Wait. Settle down. Remember, he trusted the process. In theory. The higher-ups who were in positions way above his pay grade believed in this new security detail. He had little doubt that his biker was safe.
Butlittledidn’t meannone. The concern he had over anyone’s ability to keep Dev safe, including Dev himself, weighed heavy on his thoughts.
Releasing a sigh, Cash kicked at the loose gravel. Dev wasn’t easy to manage on the best of days. Did Trace know to watch for the cues that Dev would take matters into his own hands?
With a shake of the head, Cash reprimanded himself. He seriously needed to let the uncertainty go and get his ass moving upstairs to unravel this case from the inside out. The mountain of intelligence they’d gathered had to hold the answers. Someone inside the federal government was withholding key bits of information to purposefully swerve the entire operation off course. He had to redefine the narrative to coax the rat out.
He'd suspected that for a while now. After everything he’d learned, or not learned, based on secretly watching the craziness unfold inside the church meetings, those club members didn’t have the wherewithal to steal four hundred million dollars.
The Disciples were a club of nonconformists who somehow found each other to become a larger band of uneducated misfits. None of them, except maybe Dev and Keyes, had it in them to be anything more than a nuisance to society by repeatedly executing annoying petty crimes. Yes, they should all be in prison by now, but that spoke more of a malfunctioning criminal justice system than anything else.
Which was technically a fact Dev had pointed out to him many times over.
Cash secured the latch to the fence post and started inside the building.
With a renewed sense of determination, he walked toward the back door of the building.
His list of possible suspects was dwindling with Keyes now off the list. And Fox needed to be removed too, if for no other reason than he came off as too dumb to pull off such a large theft.
So where did that leave him?
He opened the back door as those thoughts coalesced into a single truth: he was back to square one. He had gotten nowhere new fast.
“Where do you want to start?” Joe’s muffled voice called out from somewhere upstairs. Cash lifted his gaze to the ceiling as if he could see Joe.
With more force than necessary, the door automatically swung shut behind him, barely missing his backside. A new feature Dev had installed last night with Trace’s handyman help… Instantly the Trace-infused jealousy shot back with a vengeance. Trace had said something about the place feeling drafty, so Dev made the change right away, claiming his DOJ tenants purposefully left the back door ajar, pulling all the central heat from the building. As he worked on the back door, he continued to complain about his electric bill skyrocketing since Cash and team had moved in.
Like that was the problem.
The bright sun outside collided with the interior darkness, causing a moment of blindness as his eyes tried to adjust. He continued forward, throwing out his hand to guard against the clothes dryer close by. He hadn’t expected his foot to slip on something left on the floor. Cash grasped for anything to stop his legs from sliding out from under him.
With divine help from above, he caught himself on the dryer, where he crumpled to the ground.
Sharp pain rippled across his joints and muscles. He only then made out the reason he was currently flat on his ass…a silky cleaning cloth lay at his foot.
Since every person in the building resided in various stages of unkemptness, he had no real idea who would leave something so slippery on the entry floor. But in his heart, he knew the culprit had to be Trace.
Now that the new bodyguard was a permanent fixture inside the house, Cash recognized the makings of a Dev-level mess maker. They were about eighteen hours into Trace being inside the building, and very little of his belongings had actually made it into his designated downstairs apartment. Trace’s oversize duffle bag was dropped in the front entry where Cash had relocated his workout equipment to give Trace living space. He had watched Trace repeatedly pillage through the bag but never move it. As far as Cash knew, most of its contents were still lying in the foyer.
Trace also had two carry-on size suitcases delivered. One held his surveillance electronics. That case was slowly unpacked in the hallway. Dev had tossed that suitcase further down the hall in anattemptto get it out of the walkway. The other case must have managed its way inside the apartment or at least hidden enough to be unseen.
One out of three weren’t the best odds to the future of the building if they didn’t wrap this operation up quickly.
Honestly, the mess hadn’t bothered Cash near as much as how well the handsome Trace with an easy grin fit inside Dev’s world. It took a couple more hours to admit he was jealous. It didn’t help that Dev acted as if he’d met his new best friend.
Dev ate up Trace’s awe-filled admiration. His mister had even made a public proclamation at the top of the staircase, declaring everyone else in the house as ingrates who should learn from Trace how best to deal with the infamous Devilman.
It came with a hearty laugh afterward, signaling Dev meant it as a joke, but a sour taste lingered in Cash’s mouth. And that was only the beginning. It was ridiculous how well the two men got along.
He had begrudgingly gone to his bedroom to dissect the case notes. He pouted but no one seemed to notice.
Joe used their one-on-one time to talk endlessly about the internal Dallas DEA gossip circulating around the water cooler. Shanna and her handler, Emma, who had also been her girlfriend for about the last six months—the best their coworkers could tell—were now officially on the outs. The news came as a surprise. Shanna never showed any outward sadness or emotion for the breakup.
Maybe he got it wrong. He retained very little of what chatty Joe said. He’d merely responded with a grunt here or nod there. He gave just enough to keep Joe doing the heavy lifting in their conversation, hopefully not feeling ignored. All the while, he mentally fixated on Dev being inside his apartment with Trace, the door closed, not a peep from either of them for hours.
The idea of putting Trace in front of a firing squad for disrupting the balance of the house was probably overkill, just like his jealousy.
Just like this cloth that had brought him to his knees…or, actually, his ass.
