Page 100 of The Honeymoon Hack

Claire explained the situation to Moss in rapid-fire sentences, her face fully crimson.

Moss nodded, then pulled out his phone. After a moment, he said, “This is Derek Moss, head of security at Mnemis. I need to speak with someone in HR about verifying some penetration testers we’ve detained.” He paused, listening. “I understand. They claim to be working for Tremaine Industries directly.” Another pause, longer this time. “You’re transferring me to who?” His eyebrows shot up.

The wait stretched endlessly. Moss held the phone away from his ear slightly, and I heard faint hold music. My wrists ached from the zip ties, but adrenaline kept me focused. This had to work. It had to.

“Mr. Tremaine? This is Derek Moss, head of—” He stared at me as he listened, nodding a few times. “Will Stone, Brie Stone, Pierre Tremblay, Ken Saunders, and Ronnie Smith.” Another pause. “Their real names? One moment.”

Moss raised his eyebrows at me expectantly.

They really thought Ronnie and Ken were part of this. I shook my head. “It’s only the three of us: Will Reaney, Brie Reynolds, and Rav LaPierre—that’s Tremblay.”

The dark-haired woman went very still, her hand rising to touch the side of her neck briefly before dropping back to her side. Nervous habit? Or was there… what had Claire said about history?

Moss supplied our names to the person on the other end of his call—Gideon, apparently. A few more nods later, his lips tightened, and he said, “Of course. If you’ll hold a moment, please.”

Claire came closer. “And?”

Moss set the phone on the table in front of me. “He confirmed it. He hired all three of them. They’re clear.”

“Fucking hell!” Claire looked like she was about to throw something or flip the table. “What about Ken and Ronnie?”

Moss grumbled something. “They’ll probably need some compensation for this.”

“Fuck!” Claire hauled open the door, growling, “I’ll get everyone released.”

Moss produced a knife from his duty belt and sliced through my zip ties. As the plastic fell away, he handed me the phone. “Mr. Tremaine wants to speak with you.”

I pressed it to my ear and stood. “Hello?”

“Will, it’s Drew.” The familiar voice sent a wave of relief flooding through me. “Did you get what you needed?”

“No,” I said, cradling the phone with my shoulder while I rubbed my wrists. “The job went sideways. They have a team monitoring?—”

“That’s classified,” snapped the dark-haired woman.

Fine. I wouldn’t provide my team with the details now, but I’d give them a full debriefing once I was out of the data center. “We’ll coordinate our next steps with Gideon once we’re home.”

If therewerenext steps.

Brie had uploaded some information to her cloud server. Maybe she added a backdoor so she could access the server remotely?You should have asked her about that earlier.

How could you have? You were too busy telling her your feelings to focus on the mission.

Warmth spread through my chest.

That did work out in the end, didn’t it?

“I’ll start running options with him,” said Drew. “We’ll talk soon.”

Before I could respond, the door burst open. Claire held it open, talking to someone outside, in addition to her team inside. “Lark and Sully aren’t responding. Sully disabled the camera in the room where they were holding Brie.”

Wereholding.The words stopped my heart.

“The main security office has a feed from outside that room.” She paused, gaze flicking to the ground before landing on me. “We can see two pairs of bloody footprints heading from there through the security checkpoint.”

Drew said something over the phone, but the room began to spin and the phone tumbled from my fingers.

“No guards at the checkpoint,” she finished.