Rook Security Complete Series

by Camilla Blake

  “Because they’ve been keeping personal details from one another because of stranger danger.”

  Sequence couldn’t help but let his lips twitch. “Stranger danger,” he deadpanned.

  “It’s a real concern! The internet is a scary place.”

  “So, how did they start emailing if they’re strangers?”

  “They met in a—you know what? Let’s just start it over.” She reared up to go for the remote control but Sequence beat her to it.

  “You don’t have to do that for me,” he told her and her hand landed over his. He got that hot and cold, lightning, pins and needles feeling again where she touched him. Once again, he cursed himself for rushing through sex with her. He hadn’t taken any time at all to properly savor her. He’d gulped her down whole and missed out on every tiny flavor and sensation that she had to offer him. What a damn shame.

  “No, no,” she tugged on the controller. “It’s not an issue at all. I love this movie, I could watch it fifty times in a row. It’s my comfort movie. We’ll start it over and then you’ll understand it.”

  Her words stilled him and he let her wrest the remote away from him. “What do you mean it’s your comfort movie?”

  “It's the movie that I watch when I need comfort. Like a security blanket or something.”

  She rewound the movie to the beginning and sat back as the opening credits began to roll.

  Sequence considered keeping his trap shut. He really did. In fact, he felt as if he had about twenty years of repression sewing his mouth closed. But he knew what would happen if he didn’t say anything. They’d sit in silence, finish the movie, she’d go to bed and he’d feel like an asshole, asking questions to himself that he should have been asking her.

  He cleared his throat. “You…need comfort these days?”

  Naomi turned to look at Sequence, her lips twisting to one side and her sapphire eyes filled with something he couldn’t interpret. “I have a lot going on, Seek. I started my own business and then immediately put it on an indefinite hiatus. I quit my job I’ve had for a decade. I’m completely displaced from my home and my life. I’ve got a mobster after me. And I’m lonely. Yeah. I need comfort these days.”

  Seek. It echoed around in his head, her perfect voice saying his nickname that only people who loved him called him. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and tipped his head to look at her. “I will never, ever, let Bastone near you, Naomi. I swear it.”

  She seemed to be the one who was struck dumb, this time. She just blinked at him until he leaned back.

  “And as for loneliness,” he continued on. “Lotta people under this roof care about you a hell of a lot.”

  He forced his eyes back to the screen even though he could feel her looking at him. Eventually she turned back to the movie as well and started to sprawl across the couch again.

  Sequence could feel her confusion, but he could also feel her relaxing next to him. And for now, he let that be enough.

  ***

  As the digital security and recon man, Sequence didn’t have to sit-in on every single meeting or briefing that the rest of the team had to. But about halfway through the next week he started to become aware of the fact that they were meeting quite a lot. Without him. And Swift, who was bad at lying, was starting to avoid Sequence completely. Which meant that something was happening that Sequence wasn’t supposed to know about.

  “Is something going on with Naomi?” Sequence asked without preamble as he came to stand in the door to Atlas’s room one night. They all slept in a wing far from the clients, their rooms spread out from one another.

  Atlas, with his comically large reading glasses, peered up from where he was sprawled on his bed, wearing only his underwear and socks. He kept his novel up halfway covering his face, which was the first way that Sequence knew his twin was hiding something from him. “She, uh, has an appointment tomorrow.”

  Sequence heard a noise down the hall and realized that Swift was heading to bed. Sequence stepped into his brother’s room and closed the door.

  “I’m sorry. An appointment? You’re moving her from the bunker?” And this was the first he was fucking hearing about this? As the recon man, wherever they were moving her should have been the first thing on his list a week ago. Wherever the hell she was going should have been researched into the ground at this point. He should have pulled up the blueprints on the building and had them tattooed into his brain. Any person who was in that building should have had a thorough background check performed by him. Hell, he should have had every single route to this building thoroughly mapped out. If he hadn’t done all that work, then who had? And all for the purpose of keeping him in the dark?

