by Layla Reyne
“Rose?” he asked after their grandmother.
“With Papa Cal,” Helena said.
Hawes had figured as much. They hadn’t seen much of Rose since they’d moved Cal into hospice. Hawes made a mental note to stop by tomorrow. They continued on to the third floor—Holt’s family’s domain—and from the seating area there, up the spiral staircase to Holt’s lair.
And lair was the right word for it.
At the very top of the house, in the peaks of the roof, the attic bonus room stretched the length of the structure. During the day, sun streamed in through the arched front window and overhead skylights. At night it was just as bright, owing to the tech-geek wall of wonder. Across the long, uninterrupted wall, LCD screens were stacked three high and four wide and served as monitors for Holt’s bank of computers and surveillance feeds. Each of their family’s homes and all their business operations, the legal and illegal ones, could be observed from this perch. It was everything Holt needed to be the eyes and ears of the organization and to do what he did best—digital assassination: financial, social, and otherwise. All from the comfort of home so he could spend time with his daughter.
And that’s where this perch diverged from the one Holt had at the company’s headquarters. Lily’s presence here couldn’t be missed—from the wooden crib beneath the front window, to the golden bear mobile twirling above it, to the rocking chair in the corner. It destroyed the typical hacker vibe, but it also humanized the place, more than Holt’s wall of monitors and old military-style cot ever had.
Amelia crossed the room to her husband, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and peered into the crib, which had been rolled closer to Holt’s seat at the computers. The tap-tap-tap of his rapid-fire typing was the best trick they’d discovered for getting Lily to sleep. If he was in the zone, Lily was lightly snoring, dead to the world.
Not wanting to wake his niece, Hawes followed Helena to the seating area in the opposite corner. Helena collapsed on the couch, and Hawes started for one of the two armchairs before remembering the ice pack on his back. He grabbed the chair from the other paper-strewn desk, rolled it over, and turned it so he could straddle it, arms folded on top.
“Any blowback on the warehouse?” Hawes asked.
“We’re clear,” Helena said. “Local station got a tip that the cartel was cleaning up its own mess. And the feds?”
“Happy to have a new cartel informant.”
“Nice save there.” Amelia stepped away from the crib, shook out her long brown hair, and squeezed Holt’s arm. “You can stop, babe. She’s out cold.”
“Just finishing this last bit of detail work on Jodie and Ray.”
Hawes rotated his chair. “How’d you set that up?”
“Third party, like Perry suggested.”
“How—”
Holt pointed at his wireless earbud, then at the EMS live streams running on one of his monitors. “Heard the call come in. Hacked the neighbor’s security doorbell footage. I considered the fight option, but given their injuries and gunshot trajectory, there had to be a third party.”
“You wipe the security footage?” Hawes asked.
“Of course.” Holt gave him a what-do-you-take-me-for look that made Hawes smile. “And the footage from the ATM across the street.”
“Sloppy, Big H,” Helena remarked.
She wasn’t wrong. He expected more of himself. While he’d cleaned up the unexpected hiccup in the warehouse, he’d made a mess of things in the alley. It seemed everything had been off-kilter since Dante Perry’s arrival.
“He checks out,” Holt said, as if reading his mind.
The twin-speak and mind reading were about the only “twin” things Hawes and his brother shared. Where Hawes’s light-brown hair was streaked with blond, Holt’s dirty-blond was tinged with red. Hawes had the same cold blue eyes as Helena, miles away from Holt’s warm brown. Hawes preferred suits, Holt flannel and jeans. And where most of Hawes’s physical features were lean and overly sharp—nose, chin, elbows, knees, even the tops of his ears—Holt was a mountain of curved, sloping muscles. Big round shoulders, a wide barrel chest inked with tattoos, redwood trunks for legs, and a strong jaw that led to a round, dimpled chin, even though Holt covered it with a brownish-red beard cut to make his face look more square.
