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Protective brother. Marc had said the same thing. Why get Corey involved if the two of us are only going to get killed as a result? Or for that matter, if we limit what even the Academy knew, they wouldn’t send out a fleet and get us all killed. “But we can’t get the core and break into it without Corey...”
“The first thing this other team is going to want is information. They want to know who Axel and Marc are and if they’ll be useful. I don’t know about this poison or her threats. I’ve got Corey doing what he can from where he’s at. I can still trade myself in later, I guess. So we’ve got a little time to go after this core. We just don’t have a way of guaranteeing that they won’t just kill us all after we deliver. That’s why we need to be ready for minimal sacrifices. If they only have one, that’s better than two.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” I said, wanting to say more, because it was a ridiculous thought.
But if anyone had to be the sacrifice, it probably should have been me. Who was I? A thief without a family. My own brother didn’t even want to talk to me. Brandon had a brother and friends and so much more potential. The only thing was, I wasn’t valuable enough to be even considered a trade. Alice had a chance and she sent me back. They wanted Corey.
Brandon grunted and then focused on the phone. “I just need a starting point.” He rubbed his face again and yawned. “And a whole lot of coffee.”
“And an army.”
“I don’t need an army when you have secrets and resources neither team knows about.”
“Like a secret garage in North Charleston?” I asked. “Are there cars in here?”
“Bikes,” he said. He leaned over, grabbing a business card out of a holder and passing it to me.
Henshaw Customs.
Unique motorcycles and supplies.
Brandon’s name was on it, along with an email and phone number.
He never told me. I’d been with the guys for a couple of weeks, and even while I travelled in my own little world for a while, I still had daily conversations with the guys. Not once did Brandon mention he had a garage where he worked on bikes. And for having a business, he wasn’t at it often. One of the other guys once said he goes to the shop, but for some reason, I didn’t picture this. “You started all this yourself?”
“Yep.”
“You live in a tiny apartment.”
“It’s not that small. And so what?”
“This might sound like a weird question… but do you make much money at it?” It sounded rude, but if I had cash from a business, I thought I’d live somewhere nicer. Maybe that’s why he kept his shop in North Charleston. It wasn’t making much money.
“I like spending my money on better things than where I sleep.”
“Like what?”
“Like nosy girls who ask me too many questions.”
I kicked him.
“I like travelling,” he said.
“Where?”
“Wherever there’s a nice place to surf. Or wherever I’m sent by the Academy when on assignment. It’s up in the air.”
He returned his attention to the phone, talking with Corey about plans in a secret code. I leaned over, keeping my foot on his chair for balance, trying to read what he was typing. After a text, he switched windows and dug through an email box and the trash bin inside it.
“There were thousands piled up in the bin,” he said. “He never cleaned it out.”
Corey’s trash bin was filled with thousands of messages. “You’re going to check all those? For what?”
“I just need to find a way to communicate with Eddie without him getting our location. I want to try to get info on this Alice if he has any. I’m also hoping Eddie maybe sent another email to Corey that we’ve missed. If you’ve already investigated Randall, maybe there’s someone else with a phone that can lead us to the core. Like someone with a live, working phone from this network. Corey’s been trying to find this signal, but there’s thousands of signals and it could take weeks to track down.” He sat back, and planted his hand against my calf, slowly sliding his palm up and down along my skin soothingly. “Are you okay?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. He’d had his life threatened, been beaten, never thought he’d make it out. Suddenly he’d made a daring escape. I’d been wildly trying to save him and then suddenly he was back.
And then he’d kissed me, and I felt completely reckless. If I was going to die, I was going to fight and do whatever and to hell with the consequences. Brandon was beautiful, the protective older brother and he owned his own business. The angry smoldering behind his eyes told me he was going to do whatever it took to make sure we got out of this. I was willing, but I didn’t want to sacrifice him. Knowing that it might be the only way to get Axel and Marc back if we didn’t find this core on our own wasn’t the solution I wanted, and in that moment, there wasn’t anything I could do to change it. I hated that idea. It drove me to want to do something, anything, but I was powerless.
