Something about this job was different for him.
Now, it felt like he had more to lose.
Which only made her wonder if he was working so hard because of her or the man he was still looking for. The last thing she wanted was to compound his stress.
Synek sat shirtless on the floor, his back to her, though she could just see the bite mark she’d left on the side of his neck—twin to the ones he’d left on her thighs. She took a moment to appreciate the sight of him like that, unable to help herself, before she crossed the floor to better see what held his attention.
From what she could see, boxes upon boxes of files were arranged in an order that made little sense to her, though Synek seemed to be organized just fine.
Synek didn’t react to her presence until she was nearly beside him and had picked up a file he’d tossed onto the couch he was sitting back against.
Flipping it around, she read the label, finding a name she didn’t recognize scrawled across the top.
“Who’s Zachariah?”
Synek exhaled in frustration, scrubbing both hands down his face before he looked over at her. “We called him Z. He was one of the handlers for the Den. Some of us, like Red, for example, reported to him directly.”
“What happened to him?” she asked, not missing his use of past tense when he referred to the man.
“Dead, as far as I know,” he responded, though something about his tone made her wonder about how the man had ended up that way.
“Dead, dead? Or is he missing the way Grimm is?”
He scratched the spot just above his brow. “As far as I know, he’s in the ground. At least that’s what the Kingmaker told us.”
Iris sunk onto the couch cushions beside him, her knee brushing his shoulder. “Okay, so what are you looking for?”
Especially this late at night. Whatever it was had to be important, and if it was important to him, the least she could do was try to help him find it. And from the looks of things, he hadn’t been particularly successful in his hunt for information.
The box closest to his right was the only one that was open. Its contents spilled out all around him, including a mixture of documents, black and white photographs, and what looked like kill diagrams.
“There’s nothing here,” Synek said with another sigh, his gaze dropping to the pages in his lap, though from the expression on his face, it too wasn’t providing any answers. “At this point, I’d take anything.”
He was frustrated. Iris knew the feeling well, but she also knew that he would only be half as productive if he let himself get defeated.
“This has something to do with Grimm, right? You think something in these files will help you find him?”
“I don’t know, but at this point, this is the only thing we have to go on.”
For now, he didn’t say.
“Okay, maybe I can help you find something,” she suggested, plucking the folder from his lap to place with the other she was already holding. “What have you gotten so far?”
“Fuck all. Z might have kept meticulous notes, but he hardly kept anything for that last job he sent Grimm on.”
Just from what she read on the top sheet of handwritten notes, there were names and dates, as well as a summary of where this particular mercenary had gone to complete the job. If this was everything he had just on this one particular assignment, she could only imagine what all there was, considering the years the Den had been in operation.
“So you need info on his last job?”
She expected him to agree and give her instruction on what she needed to be looking for, but instead, he sighed and leaned his head back. “It’s late, dove. You shouldn’t be out of bed.”
“And leave you up alone? Not a chance. Just tell me what I need to look for.”
“Probably best if I don’t tell you what to look for. Go in blind and all. See what pops out.”
That way, she wouldn’t have any preconceived notions about what she might find. There would be less for her to ignore if she didn’t rule anything out.
Looking back at the contents in her lap, she started reading.
Z’s notes were meticulous.
Every detail perfectly written out, so it wasn’t hard for her to follow the case file even though she didn’t know any of the names involved. She tried to imagine how long this would have taken him, not just from the mercenary recounting the job, but the time and effort the man had put in to researching the mark.
That would only make her job easier.
Not sure how much time had passed while engrossed in the file, Iris glanced over at Synek, surprised to find him fast asleep. A soft smile crossed her face before she stood and walked over to grab one of the throw blankets bundled in the basket next to the couch.
Stretching it out over him, she then carefully put one of the throw pillows behind his head before grabbing the folders he’d already searched through and carrying them back into the bedroom.
On the tapes her father had recorded in the days leading to his incarceration, he said the answers she sought would be found in the details.
At fourteen, she hadn’t known what that meant, nor did she have the first idea where to look to find any such “details.”
At sixteen, the details included a low-level drug dealer’s obsession with a prostitute named Amanda Smith, a woman who also liked to spend time with a then up-and-coming politician named Michael Spader.
At eighteen, she learned Amanda Smith had mysteriously disappeared.
With one little connection, Iris had inevitably put together pieces that hadn’t made sense until she had them all laid out—or rather put up—on her wall with red yarn to connect one to the next.
She could do the same with this.
A few minutes passed as she cleared the bed off, stacking the pillows neatly on the floor and folding the comforter into an oversized square next to them. Once the bed was nothing more than a blank canvas of white, she started.
The thing about this kind of research was that it was easy to form an idea of who a person was, or at least who they had been, by the information left in the documents.