Their mother used to joke that Hawes was so much slighter and pointier than Holt because his brother had taken up most of the space in her womb. Which was also why, she claimed, Hawes was born first, making him the big brother, technically. Carrying that guilt, joke or not, Holt had been Hawes’s vigilant protector when they were young, never letting anyone bully him for being smaller, or gay. But by the time Holt had left for army basic training, Hawes had grown to a lanky six-foot-plus and learned to protect himself using the weapons he did have—speed, agility, and the same sharp elbows that had helped save him tonight.
Those and Dante Perry.
“He give you that card you sent me a picture of?” Holt asked.
Hawes pulled out his phone and opened the card compartment. “He intentionally left a thumb and index print on each corner.”
Holt tossed a remote to Helena on the way to his other desk. He fished a fingerprint kit out of the bottom drawer and cleared a desk corner with a swipe of his tattooed right arm, sending a stack of mail flying.
Amelia rolled her eyes. “Really, babe?”
“I’ll get it later.” Meaning he’d restack the mail until Lily eventually puked on it and made disposal necessary. He waved Hawes over, extracted the card with a pair of forceps, and got to work with the fingerprint dust.
Hawes left him to it and reclaimed his chair, rotating back to Amelia and Helena on the couch. “What do we know?”
Helena clicked a button on the remote, and pictures of Dante filled the screens—outside the restaurant, at the bar with Kane, inside the dining room, and on the porch in the alley, gun arm raised.
Helena hummed, same as she had outside, and Amelia laughed. “Down girl.”
“The name and business check out,” Holt said as he continued to work under an exam lamp. “Though he’s only recently back in San Francisco.”
“Where’s he been?” Hawes asked.
Helena clicked the remote again, and a list of addresses appeared on one of the screens. “Bounced around a lot.”
Seattle was Dante’s last known address. Explained the rocker vibe. Grunge just wouldn’t die, no matter how many curses Hawes laid at its flannel feet. “He licensed as a PI here?”
“BSIS issued his license a few months back.” Helena changed to another screen. “And he’s got a CCW permit.”
Concealed carry, likewise issued a few months back. Not uncommon for PIs. Or cops. Mercs didn’t bother. But first Hawes circled back to something else his brother had said, and something Dante had mentioned too.
“You said ‘recently back.’ He’s from here?”
“Yearbook picture,” Holt said, then to Helena, “Next.”
Helena clicked…and recoiled, an arm thrown dramatically over her face. “Warn a girl, Little H.”
“Hey now!” Hawes jostled his sister’s bare foot, which was dangling over her knee. “We weren’t all born beauty queens.”
Staring at seventeen-year-old Dante Perry, Hawes felt more than a shred of sympathy for the awkward boy Dante had been. Features too big for his face, gangly limbs, an unruly cowlick. Hawes had been there. Had the bad school pictures to prove it too. His eyes flickered to the bottom of the page. Galileo High School. Before it became Galileo Academy, it would have been the closest public high school to the heavily Italian North Beach neighborhood. Dante had said he’d grown up in San Francisco. “Family still in North Beach?” Hawes ventured.
“Mom and a sister,” Holt replied, back at his computers. He snapped a picture of the dusty card with his phone, tapped the screen a few times, then, after keying in commands on the computer, stepped back and wiped his hands off on his jeans. “Okay, that’s done and analyzing.”
“That someone in the organization wants to kill me.”
Helena scoffed. “Tell us something we don’t know.”
Hawes curled his fingers in the fabric of the sling stretched over his chest. “That it’s somehow connected to Isabelle Costa.”
Indrawn breaths echoed all around. Holt wobbled where he sat on the couch arm next to his wife, and Helena took up tapping her nails against each other.
“Does Perry have any connection to her?” Amelia asked, the first to recover. Holt and Helena still looked off-balance.
Welcome to Hawes’s world. “Not that I know of.” He turned to his brother. “Dig deeper. See if their paths crossed. See if anyone is paying him. Is this business or personal?”
“Looked personal to me out there,” Helena said with a nod toward the front of the house. “How are you gonna handle him? Something tells me you’ll be seeing him again soon.”
