Read Singed for Free Online Page B

far end. Everyone was busy doing their jobs. Ellis was on his phone, Dunphy was conferring with Claire and Zahra about the encrypted files in question and Evers was listening intently to them. Everyone glanced up when they entered and Gage could tell from the searching look Claire gave him that she knew they’d been discussing her.
    “We’ve got something,” Dunphy announced. Gage, Hunt and Alex rounded the table to stare at the laptop in front of him. They’d broken the encryption from one of the online militant forums the TTP favored. A few lines of what looked like Urdu text filled the screen. Gage could speak it almost as well as a native, but he couldn’t read more than a few words of it.
    “Zahra?” Alex asked.
    The young woman cleared her throat and tucked a shiny lock of hair behind her ear before translating. “‘Our contact has agreed to our terms. He has the necessary information to carry out God’s work, beginning with the target in Baltimore’.”
    A charged silence filled the room and Gage’s hands curled into fists. Were those fuckers talking about Claire? No one was going to harm her. Not on his watch.
    “Who is this guy? Who sent that?” Alex demanded, reading the message for himself though Gage knew the man’s knowledge of written Urdu wasn’t much better than his.
    “Someone from a militant chat room,” Dunphy answered, his fingers flying over the keyboard as he tried to pull up more info. “No profile on him…” More typing. “A lot of chatter from him over the past week though. Might be their new spokesman?”
    “Where’s he located?”
    Dunphy pulled something else up on screen, then his eyes shot to Alex. “DC.”
    Alex straightened as they all absorbed that new threatening piece of information, then started issuing orders. Zahra and Evers took off down the hall to gather the people he’d sent them after. “Claire,” he added sharply.
    She froze in the middle of whatever she’d been typing into her own laptop and blinked up at him. “Yes?”
     “You’re working with Gage on this. Whatever personal problems you have with him, you put them aside,” he added when her mouth parted in shock. “Understood?”
    Spots of pink colored her cheeks. “Yes, sir,” she muttered, casting Gage an accusatory look out of the corner of her eye.
    Well, that was easy, he thought, dragging out a chair to sit beside her. The fresh, clean scent of citrus hit him as he lowered himself into it. Her spine was as rigid as a flagpole and she refused to look at him. He couldn’t let things stay awkward. “Hey,” he said softly so that no one else would overhear. “We made a good team once. Pretty sure we can pull it off again here.”
    She turned her head to look at him, really look at him, and what he saw in her eyes caught him totally off guard. Regret. And maybe even a hint of longing before she masked it. She turned her face away with a resigned nod, leaving him reeling. In all his wildest imaginings he’d never thought she’d missed him. When she’d cut him out of her life without looking back, he’d always assumed she’d moved on and fallen out of love with him. Or that she hadn’t really loved him in the first place.
    What he’d just seen in her face told him differently and a painful burst of hope filled his chest. He swallowed and shifted in his seat, battling the need to tow her out into the hall and drag the truth out of her, demand answers to the million questions racing through his brain. Why? Why had she done it if she still felt those things for him? But a full frontal assault like that would send her running back behind the barricade she’d erected between them, and then she’d fortify the fucker until he’d never be able to get through it again.
    He could be patient. Maybe. If it didn’t kill him first.
    “So where do you want to start?” she asked him, all business as she pulled up files on her screen.
    Back at the exact moment when you changed your mind about