Page 33 of What Remains

“Explosion?” I’m not sure who said that. Carter, maybe?

“Jezebel blew up the hotel in Dubai.” I drop the news so she doesn’t have to. “A warning to Gwen that she’s willing to kill as many people as need be to get the password to her laptop.”

Gwen starts to cry again, slow, racking sobs making her entire body shudder, and I don’t know what to say or do. All I can think is to pin her tight to my chest, ignoring the sharp, stinging pain as she buries her fingertips into my back.

“Nothing happened to the hotel,” Carter announces after a full thirty seconds of all of us rightfully losing it. “I have someone with eyes on it now. Just spoke to them, and they shared their view over FaceTime. It’s fine.”

Gwen jerks upright, letting go of my back, and I can breathe again.

“But I saw it happen with my own eyes. She showed me the timer, and I—I couldn’t save them. She was going to blow up my brother’s hospital in London next if I didn’t give her the password.”

“I’m positive. The hotel is fine.” Carter’s news is what we need. Fuck do we ever.

“Oh my God,” she cries, shaking in my arms all over again, but this time, I assume from relief. “She—she tricked me. I’d never have . . .”

“It’s okay. Shhh.” I hug her again, vaguely aware of the fact my legs are starting to lose feeling with us in this position, but I’d sooner lose a limb than budge. “Not your fault.”

“He’s right, listen to him,” Carter says.

“How do you happen to be so close by?” Zoey asks while Gwen takes time to recover from the news innocent people didn’t die.

Thank God for that. Now Gwen won’t have the weight of any lives lost hanging over her shoulders. Not that it was her fault, but she’d have seen it that way.

“Julian helped us get a lock on a possible location.” Carter’s response has my spine going straight, and my hand on Gwen’s back stops stroking her for a second.

The mere mention of that man’s name shouldn’t disturb me, and yet, it does.

“Hey, Gwen.” Julian’s also on the plane, so that’s fantastic. “Bloody relieved to hear you’re okay.” He was born a Brit like Gwen, but unlike her, he doesn’t have an accent.

“Thank you for helping.” Gwen’s voice remains so damn small, it breaks something in me when she talks. “Please tell me you already⁠—”

“We saw they took your bag, and Juliette confirmed your rig was in it. We couldn’t get a hit on it, but we already initiated lockdown protocols. Revoked your encryption keys, logins, VPN certificates, API tokens, and . . .” He continues sharing more tech-y shit that goes over my head.

“Oh thank God.” Gwen lets go of a deep, warm breath that caresses my skin.

“We’ve burned everything that was on your network. Aliases. Safe houses. Moved assets. Pulled people off grid. I personally severed any trust between your laptop and the world.” Thank you, Natasha, for using language I actually understand.

Before Gwen, if someone mentioned a “rig” to me, I thought they were talking about an eighteen-wheeler. Or the gear I wore over my chest on missions—the kind with ammo packed inside it.

“We just can’t do a full drive wipe without it going online”—Julian does one of those ahem-coughs as if embarrassed for explaining that—“which, of course, you already know.”

“She’s going to clone the drive offline, but she’ll expect you all to burn everything, so she’s gotta be after one of my tools or programs. Changing the locks won’t matter if she’s walked off with the blueprints.” She tenses against me. “My main box at The Sapphire is my vault server, but my travel rig is what I use on ops, which means it’s already pointed at the world like a loaded gun. The things she can still do with it . . .”

“We’ll worry about that later. We did all that we could do for now.” I’m on the same page as Natasha.

The last thing I want or need is Gwen feeling guilty about something else she can’t control. And no, no parallels to my helo crash, that was different.

“We did manage to flag two guests at the hotel in Dubai as possible matches for two of the masked men who took you,” Julian shares. “A few things stood out to us about them, and they had the same body composition as two of the masked men. They had their eyes on you at the bar the night before you were taken as well. Something was off about them, so I ran them through my program. Turns out they checked in with aliases. And they were both in Brisbane before they went to Dubai, which is why we were on our way there before you called.” And now it finally makes sense why they’re so close to us. “It was our only lead, so we had to take it.”

“I’m so sorry. It, um, looks like they had eyes on us from the beginning, and I hate that I missed that,” Natasha says, and I have no idea what she’s talking about. “I bet even those guys by the pool I thought were there to protect us were working for whoever took you, too. We’re looking into their backgrounds now.”

“Don’t you dare blame yourself for that.” Gwen has a lot of practice with that line, and something tells me she’ll be tossing it around quite a bit more.

“I sh—should have had bodyguards with you.” Hearing Wyatt stutter just might fuck me up, not gonna lie.

I’m doing my best not to lose it myself, which is something I’d prefer not to do. Holloway men only cry when a dog dies in a movie. Even then, we fake “something being in our eyes.”

“No one is to blame, you hear me?” Gwen could win an award at back-seating her own feelings if it means helping others. “Just tell me Juliette’s okay, and no one else got hurt after I was taken.” Case in point.