Hawes didn’t disagree with her read, and that prospect—of seeing Dante again, sooner rather than later—both excited and troubled him. There was no denying the pull he’d felt, or that Dante had saved his life, but there was also no denying he was a threat to Hawes’s family, given what he seemed to suspect about Isabelle’s death. If Dante ever learned the truth, he’d be an enemy for sure. And there were more than enough of those these days. Except this one had already provided valuable information that had helped save Hawes. There could be more to learn.
“I’m going to work a potential source,” Hawes said. “See what more he can tell us about Ray and Jodie and whose orders they were following. I’ll use whomever I can to find out who’s gunning for us.”
“For you,” Amelia said. “That’s all we know so far.”
“True, but all of you should be on guard. If this is the start of a coup…”
“Then they’ll have to take us all down.” Helena’s voice had taken on that chilly edge again, her protective hackles rising once more.
“If Perry’s got information, get it,” Holt said. “I’ve got no flags and no unusual account activity on either Ray or Jodie.” Everyone in the organization was monitored for irregular financial or travel activity, as well as potential points of leverage.
“They had to know and trust the person who hired them,” Helena said.
“Because they believed the payout would be there,” Amelia added, finishing the same train of thought that had occurred to Hawes earlier.
He nodded. “We need to find out who.”
“How much did you tell Brax?” Helena asked.
“Nothing, but I did agree to give him a heads-up if things were going”—he cleared his throat and forced out the words—“tits-up.”
Holt snickered. “Once more with feeling, Big H.”
Hawes shifted and yanked at the sling, jiggling the ice pack on his back. “Do you want me to throw this bag of ice at you?”
“Brax is about to throw ice on both of you,” Helena announced.
Sure enough, the chief, pissed-off scowl in place, was charging up the stairs to the front door. There was no time to stop him before he—
The doorbell chimed, and two seconds later Lily’s muffled whimpers broke into a wail.
Holt bolted up, scooping his daughter out of the crib and into his arms.
“I’ll go grab a bottle,” Amelia said, likewise springing into parental action, their routine well practiced.
Holt installed himself in the rocker, the world forgotten as Lily, cradled like a football in his tattooed arm, became the center of his universe.
Hawes was more than fine with that. She was the reason they did any of this. They’d all give her the world if they could. Impossible, but what they could do was make it better and safer for her. Hawes leaned over and kissed the munchkin’s fuzzy auburn head, then his brother’s. “Get her settled. We’ll handle Kane.”
He waited for Helena to finish locking the computers, then followed her downstairs. She stopped abruptly on the second-floor landing, and if not for both their quick reflexes, Hawes would have run her over. “You need to change,” she said, nodding to his old room, next to hers, where he still kept a closet full of clothes for when he crashed there, which happened frequently. “You’ve been home a while, remember?” She nudged the ice pack on his back. “And there’s a wet spot here.”
“You got Kane?”
“Yeah, I got him,” she said with a wink.
He started toward his room, feeling more than a little sorry for the chief. He barely made it a step before Helena grasped his wrist and turned him back around. “Are you okay?”
Cattiness gone, she wore the same concerned expression she had when Hawes had uttered Isabelle’s name. She’d been there that night. She’d had to drag him out of the shower when, no matter how hard he scrubbed, he couldn’t seem to get the blood off his hands.
He couldn’t lie to her now. “No, but I have to be.”
Chapter Five
It was half past two by the time the Lyft pulled to the curb in front of Hawes’s building. As predicted, Kane had read them the riot act, then questioned them in-depth about Jodie and Ray. Holt’s cover story had held and was supported by the evidence called in. Relatively satisfied, or just dog-tired, Kane had given them a much sterner warning to keep him apprised of any situations, then cleared out. Hawes had done the same shortly thereafter, against Helena’s wishes. She’d wanted him to stay at the house, but Hawes needed to decompress within the comfort of his own four walls.
Holt had swept the area around the four-story South Beach condo building and confirmed all was clear. Inside the unit was always a risk—Hawes refused interior cameras—but exterior footage from the past few hours showed only the usual residents entering the building. No one had approached his end-unit’s door.
