Page 36 of Dozer

For half a second, I almost smile. Almost. Then I pull over into the parking lot of a McDonalds and I focus on the phone.

I go through it properly. Call logs. Message threads. Location history. Application activity. Cloud synchronization. Recent searches. Deleted files where I can access them. I don't skip because I trust her. I don't skip because I don't. I do it because doing the job properly matters more than the feeling in my gut.

Kenzi doesn't watch me. That's another thing I notice. She could sit there waiting for every reaction. She could ask what I've found. She doesn't. She gives me room to work.

Twenty minutes later, I set the phone back on the console. The laptop follows. Clean. No unexplained communications. No suspicious location anomalies. No hidden device activity. Nothing that connects her to the leak. Nothing that gives me a reason to keep her on the list. I back out of the McDonalds and hit the road again.

"You're not the leak." I say confidently. I knew she wasn’t but now I had proof. Once again, my gut didn’t fail me. I’m not sure how I would have felt if the evidence had pointed to her.

"I know."

I look at her. "You didn't know I'd find that out so quickly."

"No."

"You just knew you weren't hiding anything."

"Same thing, from where I'm sitting."

I drive for a while without saying anything else. Her words stay with me. Same thing. From where I'm sitting. It's a simple statement, but it tells me more about her than the phone did. She doesn't need me to believe she's innocent. She needs me to verify it. There's a difference. I've worked with operators who couldn't manage that kind of transparency about their own gear, let alone themselves. Kenzi Sullivan hands me the keys to her digital life and waits for the truth to come back.

I realize something else, too. She's not asking me to trust her because she's likable. She's asking me to trust the process. That's harder. And better.

"Thank you," I say eventually.

She looks over. "For what? Not being a Russian asset?" The humor is back, thin, but there.

"For handing me the truth instead of asking me to just believe you. For what it’s worth, my gut told me I could trust you. I needed to prove it right."

Her expression changes. The joke fades. She looks down at her hands, folded loosely in her lap. "That's the whole job, isn't it?" I glance at her. "Trusting the evidence over the story people want you to believe." She pauses. "I don't know how to do it any other way." Her gaze comes back to mine. "Not with a body on a table." Another beat. "Not with you."

My grip tightens slightly on the steering wheel. I don't answer. I don't trust myself to. Because that sentence has nothing to do with the mission, and everything to do with the line we've been approaching since she climbed into this vehicle. It’s a thin line between professional and personal, the line between protecting an asset and protecting Kenzi, the line between trust and something that feels dangerously close to wanting. Wanting her to be mine.

I look at the road. There’s a leak out there that we still haven't found. A crime ring powerful enough to put shooters on a county road and send men through a motel door after midnight. Somewhere ahead is the location to which we're supposed to meet the team and switch vehicles, they still have the body. I spoke with them earlier and they’ve had smooth traveling, which begs the question… is it the body they want or whatever evidence she found? All I know is there is a trail of blood following us that keeps getting longer. And somewhere in the middle of all of this is the woman sitting beside me.

I trust her and now I know I can do it with both my head and my gut. That should make things easier. Instead, it makes everything more complicated, because now I have something else to lose, and I don't know if I'm ready to admit how much that scares me.

I keep driving. For the first time since this mission started, I stop running the math on Kenzi. I don't need to anymore. I know exactly who she is and who I want her to be. Mine.

CHAPTER 10

Kenzi

"Don't move."

Two words, and I freeze so completely I forget I'm mid-stride across an empty parking lot toward a rental car, one foot barely off the ground, like a video game character somebody has paused. For one ridiculous second, my brain actually supplies the thought that I should probably stay this way until somebody hits unpause. Then training or whatever strange survival instinct I've apparently acquired over the last twenty-four hours, kicks in, and I lower my foot slowly.

"Talk to me," I say, quiet, barely moving my mouth, because Dozer has gone very still beside me in a way that means something is going on and whatever it is, isn’t good.

"Rooftop. Northeast corner. Don't look at it."

I do not look at it. This takes considerably more willpower than I would have predicted, because every instinct I own wants to snap my head toward whatever he's clocked, catalog it, understand it, turn it into information I can work with the way I work with everything else in my life. Not looking feels like standing blindfolded at the edge of a cliff and waiting to hear if I’ll be pushed off or not when I could step backwards. My eyes stay straight ahead.

"Sniper?"

"Possible. Maybe scouting. Maybe not us at all." His voice stays level, but I've learned enough of his register by now to hear the meaning behind it. I am taking this extremely seriously and choosing my words so you don't panic. For the record, it does not stop me from feeling the exact thing he's trying to prevent. My pulse kicks harder. I hate not knowing. I hate that there is an entire rooftop somewhere behind me containing information my brain desperately wants to see and understand. I am able to figure out exactly what it is that I don’t like. Being helpless and out of control. I can’t do a damn thing in this situation to control the outcome and that… that’s what I really hate.

"What do I do?"