Page 88 of Code Name: Scorpio

“All I did was open a door. He’s the one who chose to walk through it.” Ian sat back. “He worked here at Rogue for about a year, learning to use his skills differently, although, admittedly, there were times when we needed the violent side of him.”

“So you torture people here at Rogue?”

Ian didn’t flinch. “We do what needs to be done to save innocent lives. Yes, that’s in the gray, and we only do it as a last resort.”

“Does Ryder still do it for you?” She needed to hear it from Ian.

“No. Four years ago, he told me he wanted out of that work completely. We transferred him over to the main Zodiac pipeline. Most of the people who work there don’t even know Rogue exists. And nobody knows about Ryder’s past.”

“Except you.”

“And you.” Ian held her gaze. “The man you were with at that lodge is real, Cassandra. His past made him who he is. I know that’s a hard thing to sit with. But it also made him someone worth having. I’ve never once regretted bringing him on the team.” Ian stood. “That’s all I came to say. I’ll let you get back to work.”

He walked to the door.

“Mr. DeRose… Ian.”

He turned. She wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted to say.

“Thank you. For telling me.” That wasn’t it, but she couldn’t find the words.

He nodded once and left.

The lab was quiet again. Just Cassandra and her screens and the blinking cursor on the encryption terminal.

She sat with all of it for exactly thirty seconds. Ian’s words. Ryder spending the night outside her door. The scar on Ian’s arm.

The man who’d cooked her eggs that night after the café, the man who’d made her feel powerful as they’d made love, the man who’d held her face in his hands and said eyes on me while her brain tried to rip itself apart.

He was the same man who’d spent years hurting people for a living.

She couldn’t hold both of those things and crack this encryption at the same time. One of them saved children. The other could wait.

She put Ryder Sutton in a box in her mind and closed the lid.

Later. You later. Kids now.

She went back to the self-referential seed. Her brain a little fresher now, she realized she’d been approaching it wrong. She’d been trying to derive the key from the file structure when the answer was in the data itself.

She rebuilt the framework from scratch.

The first test block decrypted into readable text.

Her hands went still on the keyboard. Her pulse was hammering so hard she could feel it in her wrists.

Stay with it, you’ve got it now.

She ran the second block. Clean text. Third block. Clean.

She expanded the decryption to the full dataset, leaned back in her chair, and watched it unspool across her screens. Names. Dates. Routes. Contact numbers. Financial records. Transfer logs. The full supplier network laid out in the kind of meticulous detail that only people who believed they would never be caught would bother keeping.

She knew who the kidnappers were.

She knew where they operated. She knew their routes, their contacts, their schedules. She knew the names of the people who supplied children to the Diehls and the names of the people the Diehls supplied them to.

I told you. Cassandra Leuenberger is what happens.

She picked up her phone and called Fallon.