“No! Don’t. Stop, Zy! Please…”
At the bottom, he set her on her bare feet and nudged her toward an empty metal chair under a single light bulb. “Pleading won’t work with me anymore. I’m going to interrogate you, Tessa. I’m going to let you sit here alone for fifteen minutes. When I come back, I’m going to have a metric shit ton of questions for you about who you betrayed, when, and why. And I better get answers that jibe with the evidence we’ve got or I swear to god being in this hole will seem like paradise when you’re done dealing with me. The worst part? I convinced myself I was so fucking in love with you. And all you did was stab me in the back and rip my heart out through the hole you left. I won’t give you that chance again.”
She gaped in incredulity—or was that horror?—before she curled up in the chair and gathered the blanket around her protectively. Zy steeled himself against the fear in her eyes and the tears falling down her face. He tried not to be moved by the fact she was crumbling before his eyes. He did his fucking best not to care that she curled her knees against her chest, lowered her face, and sobbed.
It took everything inside him not to cross the handful of feet between them and wrap her in his arms. The fact he still wanted to, despite everything, told him he needed to get distance between them now. Or he would do something stupid, like believe her, again.
With a curse, he forced himself to block out the sounds of her sobs and ascend the ladder, slam the lid on the bunker, and lock it.
Then Zy closed his eyes, sucked in cleansing breaths, and told himself he’d done the right thing—the only thing—he could do. Fuck, he wanted to fall to his knees, and it was taking every ounce of his strength to stay upright. He couldn’t let her take him down.
“She’s destroying you,” Trees said quietly.
Zy tore his eyes open, shocked to find them wet with acid tears. “I don’t know how to fucking stop it.”
His best friend through thick and thin stood beside him, hand on his shoulder. “If you were able to do the forensic dive on her computer, I would interrogate her for you…”
But he couldn’t. Zy barely knew enough about Trees’s specialty to be dangerous. And the big guy didn’t have experience in forms of interrogation, especially the dirty ones. Zy had never had a problem finding his spine and doing what needed to be done…but he’d never fallen for the enemy, either.
“I know.”
“You’re not up for this.” Trees shook his head. “We need to call someone else.”
“There is no one, man. The bosses are wrapped up in saving Kimber. Kane has Valeria. One-Mile…”
“You going to let that crazy son of a bitch near her?”
“Fuck no.” Even when he was furious with Tessa, even when he suspected her of the worst, here he was…still trying to protect her like a fidiot. “I have to report something to the bosses in an hour. And if she’s at all involved in Kimber’s kidnapping—”
“They’re going to call the police.”
Zy nodded grimly. He might be the one to help separate her from her daughter, put her in prison, and end her life as she knew it. No, he wasn’t taking the blame, goddamn it. She had done that. He had simply caught her. “I can’t stop it.”
“You can’t.”
In the back of his head, some voice not wrapped up in bubbling rage warned him against being rash. It begged him to at least listen to Tessa. But that had to be his shattering heart. What fucking reason could she have that would make it okay to sell everyone out to dangerous criminals?
“Motherfucker.”
“The universe owes you for this, man.”
No, it didn’t owe him a damn thing. No one did. Sometimes life was rough, and all he could do was suck it up, try to get through, and hope that someday he found someone who made his heart rev and fall like Tessa.
He had to get through today first, and that wouldn’t be easy. His lack of sleep collided face-first into his heartbreak. When had he ever felt this fucking wretched? Never, but he had to stop boo-hooing. That wouldn’t get the job done.
“I need a drink.”
It said a lot that Trees didn’t refute him, just nodded and led the way inside, straight to the whiskey. Zy knocked back three fingers with a sigh.
He could do this. He could find the will and the strength. He would get through this.
“Have you started going through her things yet?”
“No. I know I’m going to find more, and I hate to pile on right now.”
Zy snorted. “This is probably like ripping off a Band-Aid—better to do it all at once so the sting goes away faster.”