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He blinked, looking away, instead focusing on a couple of the boats still out on the water, their lights shining bright on the water around them.
“Tell me the truth, Roman. Can we save her?”
Roman didn’t miss a beat with his answer. “Yes. Absolutely we can.” His confidence didn’t sound manufactured. Wyatt allowed himself to believe it with all of his heart. He would have to lean toward the positive because in a situation this bleak, that was the only option that would keep him going.
“Let’s go, then.” Wyatt put an arm through Roman’s, reaching down and locking their hands together. “I want to see if I can track her cell phone, if Leonidas hasn’t thrown it overboard by now. Plus, there’s some other things I want to try, like getting access to Leonidas’ emails. Now that I know the address he was using, it might be easier for me to spoof a virtual system and—well, yeah, you don’t need all the details.”
“I don’t mind the details, not when they come from you. I can hear you talk for hours about whatever you’re passionate about.”
That had an interesting effect on Wyatt, causing a flush in his cheeks and a flutter in his chest. He cleared his throat, looking up into Roman’s eyes and seeing more than enough stars to last him a hundred light-polluted lifetimes.
“Come on,” Roman said, leaning down for a kiss. “It’s going to be a long night.”
And boy was he right about that.
Chapter 21
Roman Ashford
The night dragged on. Roman sat at his desk, going over the plan for Mimic’s rescue. An empty mug with coffee stains around the rim sat next to his computer, another half-full mug lined up right in front of it. Roman lifted his arms and kicked out his legs, stretching out his muscles and releasing a tired yawn. He turned his head, looking at Wyatt, who sat cross-legged on the floor, typing furiously on his laptop. His light brown hair had been made messy by his frequent habit of running his hands through it, while his glasses sat dangerously low on the edge of his nose.
This entire situation may have been as fucked as a duck inside of a burning truck, but Roman was grateful he at least had Wyatt at his side. The freckled-face love of his life, his other half, the man who’d almost gotten away not once but twice.
Let’s not make it a third.
Wyatt pushed his glasses up with a finger as he looked in Roman’s direction. He wore an oversized white T-shirt he had pulled from Roman’s closet and a pair of light blue boxers. Somehow, even with the intense exhaustion that permeated the room, Wyatt still managed to look like a full-course meal worthy of making Roman drool.
“How’s it going?” Wyatt asked him.
Roman shrugged, peeling his eyes away from Wyatt and back to his notebook. He had gone through pages and pages of writing, working out a hundred different ways they could tackle the rescue mission. He wanted to consider as many possibilities as possible, from worst-case scenario to best (and likely most impossible).
There was one set of plans that made him feel most comfortable. “I think I’ve got it. It’s going to be dangerous, but if everything works, then we should have Mimic and the tome back with us by the end of tomorrow. I just want confirmation that they’re being held in the Key West location.”
“I’m actually working on that right now.” Wyatt flipped around his laptop, aiming the screen at Roman. There were a bunch of lines of text that amounted to gibberish for Roman. He looked back to Wyatt’s bright eyes, lit up by the two lamps throwing off golden light into the room. They twinkled almost as much as the city that stretched out behind him from the floor-to-ceiling windows. They were inside Roman’s home office, in his high-rise condo looking over Miami Beach. He’d bought it under a different name after completing one of his biggest jobs ever, so it was untraceable and also very meaningful.
“What am I looking at?”
“A charismatic and big-assed cutie with a fear of spiders and a love of computers.”
Roman chuckled, nodding. The mention of Wyatt’s admittedly large rear made Roman’s cock twitch.
“And what’s this big-assed cutie have to say about the mumbo jumbo on the screen?”
“Ah, that’s what you were talking about,” Wyatt said with a wink. He leaned forward, pointing at the first line, knees on the floor and back slightly arched.
He’s making me hungry.
Roman pushed his focus away from Wyatt’s ass and back onto the matter at hand.
“So this here is a string of text messages that was sent from Leonidas’ phone,” Wyatt explained, sounding quite proud of himself. “I was able to compile this list after I forced my way into the phone provider’s servers. Unfortunately, Leonidas was using an encrypted program that basically burns the messages five minutes after they’ve been sent, so I can’t read what was on them, but I can figure out when and where they were sent from. These were all sent on the same date as the Broad Museum bombings, which was the same time Leonidas grabbed the tome from the museum. They’re all from Leonidas’ phone, and they’re all coming from a Key West area code.
