Page 4 of Fighting for Ella

Who was seen walking through the halls.

Who was seen climbing into a cab.

Who had gotten on a flight out of the country.

Ella Whitlock.

It was her.

They knew it.

There was enough proof to have her locked away for the rest of her life for that alone, aside from everything else the mole at Prey had orchestrated.

Yet …

Miguel couldn’t shake the feeling that something didn't feel right. Something didn't sit right about this whole thing, he just couldn’t figure out what it was.

“Don’t see any other option,” Owen “Fox” LeGrand muttered. As the leader of the SEAL team and, by default, the leader of the West Coast offices and the two teams that worked out of it, it looked like he was taking this the hardest.

Although none of the others looked much less angry.

This was a hard betrayal for all of them to swallow.

Ryder “Spider” Flynn, Eric “Night” McNamara, Logan “Shark” Kirk, Grayson “Chaos” Simpson, and Charlie “King” Voss looked like they were seconds away from jumping onto planes and heading off to Mexico themselves to drag back their little traitor. It was a blow they would never really recover from, Miguel could only imagine how hard it would hit if one of the men on his team betrayed them.

Scarlett, Lucy, and Cassie all had red-rimmed eyes. All three of them sat with their men by their sides, a mixture of shock and anger on their faces. Of everyone, they had been betrayed the most. Not only had they trusted Ella as part of their team, worked with her every day, and created the drug with her, but they had all suffered unimaginable horrors at the hands of Raul Castillo.

Horrors they hadn't even had a chance to recover from yet.

Now they were faced with this and seeing the pain in their faces ignited a powerful anger inside him.

His big brother Luis had fallen in love with Cassie, which made her a little sister to him, which made her two teammates feel like family as well.

Nobody messed with his family and got away with it.

“Ella knew about the drug from the beginning,” Fox continued, addressing Tate Laurier—who had fallen in love with Scarlett Madden when she had been set up as the one who sold the drug to Raul in the first place—and Luis’ SEAL team, and a team led by Blake “Rocco” Wise, as well as Miguel’s own team. “Those emails that had Scarlett’s name on them, the other name on some of the others was hers. We all thought it was just the mole trying to set up the entire team so whoever ended up being kidnapped would take the fall.”

Now they knew differently.

The emails with Ella’s name were the original ones, the ones with Scarlett’s name were the plants.

“Her computer skills are top-notch, almost comparable to Raven and Olivia’s,” Fox added. Raven was Eagle’s sister, and Olivia was his wife, both were computer geniuses. “So she would have been able to set up the bombs, plant the emails, hack our systems, and tamper with the plane that almost killed Zander and Lucy.”

At that, Zander Madden, Scarlett’s twin brother and a former Delta Force operator who had supposedly died, tugged Lucy closer, wrapping his arms around her. Anger marred the man’s features, and there wasn’t a single person in the room who didn't mirror that same expression.

“When I was watching Scarlett, when I was struggling with my own doubt about what happened with my dad, I wondered if she could have been coerced somehow,” Tate said, leaning in to touch a kiss to Scarlett’s temple. “I wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice. As soon as we got the call that Ella was seen on camera taking the Reactivator, I made sure that someonewas sent around to check on her family. They’re all fine. They haven’t been threatened in any way, so Ella didn't take the drug to protect anyone.”

“She took it because she’s the one who wanted to sell it all along,” Fox said, disdain in his tone.

“But I don’t get why Raul would go after the others then,” Miguel said. That was what was bothering him. While they didn't know for sure, they suspected the mole had sold the drug under the provision that they would help get one of the Athena Team members abducted since the mole themselves didn't have the formula. But if the mole was Ella, then surely she knew the formula, so why the need for all of this … drama?

Abductions, plane crashes, bombs, it was all so much for someone who could have just taken the vial and the formula and gotten on a plane to Mexico, handed it all over to the weapons dealer, and then taken their payout and disappeared.

By the time anyone realized what was going on they could have been in the wind.

They could have gotten away with it.

Instead, Ella—if they were to believe the evidence—had hung around, orchestrated abductions of each one of her teammates, only to then disappear with the drug.