Oh, my God.
“But, Nikki… That doesn’t wipe out what you had with Conner. Am I right?”
“I—” She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think.
Hell… She might not ever breathe again.
21
She stared at Damen as though he’d just spoken to her in Slovakian, which she’d already told him was one language she didn’t know. He could teach her. Though…that was neither here nor there at present.
He’d just delivered the ultimate blow to her—and the piece of this puzzle that had been eating at his soul like a piranha all this time.
He propped his hands on his hips as she held the laptop in her palms. And inevitably, mentally, ran through a litany of swear words or some other rant of epic proportions he was certain she was desperate to unleash on him.
He reminded her, “No one else lives in this wing. No one will hear you when you unload on me.”
Tears filled her eyes.
That shredded him even more.
“Nikki,” he quietly said. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“But you knew it was a risk,” she countered, not missing a beat. “All this time, you suspected it was…more likely than not that all of my files would be erased.”
“I can’t say for sure,” he asserted, and now raised his hands in the air, in surrender. “I didn’t know the tracking device would work in reverse, pinpointing your computer once the download was completed. I do believe that with the machine off, it’s effectively deactivated. The lack of an alarm continuing to wail is a good indication.”
“That’s one of the reasons you think we’re safe here? They aren’t tracking the device at the moment?”
“Not until I boot the computer back up. On the ops campus.”
Her eyes squeezed shut.
His gut wrenched.
“I’ll have IT specialists with me when I do. Some of the absolute best in the business. I’ll explain it’s mission-critical to preserve all of your files. They will do everything they can to ensure it. I will do everything in my power—”
“Why are you giving this back to me now?” she quietly insisted. “I can’t do anything with it. You’ve just ascertained that if I start it up in order to check my folders, I’ll trip the tracking device. Leading the bad guys here. To us. To this safe place where your mother and your niece reside. Where they sleep at night.”
He swallowed down a hard lump.
Her eyelids fluttered open and she continued. “You also still need the computer in order to transfer the data. So.” She stretched her arms toward him. “Handing this to me isn’t an olive branch, Damen. And there’s no sense in testing me. You already know I won’t do anything that puts our lives—and others’ lives—in grave danger.”
He took the computer from her and returned it to her laptop bag.
Then he stood alongside the bed again, genuinely shocked she hadn’t climbed out of it.
Raking a hand through his hair, he said, “I have no intention of—”
“This is what you meant when you indicated Conner might come between us. Not just by way of the memories in my head and in my heart, but… Because you knew the possibility existed that what would be given back to me at the end of this misadventure was a worthless piece of technology I might as well toss in the trash.”
“Again, I don’t know for sure—”
“But you can’t guarantee anything, either,” she countered.
“No. I can’t.”
She pulled in a long, quavering breath. The slight rasping sound nearly gutted him.