Boomer jogged out with Mae.
Maddie ran back to the desk.
“We have to move,” Deke commanded.
Maddie pulled a small metal box from under the desk, holding it up triumphantly. “She doesn’t have shit. I erased everything I’d done the minute you shot Byrne. I probably got rid of most of my own work. There’s a backup hard drive that we now have, but there’s nothing on that laptop.”
She’d always been the smartest person he knew. “Baby, you just saved the day. Let’s go.”
She nodded and ran back.
“Kyle, she’s got nothing,” Deke explained. “Stand down. We’ll get her later.”
“You’ve got forty-five seconds, Deke. I already set the timer.”
“Then unset it. We don’t have to do this. You don’t have to do this,” Deke pleaded.
“I do.” Kyle’s voice sounded hard over the line. “I have to do it. She’s going to get away. You think she’s trapped but she’s not. She always wins. I have to stop her. I’m sorry, Deke. It’s done.”
Fuck. “We have to go, Maddie. We have to run. This whole place is about to explode.”
“What?” Maddie hustled to his side.
He took her hand and ran for the stairs. “We have to get away from the house. We’re going for the trees. When we get out, you jump for cover, understood? Boomer will take care of Mae. If I fall, you keep running.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
He stumbled on the stairs, but Maddie held him up. He forced himself to move, feet pounding on Byrne’s hardwood floors and then the marbled entryway. The door was open, the bodies of the guards he’d killed still lying on the gorgeous porch.
He ignored them, the only thought in his head, getting as far away as possible.
“Where’s Kyle?” MaeBe was shouting. “He can’t go after her.”
Boomer kept moving.
“Where’s Kyle?” Maddie asked.
Deke simply ran, holding her hand.
He was still holding it when the world exploded around them.
Chapter Sixteen
“You know I’m usually the one who gets hit on the head,” Boomer remarked, sitting back in the chair that Maddie had slept in the night before. She’d been with Deke through everything, holding his hand when the ambulance had come, sitting by his bed after surgery had fixed the bullet wound in his shoulder, calling his parents to let them know what had happened.
They’d barely escaped that blast, and she wasn’t taking anything for granted.
She wouldn’t leave him. Not ever again. Especially since she’d thought he was dead. It had been a terrible moment and it passed the second he’d opened his eyes, but she was still way too close to it.
“Well, you were faster than him this time, buddy.” Ian Taggart was a massive presence in the small room. “And you were carrying a girl. You get the best rescuer trophy at this year’s awards.”
Big Tag had shown up a few hours after Deke had come out of surgery and immediately gone to work. He’d had a lot of cleanup to do. She’d been in the middle of an interview with the police right outside this hospital room when Ian had shown up with Drake in tow. The interview had stopped and ten minutes later the police had walked out with nothing more than a thank you for your time, ma’am.
She wasn’t sure what sort of magic they’d worked, but even the news was now reporting the incidents as Nolan Byrne’s final fuck you to the world.
And amidst all of it, Taggart had been forced to identify his nephew’s body.
She squeezed Deke’s hand and blinked back a tear. She hadn’t known Kyle well, but finding out he’d still been in the house when it exploded had rocked her world. She could still remember how MaeBe had gone quiet as though she hadn’t cared about anything else that happened around her. MaeBe was in the room across the hall, recuperating from her own surgery. Maddie had tried to help the other woman out, but Mae just stared at the window, not saying a word.
“I should have been faster,” Deke said. “Hell, if I’d been faster, I would have caught that door before it closed. I thought it was a panic room. I thought she would be locked in and we could deal with her when Drake got there. I thought we had her cornered.”
“Well, what we’ve figured out is that the elevator she used went down to an underground tunnel that led to Byrne’s garage. The douchebag had eleven different cars,” Ian explained. “Although now he’s down to ten, or rather his estate is.”
“So she’s in the wind.” Deke sighed, a weary sound. “And it was all for nothing.”
“Well, I have to hope that Kyle’s death means this Julia Ennis person will ease up on Mae,” Ian replied. “She won’t have any reason to come after her. From where they found his body, I think he was trying to find the elevator so he could follow her. He wanted to kill her, and it cost him his life.”
“He’s not dead,” a hollow voice said.
“Mae, you should be in bed.” Ian Taggart crossed to the open door, a deep frown on his face.
“You all think I’m a moron, but I know what he’s doing. Whose body did you use? One of the guards? There were a bunch of them, but no one’s mentioned a single one on the news. The only dead bodies they mentioned were Nolan Byrne and Kyle. I thought that was interesting, don’t you?” Mae was pale, her vibrant hair pulled back. Her right arm was in a cast, and without makeup or jewelry, she looked so young and vulnerable.
Maddie didn’t understand any of it. “I saw a lot of dead bodies as we were running out of there. I assumed Deke and Boomer killed them. How would the press not know about them? I assume the police worked the scene.”
“They worked the scene until the CIA took over,” MaeBe countered. “We all know that. Let’s not pretend that every piece of information isn’t coming straight out of Drake Radcliffe’s mouth.”
“But how could they just lie?” Maddie asked, knowing the question sounded incredibly naïve.
“There are things that they do to protect the public,” Deke began. “If it got out that there’s a rogue group working and it’s made up of corporations who don’t mind killing each other, the conspiracy theories would never end. Drake needs to be able to work in the shadows. If he can’t, everything he knows up until this point changes and he has to start over again. Everything Kyle worked for. Years of investigation and making contacts that he’s going to use to take the organization down would be lost because the minute the light turns on, the rats will run.”
Yeah, she still wasn’t sure she got it, but some things were above her paygrade.
“I’m sure Julia won’t mention it to anyone,” Mae said under her breath.
“A fuck-up like this?” Deke straightened up, his back against the pillow. “If she does admit that she showed herself to Kyle and Drake, they’ll kill her. She’ll keep her mouth shut because what we have is mutually assured destruction. Right now, they think Byrne’s the one who went insane. If they know what she did, they’ll decide she’s not worth the trouble and they’ll cut her.”