Spader had been a man of wealth and means who used his advantages to destroy the lives of others with little care as to how it affected anyone else, but as Iris went through each file, she wasn’t just learning about the inner musings of Z, whose detailed notes also provided a look at the man himself, but she learned about Grimm as well.
Special ops, his file—the first one ever recorded on him—said. Calm and collected. Efficient and quiet.
The perfect soldier, Z had written in pen alongside typed notes, though if Iris remembered some of her father’s musings, a Marine was a Marine and didn’t like to be called a soldier.
She set that file to one side of the bed, if only because it was the start of it all. Then she hunted through the rest of the files until she found the one dated most recently.
Everything in the middle was what would matter.
She just had to find the details.
*
Sleep was coming more readily to Synek, and though he had the occasional nightmare—that woke him on a silent scream with reflexes ready to defend himself—he now could go a few hours without being startled awake by his own conscience.
He blinked his eyes open, briefly bewildered by where he was before sitting up, the blanket covering him sliding down to pool in his lap.
When in the hell had he grabbed that?
Iris.
The answer came immediately as his sluggish brain caught up with the rest of him. He glanced to his left, then his right, expecting to find her nearby, whether working or finally back asleep, but if she was either, he didn’t know because she was no longer in the room. Nor were the files he’d been sorting through for hours after he’d woken up earlier.
Scrubbing a hand down his face, he stood and stretched his tight muscles to ease some of the tension. Too many late nights and not enough sleep were catching up with him, but he didn’t have ti
me to let himself crash for too long.
Their unspoken deadline loomed over him, lingering in the back of his mind even when he tried not to think about it.
After a quick trip to the bathroom to clean himself up, he headed to the kitchen and put a kettle on before going to look for Iris. Yawning behind his fist, he entered the bedroom on this floor and then promptly stopped in the middle of the floor.
The first thing he saw was Iris fast asleep on the floor, one arm tucked beneath her head as a pillow. It was obvious she had crashed while working, considering the number of open folders around her and the sheer chaos that was the bed.
He wasn’t sure how long she had been working while he’d slept, but from the looks of it, she’d been going for hours.
The mercenary in him wanted to see what she had found and try to understand the puzzle she’d left behind from the way the files and documents were arranged on the bed, but instead, he merely spared it a single glance before making his way across the floor to her.
Careful not to jostle her too much, he lifted her and carried her out of the room, almost smiling when she wrapped her arms around his neck, though she had yet to waken.
He laid her on the sofa, covering her with the same blanket she’d covered him.
Soon, he thought as he straightened and headed back over to the gently whistling kettle. Soon there wouldn’t be anything to keep them up at odd hours and only sleeping when they were too exhausted to do anything else.
It was the unspoken promise he’d made to her.
He doubted his demons would ever truly go away—that he would ever lead a completely normal life—but Iris quieted his mind. She helped him think clearly, breathe easier, and feel like he wasn’t losing a battle with his own mind.
He wanted her more than he had ever wanted anything, even his own sanity. And if he had to take on a fucking army to make sure she stayed by his side, he would.
Once he had her settled, Synek fixed his tea and walked back into the bedroom to survey her progress.
Now that he was significantly more awake and alert than he had been before, he got back to work.
For a man who spent a great deal of time transcribing their lives, Z had fuck all on Grimm’s latest job. Considering there had even been a report card in one of Synek’s earlier jobs with three little words written on the first page—cruel, lonely, and vicious—he expected to find more on Grimm, who had been there longer.
Z could be a judgmental little prick when he wanted to be, and while he hadn’t disapproved of Synek entirely, he always worried that Synek was too unstable to do the job that the Kingmaker needed the mercenaries for.
He wasn’t entirely wrong. Synek could be bad for business if left to his own devices for too long. Even he didn’t remember much of those early days beyond the brief flashes of memories that came and went.
One would think that everything would be okay now that he wasn’t having to deal with mind games from the homicidal bitch who liked to sleep with him, or a mother who thought beating him would purge him of his “sins,” but it took far more than a new job to do that.
He’d been in a dark place for years and was only just finally getting out of it.
Focusing on the task at hand, Synek tried to make sense of what she had laid out on the bed, following the circle of facts in the way Iris saw them rather than what he thought to be true.
If she hadn’t arranged it in the order she did, he would have never put it together this way. There was no chronological order between the cases, rather a number from the past year he had seen, and the rest scattered across at least five years
And it seemed, just as they were looking for Grimm, the other man had been hunting something of his own as well.
But what?
The sound of footsteps had him looking up, spying Iris stumbling toward him even as she rubbed her eyes. He could tell she was exhausted, especially after he had already kept her up well into the night before waking her again, yet she refused to stay in bed.
An unbidden smile turned his lips as he reached for her without thought, catching her before she could stumble into anything else and pulling her down onto his lap.