  “Well, not me personally. But yeah. She’s got someplace to be so we’re bringing her there and back.”

  “What the fuck is the point of lockdown if the client gets to keep her external appointments?” Sequence was tight with tension. He knew there was more that Atlas wasn’t telling him. And it was something that the entire group knew but him. They wouldn’t keep him in the dark unless it was what Naomi wanted. Which meant that she had some sort of engagement that was important enough for Rook to break lockdown that she didn’t want Sequence to know about.

  “Apparently it’s really important,” Atlas muttered, flipping a page in his book.

  Sequence, at the end of a rope that wasn’t very long to begin with, strode forward and tried to wrestle the book away from his brother. But Atlas, used to this kind of behavior, clamped down on the pages.

  “Hey!”

  “Let go and tell me what the fuck is going on.”

  “No!”

  “Tell me!”

  The brothers rolled over one another, scrapping and elbowing and grabbing for the book. This was a very old habit. Sequence didn’t care about the book at all, but it represented whatever truth that Atlas was hiding from him and he was going to rip it from his brother or get a black eye trying.

  “Damn it, Seek!” Atlas shouted as he tried to pivot away from an elbow to the solar plexus.

  “Tell me right now.”

  “I can’t! She doesn’t want you to know. Okay? It’s some doctor’s appointment that couldn’t be rescheduled and it’s private and she asked Rook to organize it so that you wouldn’t know anything about it. Now get your bony ass off me.”

  That wasn’t a problem. With those words from Atlas, all the fight leeched right out of Sequence. He rolled off of his brother and went to sit at the edge of the bed, his hair gripped tightly in one hand.

  “Shit,” Atlas muttered and sprawled back out on the bed the way he’d been when Sequence had come in. He used one socked foot to nudge at his brother’s back. “You gotta talk to me.”

  Sequence said nothing.

  “Brother dear…” Atlas crooned, nudging again with his socked toes. “Talk to me.”

  “Quit touching me with your feet.”

  Atlas, not about to ignore a perfectly good opening when he saw one, lifted one muscled leg and, quite dexterously, used his pointed toes to stroke against his brother’s cheek. “Don’t cry, Sequence,” Atlas said in a mock sympathetic voice.

  Sequence, sucking his teeth, turned and socked Atlas in the leg hard enough to give him a charlie horse, but both brothers laughed. It was the kind of humor that was derived from a lifetime of living side by side. Neither of them could possibly have counted the number of times that Atlas had provoked Sequence into giving him a charlie horse.

  “Fuck,” Atlas gasped as he rubbed the cramp out of his leg, still chuckling.

  “I’m just mad at myself,” Sequence eventually said. “I can’t believe I fucked this up the way I did.”

  “You couldn’t have known it was gonna end up like this. I mean, how many girls have you pulled this shit on and nothing bad ended up happening? Just bad luck that you had to see her again and navigate the awkwardness, you know?”

  Sequence knew his brother was being deliberately obtuse, but he fell for the bait a
nyways. “That’s supposed to make me feel better? Fuck you. I obviously feel like shit that this has been my MO with women for a decade, all right? It’s a shitty way to treat people. And I feel even worse that I did it to Naomi. And not because I have to navigate the awkwardness now. Because I—” he cut off all at once, gripping his hair in frustration again.

  “Because you genuinely like her. And because you liked her then too. Because unlike the other women, you didn’t want to ghost her. But your dumbass issues made you do it anyways.”

  Sequence tipped his head and looked his brother in the eyes.

  “What?” Atlas asked, shrugging. “I had the same childhood as you did, Seek. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that we’d come out of it with some of the same habits. You think I have healthy relationships with women? Shit, no.”

  “You don’t hit it and quit it.”

  “Nah, but I never let it turn into anything. I never talk to them for real. Or get to know them. I’m a good time. The end. And why not? You and me, we had enough bad times to last us a lifetime. So fuck it.”