Apparently they hadn’t looked hard enough, or more likely, the man leaning against the side of the building reading a paperback, knew exactly where to stand to avoid the cameras.
“Where’s the bike?” Hawes asked. All the building’s parking areas were in view of Holt’s or other surrounding cameras. They would have seen the Hog on the security footage.
“In a garage up the block,” Dante answered as he tucked away the book, a popular fantasy series. “One that doesn’t have wired cameras.”
Caution dictated—more and more with each passing hour—that Hawes not let this man into his life, much less into his home. A well-founded warning. A perfectly timed kill. A work-around designed to thwart their security. Letting him in was a risk, but Hawes had committed to keeping this potential enemy close, to seeing what more he knew about the threat to his family, should he make another approach. And now here he was.
Those were the logical reasons to let Dante in. There was also the illogical. The part of Hawes that had been unsteady since the alley, that he’d kept hidden from his siblings, and that was already settling in Dante’s presence. When Dante shoved off the wall and stepped directly into a camera’s line of sight, it settled further.
“Could have given you a ride if you’d wanted.” The smirk was for Hawes’s benefit. The dark eyes flitting to the camera were for the benefit of whoever was watching. A white flag of sorts. He was exposing himself here as much as Hawes.
Good enough for Hawes, whose traitorous body led his mind astray, considering other things he’d like to ride. He pushed back one side of his leather jacket and dug his keys out of his jeans pocket, ignoring his vibrating phone in the other. “If I never ride on that bike again, it’ll be too soon.” He swiped his key fob over the building’s lock and opened the front door for Dante to enter ahead of him. Less risk, relatively.
“You need to be more careful,” Dante said, as if reading his mind.
“Right now, I trust about five people.” Keeping Dante in front of him, Hawes motioned for the stairwell. “None of whom were in a position to drive me home. A Lyft tracks where I’m picked up, where I’m dropped off, and when my card is charged.
Holt can track all that. And the person in my organization who wants to kill me isn’t going to kill a civilian who’s just trying to make a living.”
Dante exited on the second floor without being told. Worry shifted forward in Hawes’s mind—the PI knew exactly where he lived—until Dante’s next words took the lead. “You sure about that?”
“I have to be,” Hawes said, “if I’m going to sleep at night.”
He wouldn’t have another Isabelle Costa weighing on his conscience. Though maybe others didn’t have the same moral hang-ups he did. Was that why someone was targeting him? Were their associates opposed to the new order? Five years in, it wasn’t so new anymore, and no income had been lost, no innocents had been killed, and no one had gone to jail. Hawes counted those things as victories, but perhaps other operatives didn’t. Operatives like Jodie and Ray who’d been frustrated with Hawes at different points tonight. Longer than that, apparently.
“Madigan?” Dante called from the far end of the hallway.
Hawes shook himself loose from where he’d halted midstep. At the door, he pressed his thumb to the scanner and entered his access code, the security significantly upgraded on his unit. “Sorry,” he said to Dante. “Was just replaying the follow-up with Kane.” A convenient enough excuse.
“He came by the house?”
“To discuss what looked like a third-party altercation.” Inside, Hawes tapped the foyer light switch, and track lighting brightened the hallway leading into the condo’s main living area. He toed off his shoes and shrugged out of his jacket, tossing both on the steps to the master bedroom loft. “Holt thanks you for that suggestion. Quicker backstory build.”
A shadow streaked across the edge of the lighted area.
Dante drew his gun and lunged forward, a hand on Hawes’s chest to hold him back. Considering for a split-second how much it would hurt his aching back and hands, Hawes acted anyway. Bandaged hands wrapped around Dante’s wrist, he wrenched the hand away and crouched. He turned under Dante’s outstretched arm and kicked, heel aimed at Dante’s firing wrist. Direct hit. The gun clattered to the floor. With Dante’s other wrist still in his hands, Hawes righted himself, spun behind Dante, yanked the man’s arm up behind his back, and rammed him, chest first, into the wooden pillar by the stairs.