“You should be sleeping,” he said, tossing the papers he’d been reading to the side to better turn her in his arms.
“So should you,” she said after a yawn, “but here we are.”
Iris finally managed to pry her eyes open and take in the organized chaos she had left behind the night before. As quickly as she had seemed fatigued, she was wide-awake now as she launched into the meaning behind every choice she had made, connecting the dots for him until he understood what she had found that he had never thought to see.
Even after she had trailed off and he still stared down at everything she had put together, he didn’t realize she was watching him until he looked at her. She had a habit of doing this when she was thinking something important, but lately, she hadn’t been sharing her thoughts with him. Even when he could tell with a glance at her face that she wasn’t telling him the truth.
But he didn’t pry. He had plenty of time to figure out her secrets.
“What was he like?” she asked suddenly, drawing him from his own thoughts until he focused on her. “Grimm, I mean. It’s obvious you care about him a lot, but you’ve never really talked about him.”
That was because it didn’t even make sense to him, at least not completely.
Grimm had been the one to train him when no one else wanted to even step near him. And Synek remembered all too clearly what he had been like during those early days in the Den when he’d wrought a path of destruction that could hardly be contained. But the other man had had a death wish.
Clearly.
Why fucking else would he bother?
It was for both those reasons that Synek was determined to find him. He owed the man a debt for helping him when he hadn’t any idea how to help himself and he wanted to know Grimm’s motives behind it.
He was most curious about that.
“He was a pretentious bastard,” Synek answered after a while, conjuring an image of the man in his mind. “Ex-special forces from what I understand.”
Though no one had been able to tell him whether he was American or British. Synek thought he could spot a fake a mile away, but Grimm’s accent was flawless on both sides. And depending on who was asking determined which nationality he gave.
“He didn’t like to talk about himself, or even the reason he ended up with the Den.”
“Did he know about you?” she asked, her expression falling. “Did he know about how you came to the Den?”
It wasn’t something he had talked to many about, though they had all drawn their own conclusions with the secretive way he had entered the fold. But Synek knew all about him, and that was even before he’d voluntarily told the man the information.
“He was there the day the Kingmaker came to recruit me and the day I walked into the Den.”
Grimm was there during some of the lowest moments in his life. It wasn’t so much a mystery about why he felt as if he owed him when he thought back to how much the man had helped him over the years.
For whatever reason, the other man had taken pity on him and had not ostracized him as so many others had.
Synek brushed a hand through his hair. “He found the family I sent Winter to live with.”
It would have been impossible, in the midst of his training and work, to effectively raise an eleven-year-old girl, especially in his condition. He’d barely been able to keep himself together, and if left with him, he might have fucked her up more than he’d intended.
But Synek hadn’t trusted anyone with Winter, not when she had been the lone light in his life at the time.
“He’s saved my life more than once,” Synek went on. More times than he probably deserved. “I owe him a debt.”
“We’ll find him,” she said, offering him a smile when he brushed the pad of his thumb across her lips. “I’m good at finding people,
you know.”
Yeah, he knew that all too well.
Chapter 29
Synek was back in his regular uniform of dark denim, motorcycle boots, and a leather jacket the next day. His hair was unkempt like she liked it, and she didn’t have to look to know that his cigarette was in place.
Sometime this morning after they’d both woken up, showered, and gotten dressed, it hit her that something was rather domestic about them now. Whether it was showering together, which always ended with needing another, or watching him make his tea—they weren’t just two people working on a goal.
They were in a relationship.
Funny that she had never expected it to happen this way. She’d always imagined those cliché but special moments when the man would ask her outright and she would either agree or deny him.
That wasn’t remotely what happened here.
There was no need for questions or a full-blown conversation about it; she was his, and no part of her thought otherwise.
His one, as he liked to say.
“What’s that thought you’re having?”
His voice brought her around to him and the way he was staring. The sight of him managed to bring a smile to her face.
Everything about him was distinctly masculine. The way he stood, the hair on his jaw, the tattoos she could see through the thin shirt he wore. Yet in his much larger hands, he held a dainty cup of tea.
“What?”
“You smiled at me,” he said. “What were you just thinking about?”
“Relationships,” she answered, grabbing an orange from the basket in front of them and going in search of a knife.
A curious expression crossed his face as he ventured over to her, setting his tea down to pluck the orange from her hands. “What about them?”
“I’ve never been in one.” And now that she thought about it, she had never seen a particularly healthy relationship either. “My parents didn’t really get along, and they were only together sporadically as far as I can remember. And even when they were on, things were always a bit … tense.”
They might have been able to make her, and both loved her in their own way, but her parents’ relationship defined dysfunctional. Despite her desire for a family, she knew they were better off separate rather than together.
Den of Mercenaries: Volume Two Page 56