  “It makes me want to lose it that he’s still controlling us.”

  Atlas went still. They didn’t often talk about their father and he’d never heard Sequence admit to something like that before. That even though he was locked up halfway across the country, his mistreatment of them during their childhoods still affected them, still changed the way they interacted with the world.

  “Fuck him,” Atlas eventually agreed. “I hope they’ve got him sorting pins from needles for twenty hours a day. Naked.”

  Sequence, seemingly against his will, laughed. “I really don’t think that’s what prison is like.”

  “In my head it is.” Atlas fought the urge to sit up, shoulder to shoulder with his brother. If he made it a big, sentimental deal, then Sequence would shy away and who knew when they’d get around to having this conversation again. Maybe never. “I haven’t figured out how to shake the old man off my back yet either. But I’m trying. I know if I met somebody like Naomi, I’d probably try a lot harder. She’s too good to let an asshole like Dad get in the way.”

  “Yeah.” It was all Sequence said. But Atlas hadn’t been expecting a hell of a lot more. Sequence wasn’t a talker, never had been. Even before their father had started beating the shit out of them on a regular basis. But once that had started, well, it was like Sequence had forgotten how to speak altogether. As sparse as this conversation had been, it was the longest and most vulnerable conversation about their dad they’d had in a very long time. “Guess that’s what the therapy is for.”

  Atlas blinked. “You’re going to therapy?”

  “Court ordered.”

  “What?!”

  “Joking. Rook ordered, more like. He’s making me talk to Waters a couple times a week.”

  “Ah.” Atlas attempted to hide his surprise. He could have been knocked over with a feather that his brother was going to therapy. It suddenly started to truly shift down on him, the weight of what was going on. Sequence must truly, truly have feelings for Naomi if he was going to therapy for her. The idea of Sequence entering a room with the intent of talking about his issues, well, Atlas would have laughed himself silly over it if he hadn’t seen the veracity of it in Sequence’s face. “What the hell is that like? Gotta be honest, can’t really picture you in therapy.”

  Sequence barked a laugh again. “It’s weird. And sometimes quiet. You’ve met her. She’s a total kook. Sometimes she talks to fill the silence, but mostly she lets me just sit there and try to, I don’t know… find the words. She gave me these.” Sequence held up two silver marbles that Atlas now realized he’d been playing with for this entire conversation. He wracked his brain, trying to remember the last time he’d seen his brother play with something.

  “Is it, like, working?”

  Sequence shrugged. “Fuck if I know. I thought things were going better with Naomi, we’ve been hanging out a little bit in the evenings. She’s not as nervous or tense around me anymore. But then I find out…” Sequence stared at the opposite wall. “Is she all right? Like, medically, do you know whether or not she’s all right?”

  “Apparently it’s not a medical emergency or anything. I guess it’s just an appointment that she can’t break. And I guess Rook agrees with her.”

  Sequence nodded and stood up. Atlas and Swift were off tonight, but he and Geo were on. He needed to get back to the surveillance room. “I’ll let you get back to your Nicholas Sparks novel.”

  Atlas picked up his now extremely crumpled book. “Don’t knock it till you try it.”

  “I was joking,” Sequence said as he turned at the door. “You’re not seriously reading a Nicholas Sparks novel.”

  Atlas flashed the cover at his brother. “Chicks love this shit. They can’t wait to jump my bones after I tell them I’ve read it.”

  Sequence rolled his eyes at his brother and quietly slid back into the hallway.

  Atlas set his book on his chest and stared at the place where Sequence had just stood. He watched nothing for a long time, the thoughts revolving in his head.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Naomi ended her four-month appointment a complete and total mess. There was just no denying this thing anymore. She sat in a gown on the crinkly-papered exam room table and just hung her head. She was torn in equal parts of elation and dread.

  Her other sonograms had been gray shapes that had reminded Naomi of scans she’d once seen of the tectonic plates. And similar to that, she’d known that what she was looking at was important and foundational and undeniable. But she hadn’t looked at those images and seen a person.