He continued to stare up at me, massaging my leg, waiting me out. He wanted a real answer.
“You’re not going to make me run off to South America while you solve all this yourself, are you?” I asked. Deflecting was better than what I was really thinking.
His face tightened. “I…can’t do this alone. I want to. I don’t want you in danger, but you and I are here right now. We’re so close and letting anyone else in, like the FBI or someone else, that would mean we’d lose time, and we don’t have that luxury. Not with a poison on Marc and Axel. Not when they’ll continue to hunt for my brother even if we disappear. We won’t be safe until we get our team back and we’re locked away.” He bit his lip, his mouth twitching like he wished to say more, but couldn’t.
I was quiet for a long moment, waiting him out.
Finally, he sighed. “If I told Raven and Kevin how bad things are right now, they’d insist we go back. You’re the only one who understands how deep we’re in. You’ll work with me, won’t you? You’ll help stop this?” His eyes shimmered, showing me the depths of despair he was feeling, well beyond what I’d been feeling up until that point. I’d been scared, angry, but sorrow wasn’t among those feelings.
For Brandon, he was already worried we’d lost. If all of this ended badly, he’d consider it his own fault.
It killed me. I wanted to do anything to stop that look. I nodded, promising to go with what he wanted. I spilled what I knew, wanting to resolve it all as quickly as I could. “We need to go see Doyle,” I said. “You remember him? He works for Blake, I think. I was telling Axel we should go… and he was into it before he got kidnapped.” It was a lie, but that was the only other lead I could think of. Maybe if he was convinced that Axel was into it, he’d actually go. “Doyle listens in on phone signals. He might have noticed this underground system.”
Brandon’s intense eyes studied me. “Maybe. Give me a minute. Just in case Doyle doesn’t have anything, maybe I can at least get another name as a lead. And Corey can do some research. We need anything right now.”
He went back to checking messages. I’d let him have his minute, and explore a bit. I needed to do something besides sit around or I was going to pass out somewhere. I got up and went to the other door that had to lead to the rest of the garage.
“Don’t touch anything,” he said as I opened it.
“I’m touching the floor,” I said.
“You can touch the floor.”
The inside of the garage was dark. “I need to touch the light switch.”
“You can touch the light switch. It’s on the right.”
> I flicked on the lights.
The vastness of the garage struck me first. It expanded back further than I originally thought it did. There was a long wall of tools, toolboxes and tables lined up in the back. There were motorcycles in a row on the far side, parked diagonally like the outside of a biker bar. Each bike looked complete and ready to go, parked just far enough apart so he could pull one out. Tall shelves broke up the interior space and blocked off part of my view of one corner, but seemed to hold various parts too big to put on the shelves. There were large wood crates, too, with parts and some looked big enough to hold entire bikes inside.
Then I found the bikes he wanted me not to touch for real. There were a few display cases around the garage, each one holding a shiny bike with a paint job that blew my mind. Flames, ice and snow, beautiful women, dragons. Some details were molded from metal, and then painted.
I looked up.
More bikes were suspended from the ceiling. More 3D designs he was showing off. I cringed underneath them, worried one would fall, but they were so still. An Ace of Spades, a bike featuring Wizard of Oz characters, one had aliens. He was an artist and bikes were the canvas.
There was one bike up on a table in the middle of the shop, unassembled. So he didn’t just design the art, he built the motorcycles from the wheels on up.
I shuffled forward in my flip-flops to one of the display cases to check out the bike in detail. It was designed to look like it was on fire, and I was trying to imagine what it would be like to ride it.
As I leaned in, a light flickered inside the box, and the floor of the display case lit up, and then the bike itself lit up. The LEDs were positioned so the glow of flames looked almost real, flowing back and flickering in a continuous wave.
“You should see how she rides,” Brandon said from behind me, making me turn. He was standing near the door, his hands on a panel against the wall. He released it and then motioned to the fire motorcycle. “I don’t take her out as often as I used to.”
