This was it. Once she went through that door, she was really in it.

She wiped her sweaty palms on her hips and nodded. “Absolutely.”

The buzzer rattled like an amplified bee and the door clicked open. Voices from men in the studio echoed off the hallway’s industrial white tile, but no one showed in her immediate line of sight. With a quick wave to Bonnie over her shoulder, she let the door snick shut and crept toward the bullpen.

Her arms and legs trembled, and the best her lungs seemed capable of were shallow short breaths.

Footsteps sounded from the side hallway behind her, and her heart jolted.

She ducked into the women’s bathroom, huddled next to the door as it closed and waited for the person with the quick heavy footsteps to pass. Not that hearing anything over her pounding pulse in her ears was an easy feat. Sneaking into a TV station was certifiably insane. Definitely not the kind of work she was cut out for.

The footsteps passed, leaving only the quiet of the lounge that separated the bathroom from the exit in their wake.

“Cassie?”

No. Freaking. Way.

Cassie straightened away from the door and slowly turned. “Well, if it isn’t the girl I snuck in to see. Why aren’t you answering your phone?”

“Um.” Lizbet motioned to the bullpen. “I do have a job to do.” As soon as she said it, she seemed to remember the same was no longer true for Cassie and flinched. “Sorry.”

Cassie waved it off. “Don’t be. But I need to talk to you. Now.”

She checked beneath the stalls in the main part of the restroom, gripped Lizbet by her suit-clad arm and tugged her toward the two padded slip chairs in the corner. “You know that BDSM novelty piece you did a few weeks ago? The one with the Pro Domme?”

Lizbet demurely took the seat next to Cassie and smoothed her scarlet red pencil skirt toward her knees, a mildly incensed frown on her face. “That wasn’t a novelty piece. It was the start of a series. And the online comments were triple that of any other stories done this month.”

Cassie shook her head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it as a dig. I’m sure it did great. But I need to know about your source. The lady whose identity you kept hidden.”

The incensed expression shifted to wariness, and Lizbet edged away from Cassie as though uncertain who or what she was dealing with. “What about her?”

Now for the tricky part. Getting any reporter to share their source was iffy at best. If she shared that the Domme was a possible murderer that might get Lizbet off the fence, but would open a whole different can of worms. Kir had trusted her with family knowledge. She wasn’t about to break that confidence now. “I think she’s the person who told the execs about my relationship with Kir, and I think she shared it because she was somehow tied to Alfonsi.”