  Until today.

  There was a baby in there. A straight-up baby. She’d seen the kid in silhouette. In gorgeous, stunning silhouette. She’d seen the shape of a nose, a forehead so large it had made her laugh through her tears. She’d seen freaking fingers.

  She also could no longer deny the baby bump. She’d been dressing in bulky, roomy clothes and purposefully not scrutinizing her belly. But now she looked at the picture of herself on her phone she’d taken at her three-month appointment. Then she scrolled to the side and looked at the picture she’d taken of herself just a few minutes ago. Her smile was wobbly and a kaleidoscope of emotions. She was naked in the photo except for her underwear, her forearm across her breasts. Which were also starting to get noticeably larger. At some point, the team was going to start wondering how the hell she was eating like a bird and somehow gaining curves. They were going to think she was a secret eater or something.

  Naomi took a long minute to pull herself together. She needed to get dressed and go out into the waiting room, where she knew Rook waited for her.

  Geo and Atlas waited down in the car. Naomi was grateful that this was a large medical complex and unless Rook had broken his promise to her, the team couldn’t have possibly figured out which doctor she was here to see. Her secret was safe with Rook, in theory. But not for much longer. This baby bump was gonna out her any day now. And maybe that was just the way it was supposed to be.

  For the first time, Naomi was thinking of her baby as a person. And suddenly, keeping this little person a secret didn’t sit right with her. She wasn’t ashamed of her baby. She wasn’t ashamed of being pregnant. She didn’t want her child to know that she’d kept them a secret for so long.

  She had to tell the team. She had to tell Sequence.

  She carefully slid the sonogram back into its envelope and gathered the literature that Dr. Grieves had given her. Then she slipped her clothes on and took a deep breath. She was going to tell Sequence that night.

  The two of them were in a good enough position for it, she figured. As good as they could be. She no longer feared that he hated her. In fact, she was fairly certain he even cared for her. In a closed off sort of way. He made it his mission to make sure she ate something every night and over the last week, they often hung out while she ate. Sometimes he’d watch what she was watching, or
he’d stay and chat with her. Well, he’d do the Sequence version of chatting. Which was basically nodding and grunting while she chatted. But still. It was a whole lot healthier than when he’d been ghosting her. At least she didn’t have to stalk him just to be able to tell him that he was going to have a genetic offspring somewhere in this great universe.

  She couldn’t think of Sequence as the baby’s father. Her brain simply wouldn’t let her. Naomi figured it was some kind of deep-rooted defense mechanism. He’d abandoned her before. She wasn’t going to put her eggs in his basket again. Her goal wasn’t to include Sequence in the baby’s life in any real way, and she hadn’t seen a single thing that would convince her that he’d want that. She simply wanted to start her baby’s life with honesty. The secret was killing her. She wanted to be upfront with Sequence and then let him do whatever he was going to do.

  She did not, at all, have high hopes. The man had freaked out and disappeared from the face of the earth when she’d asked him to have dinner with her. Tossing a baby into the equation was likely to make him change his name and moved to Singapore. And that would be fine. Just as long as Naomi got to tell him the truth. That was all that really mattered anymore.

  Naomi tucked her papers under her arm and stepped into the hallway on the way down to the waiting room. A man who looked vaguely familiar stood in the hallway, his back to her.

  When he turned, Naomi stumbled. She still couldn’t place him, but the look in his eyes had her bracing her hand against the wall as her feet scuffed the linoleum floor. His eyes burned into her, through her. This wasn’t a stranger. This man was here for her. She had no doubt about that at all.

  “Miss Cutler,” he said in a strangely hoarse voice. Spiders skittered up her spine. She knew, she just knew, that this man was not friendly.

  Naomi backed up a few steps. The man was standing in-between her and the waiting room, which was behind a closed door. If she screamed, would Rook be able to hear her?