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I also couldn't alphabetize his files on the Abruzzos because he had some kind of asinine system that made sense to only him.
But no offenses were as bad as the coffee one.
"Where can I set up?" Alex asked, having walked in two minutes before declaring she was 'sick and fucking tired of being in lockdown' so she decided to leave Breaker with their son, Junior, and headed up to Hailstorm for the day as a form of small rebellion. Breaker didn't seem overly convinced that the blowback from The Henchmen war wasn't going to find its way all the way up to his little house on the hill. Actually, that was the general consensus around Henchmen allies ever since Hailstorm went into the gym and found not only bugs but a small, badly built pipe bomb. Bad enough that it likely wouldn't have done much damage beyond the locked office they had placed it in.
Janie would have had a good laugh about it. You know, if we were sharing that with her. Which we weren't. Lo, to my surprise, had sided with Reign and she was getting radio silence about the whole situation.
"Back at your own goddamn house," L growled, clearly less of a team player than even I was.
Frankly, I welcomed Alex's company.
For me, Alex was an easy coworker and friend. This was mostly thanks to the fact that I never had to analyze her. She was blunt and fearless with her thoughts and opinions. If she had something to say, she said it. There was no guesswork. Which was good for two reasons. One, I didn't have to profile her. Two, she didn't have to resent me for profiling her.
"I brought you a twenty-four ounce coffee with six shots," Alex reminded him, slamming her laptop down right beside him, despite there being plenty of desk space beside me where I had set up a full arm's length away from L so I wouldn't piss him off any more than I already had with my presence. Alex wasn't exactly the sort to accommodate just because someone growled at her. That was likely thanks to having put up with Breaker's grunting and growling and demands for years. "So go ahead and pull those wadded up panties out of your ass and relax, L. You're outnumbered now. Mina and I are totally going to gang up on you now. Right Mina?"
"I ah..." I started, thrown off.
"See? She agreed. Now, the Abruzzos..."
"I don't know why you're here," L said, swiveling his chair toward her. Though, I got the impression it was less to face her and more because it pushed him a little further away from her. "In fact, I don't see why you're on this case at all. I know everything there is to know about the Abruzzo crime family."
"I got your files," Alex agreed, nodding, as she brought her laptop up.
"And?" he prompted when that was all she said.
Because her face was turned just ever-so-slightly toward me, I got to see a small smile pull at her lips before she forced them into a straight line. But it was enough for me to know that she had something up her sleeve.
"And I found it lacking."
"Lacking?" he asked, voice deceptively quiet. But with the tension in his jaw, I could tell he was barely holding onto his anger.
Being as smart as he was, it was hard for him to accept that he didn't have all the answers, especially about his specialty.
"See, I really liked knowing how Mack takes his coffee and all, don't get me wrong," Alex said in a dry voice. "But I was a hell of a lot more interested in the fact that he has a weakness for girls. Meaning, young ones."
"What?" L exploded, almost sending his chair flying he jerked upright so fast. "Young girls? There's been no record of that."
"On the books," she nodded, "you're right. Hell, you can't even find any suggestions of that kind of thing. But then you find him in the dark web and you see that he has this SN and that that SN has been used to view kiddie porn on a website that just received a very malicious form of malware that may or may not be funneling money out of the subscribers' accounts and into a non-profit that helps survivors of child sexual abuse."
Alex, since joining forces with Janie years back, had grown a lot in her skills. And because the two had their own connection to the shithead who ruined good chunks of their lives, the man Wolf eventually killed after Janie's botched plan to blow him to kingdom come, they had joined forces to become a sort of police force on the dark web. They trolled the worst sites and attacked the members, brought down the sites themselves. They were a duo of vigilante cyber do-gooders. There was even a fan page for them on the dark web somewhere. They would both pretend that they didn't know that that fan page existed, but they both absolutely knew.
