He thought about Scotty and Grace and acid crawled up his esophagus. They’d both lost everything. This wasn’t the time to be thinking about his love life. This was the time to concentrate on catching Scotty’s killer. Maybe then they could all move on with their lives.

They continued moving stealthily through the woods, still some distance from their target.

Alex wasn’t done with him yet.

“Before I met Mallory, I didn’t let anyone close. I told myself I did it to protect them but in reality, I was scared. Scared of rejection. Scared of not being deemed worthy if they knew the whole truth.”

Shane shot the guy a glance. Was he talking about being an assassin for the CIA? “I doubt Yael has a history of covert ops.”

Alex laughed reluctantly. “She does not, but she’s a gentle soul and has reasons to guard her emotions.”

That gentle soul had tossed him aside like he was a live grenade. Hadn’t seemed to matter to her whether or not he had any feelings on the issue.

After a few more minutes they reached their destination.

“That’s the place.”

They watched for five long minutes but there was no sign of activity from inside. Alex started silently across the frost-damaged lawn. They reached the backdoor and, in under a minute, Alex had picked the very expensive lock.

“Wait.” He held up his hand, pulled out some sort of device and turned it on. Then he sent a text and twenty seconds later the whole neighborhood went dark. Alex eased open the backdoor and headed straight to the alarm system that was starting to beep on auxiliary battery power. The beeps got closer together and Shane braced himself to move fast if the alarm went off.

A triple beep told Shane the system was disarmed and they were in.

“Won’t EG know someone’s in his house?” Shane whispered.

“Not with my little gadget. And I’ve turned on a signal blocker that prevents any listening devices or cameras from transmitting within a ten-meter radius in case he has some hidden inside the house. If EG notices the interference on any of the feeds hopefully he’ll put it down to the power outage.”

“How long until the power company turns it back on?”

“We should have about thirty minutes. If EG investigates the issue he’ll see that there is an area outage. And Yael is all set up to follow anyone checking for outages who is not situated in the immediate area.”

Shane’s mouth tightened. “Smart.”

“Yael’s idea.”

Like Shane hadn’t already guessed that.