“Thinking for a second that I would betray your trust. Just wait till we’re alone, hellcat.”
“Add it to my tab, barman.”
Rhys looked tempted to drag me to a room—or just a dark corner—right then and there. Unfortunately, there was no time.
Nox returned to swoop up his daughter before I got a turn to hold her and walked away again.
“Where’s he going?” I asked.
Judge hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Gus doesn’t like to hear the specifics of what Nox does. They call it the Gus-Protocol. With everything happening, though, no one is leaving their women alone. They’re camped out in a bedroom with a shit-ton of face masks, snacks, and whatever else O had Texas get earlier. They’re rebranding the lockdown into girls’ night.”
I had other things I needed to do, but that didn’t stop me from making a mental note to request a girls’ night invite at a less dangerous time.
Nox came back empty-handed and declared, “Field trip, kids.”
The vibes were… tense.
That was probably the biggest understatement ever said in the history of understatements, but still.
Standing in a mostly empty warehouse in the middle of nowhere, I looked around the motley crew that’d been assembled.
A bar owner. A motorcycle club president and his tech guy—the rest of the club was stationed at Rye or with the significant others. A… whatever Nox was. An undercover detective.
And an FBI agent, there in secret.
I was guessing the warehouse belonged to Nox since he’d set the location, but I got the distinct impression I couldn’t prove that guess no matter how hard I dug. Not that I was going on that particular archeological adventure. Like Mayhem, I was living in ignorance about Nox, too.
Contrary to my brother’s insinuation the night before, I wasn’t blindly following the rules like I had as a kid. Not when my gut said it wasn’t the right thing to do.
Surprisingly, neither was my brother himself. As the oldest sibling at forty-four, Grayson had always been an adult to me. Literally since he’d been a legal adult when I was born. Not just that, he was the typical oldest child. Too serious. Shouldering too much. Too annoyingly bossy.
Joining the FBI hadn’t softened him, but it had given him the same ability to see the shades of gray between the black and white that I had.
Hence why he was meeting us in the warehouse from every horror movie to share what he could.
Glitch had brought a whole smartboard to the meeting, which was cool and more organized than printouts and a tangle of yarn. There was a small timeline of loose events, some notes about what Nash had been into when he was alive and wasting space, and some other random occurrences that might’ve fit in somewhere.
Once we had the gist laid out—including the details of the drive-by that no one in my family was aware of, though it was unlikely to remain that way now that Grayson knew—it was my brother’s turn to share.
“The Irish mob is making moves,” he said. “Big ones. Crime families have been dying off all over, and up until recently, they were following that trend. Losing territory, members, and funding. No support. No fear. No one needs them for gambling when people can bet on everything right on their phone. It took too many bad movies, but people finally learned not to go to them for loans they’ll never get out from under. We suspect they’re still trafficking women, but we haven’t been able to pin anything on them because they’re careful.”
“That doesn’t sound like them,” Nox put in. “They’ve always been crazy fookers.”
“Not anymore. They’re making aggressive moves, but they’re doing it quietly.”
“Quietsure as shit doesn’t sound like them.”
“If they’re being so cautious, how did you get involved?” I asked.
“Huge shipments of 3D printer filament,” Grayson said.
Rhys’s mouth curved down. “You’re tracking craft supplies?”
“People print ghost guns,” I explained. There’d been a surge of them hitting the streets. The basic kind were bad enough, but like everything in tech, abilities evolved—for the good and the very,verybad. “Modified untraceable weapons that can be melted down to a lump of burning plastic have been making our jobs pretty damn difficult.”
My brother nodded. “Bingo. Agents a couple years ago thought they had the Padric patriarch on RICO charges, but they couldn’t get anything to stick. Now, we can’t even get eyes on him.”
“And you won’t,” Nox said. “The whole family was wiped.”
