding. I think he wanted a society daughter, and he ended up with a geek.

“Anyway, that’s what I thought until one day I saw something on the news about a group of DEA agents who’d died in Mexico when their communications were compromised. There was an interview with a tech expert who said it all came down to one little piece of malware. That’s when I knew what I’d done. That malware was something I’d written. Those men died because of something I’d done.”

She swallowed hard but squared her shoulders. It hurt, but there was no hiding from the truth. Nor would she want to. “Guess you could say I killed for the first time when I was twelve. If you kill a bunch of people, does that make you a mass murderer or a serial killer? I’ve always been too scared to Google it.”

A hand curved around hers. “What it makes you is a kid who was used,” David said. “Those deaths aren’t on you. They’re on your father. You’re innocent in this.”

Elle’s smile was mirthless as she stared at his hand. “You sure about that? It’s not the worst thing I’ve done.” Not by a long shot. “You don’t know all of it.”

To make matters worse, every day she’d learned of some new atrocity that her coding had caused. Even if she tried to make amends for the rest of her life, she’d never make up for the damage she’d done. Unwittingly or not, she was still responsible for all those lost and broken lives.

“You were a kid,” David repeated. “He’s to blame, not you.”

Elle shook her head and decided to let him have all of it. The story she’d discovered the night before. The one she was still trying to get her head around before figuring out a way to explain it to him. But listening to him now, she realized there would never be a right way to tell him what she’d done.

To tell him she was the one who’d ruined his life.

Elle swallowed through a throat so tight it hurt. “Yesterday, Harvard mentioned an operation in Russia eleven years ago that went bad on you. It set off alarm bells for me, so I looked it up.” She took a shaky breath as she slid her hand out from under his. “It was my fault. You were the victim of some malware I wrote to corrupt a comm system. I didn’t know.”

Her voice broke, and she cleared her throat. “Now I do. I know you were working with a group of operatives from several agencies to bring down a terrorist cell financed by organized crime. I know you had all the intel you needed to put an end to their violence. And I know that right before you moved in on the group, your system was corrupted, and your comms knocked out. You went in blind, and it was a bloodbath. According to the news site, only one person made it out alive. I guess that person was you.”

She leaned toward David and whispered, “Am I still innocent now?”

16

No one moved as the air in the room grew oppressively heavy. Elle tucked her hair behind her ear, wishing she’d confessed her sins to David privately. Wishing she’d managed to hide her shame from her team, solely because she wanted them to think the best of her for just a little while longer. She took a deep breath. It was better they knew who she really was before things got a whole lot worse for all of them.

And David…

She was the reason his mission had been a disaster.

She was the reason his teammates were dead.

And she was the reason he’d lost the career he’d loved. She wasn’t dumb; it hadn’t taken her long to join the dots between what happened in Russia and his freelance work now. His whole life had been turned upside down—by her.