Page 10 of Code Name: Scorpio

The wear pattern on his collar, the direction of his gaze, the ink stain on his middle finger worn deep enough to be permanent. The patterns and conclusions were assembling themselves before she’d finished looking. She tore her gaze away to stop the cascade, only to land on someone else.

A woman whose chair was angled two inches away from the man beside her, weight shifted toward the door, jaw set in a way that had nothing to do with the briefing. Cassandra’s brain was already stitching the pieces together when she wrenched her gaze back to the table.

She wanted to cover her eyes or run or both. But she couldn’t without making a huge scene.

Fallon gripped her elbow softly. “Hey, it’s okay. You really don’t have to talk to anybody. Ian DeRose, head of Zodiac Tactical, is going to lead the briefing so everyone’s on the same page, okay? You don’t have to talk.”

Fallon thought she was shy. That fear of talking to people was the cause of her strange behavior. Better to roll with that. “Yeah, I’ll just sit and listen.”

She kept her gaze down. Fallon walked toward the two empty seats near Isaac, and she followed, careful not to look too closely at the people around her. She gave Isaac a little wave, looking over his shoulder rather than at him. If he thought her behavior was weird, he was polite enough not to say so.

Cassandra kept her eyes on the table, on the screen, on anything that wasn’t the people around her.

Then someone spoke, and the room went quiet.

Not actually quiet. The briefing hadn’t started yet, people were still shifting and murmuring around her. But this voice cut through all of it the way nothing else in this room had.

Ryder Sutton.

She’d met him on a video call when she and Fallon had been working a dangerous op a few months ago, and then through a phone pressed to her ear on the worst night of her life, when he’d picked up and gotten a team to Fallon before it was too late.

She couldn’t help herself; she looked at him.

He was talking to the person beside him, not to her. She could see him in profile. Broader through the shoulders than video calls had suggested, jaw sharper, the lines of his face harder and more defined without a screen softening them. His sleeves were pushed to his forearms and his hands rested on the table.

Her breath caught. For a few seconds, her brain went quiet. No cascading details, no patterns demanding the next data point. Just the unexpected warmth of looking at someone and wanting to keep looking.

Then her brain caught up, started clocking patterns about him that had nothing to do with her attraction. She jerked her gaze away and looked back down at the table.

They’d texted for a while after that night both Fallon and Isaac had nearly died. First Ryder had kept her up to date on how they were doing in the hospital, then some friendly banter.

But finally, Cassandra had stopped. Not because she didn’t like it but because what point was there? She was never going to meet Ryder in person.

Given that she was barely refraining from running out of the room screaming, this probably didn’t count either.

“There’s Ryder,” Fallon whispered in her ear. “Remember him?”

“Who? I have no recollection of that name at all.”

“Yeah, right.” Fallon laughed, but then it faded. “Do you have a migraine?”

Shit. Was she giving herself away? Yeah, she definitely could feel the pain gathering at her temples, but right now, it was manageable. “No. I’m okay. Why do you ask?”

“You just still have your sunglasses on.”

Shit, shit. “Oh yeah, precautionary.” Close enough to the truth.

Fallon reached over and squeezed her hand. “Thank you again, for being here. You’re the true superhero.”

Right. And her superpower was a brain that constantly tried to sabotage her.

Cassandra kept her gaze down on the table as the man at the head of it, the Ian DeRose guy, began speaking.

“I appreciate every one of you being here. You know what sort of bastards we’re dealing with, so I’ll skip any preamble.”

He gestured to a screen behind his back. “Children are being trafficked by an organized criminal operation. We don’t know how many. We don’t know the full scope. What we do know came from a source picked up on an unrelated operation who described a logistics outfit moving kids as part of a larger enterprise.”

Cassandra kept her eyes on the screen, brain on the data. This, she could do.