There was nothing she could do to ease the ache of possible betrayal, so she offered a terse nod before she jogged back to the Range Rover and used the running board to help haul herself inside, slamming the door harder than was necessary. As soon as Cord was buckled in behind Victoria, she gestured out the windshield that they were ready to continue up the mountain.

The deeper they drove into the pines and aspens, oaks and maples, the faster the kinked knot of dread grew until she was little more than a five-foot-three tightly controlled mass of nerves. Please let the girls be there. Please let them be alive. It had become her silent mantra throughout this entire trek into the mountains.

A flash of light up ahead nearly blinded Alyssa a split second before Victoria hit the brakes, while the crackle of the mic broke through, announcing, ‘We’ve got an approaching vehicle, moving at a high rate of speed. Stand by.’

‘That’s Tony’s truck.’ Cord’s voice was full of the shocked disbelief Alyssa felt.

What happened next was a swirl of motion as the inside of Tony’s cab was lit up by the floodlights Victoria had flipped on. Alyssa barely registered her teammate’s pinched expression as he leaped down from his truck, slamming the door behind him. His words didn’t carry back to her, but it was clear he’d spoken to someone she couldn’t see.

Pumped up on adrenaline, Alyssa shoved aside the eruption of anger and betrayal and reached for her weapon as she, too, opened her door and climbed down. However, unlike Tony, she left hers ajar, using it as a shield if it should come to that. Damn it all to hell. She so badly had wanted to be proven wrong, to know that there was a reasonable explanation for all the coincidences, and that there was no way possible her teammate was involved.

Tuned in to a dozen things at once, Alyssa registered Cord’s mirrored stance.

Over the next few seconds, Alyssa was prepared for many things to happen – except the grin and shouted exclamation of what sounded like sincere relief that erupted from Tony. Nor did she expect him to pound on the driver window and holler inside, ‘It’s okay. You’re safe.’

Until she realized he had no idea they were onto him. When she spotted the gun gripped in his hands, she shouted, ‘Place your weapon on the ground, Tony, and put your hands in the air where we can see them.’

Tony’s eyebrows shot up onto his forehead, an action she’d grown accustomed to over the years. ‘Setting the gun down,’ he yelled over the idling engines, extending one arm into the air while bending low to set his firearm on a pile of leaves. ‘What’s going on, here, Lys?’