AllFreeNovel
Share Us
LAETH
I stompedinto Elite Security’s offices with that haze of red still coating my vision and my blood so hot it was singeing my veins.
“Morning, Laeth,” Willow greeted.
In the mood I was currently in, I wanted to just storm past without acknowledging her and slam the door to my office so no one else would fuck with me for the rest of the day. But Willow was too damn sweet. She didn’t have a mean bone in her body. It didn’t matter how shitty of a mood the guys and I were in, we always made sure to treat our receptionist with the respect she deserved. Not only because of her kind heart, but because we wouldn’t be able to function without her. She’d taken time off a handful of times since starting here, and every time she did, it was pure luck the walls didn’t fall down around us.
If we didn’t think her man would come in with a goddamn torque wrench and beat us all to death, we’d chain her to the desk so she could never leave us.
I jerked my chin in acknowledgement, offering a grumbled, “Morning,” as I stomped down the hall to the left of the reception area. The hall to the right housed our assistant, Lark’soffice as well as the breakroom and another smaller conference area.
I wanted to shut myself in my office and close the rest of the world out. That was where I was the most comfortable, where I felt at peace, surrounded by computers. I’d always had a gift when it came to tech. When I was a kid, I’d taught myself how to write code, then, as I got older, hacking had become my favorite pastime. When I joined up, the Army taught me a bunch of other skills, but when Gabe, Jensen, and I started working ops, I got to hone my computer skills even more.
A few years back, a guy named Jase hired us to do some digging into his family while keeping an eye on his woman. When Poppy was kidnapped, a crew from Virginia, a firm by the name of Alpha Omega, came in to work with us to help get her back. Their tech guy, Xander Caine, taught me even more. Now there wasn’t a system I couldn’t hack. You couldn’t bury anything so deep I couldn’t get to it eventually.
With computers, I was in control. They made sense to me. There were still times when I needed to get out in the field to scratch that itch the military had instilled in me, but sitting behind these monitors was a rush of a different kind.
Research was second nature. Digging into people’s lives when a case required it was more dramatic than a soap opera at times. From this chair, I could find out all I needed to know about the people who’d taken Deva in, claiming it had been out of the goodness of their hearts, then spent the rest of her life abusing her.
And once I had everything I needed, I could dismantle their entire world with a few simple keystrokes. Which was exactly what I intended to do.
But first, there were a few things I needed to take care of before I could settle my mind on my work.
There were three offices and a conference room down this hallway. Mine was the first and biggest, due to needing an entire wall of computer monitors to do my work. Because of the confidential nature of what I did, there were no windows facing into the hall or outside, but I didn’t mind the cave-like feel.
Jensen’s office was at the very end, his space totally different from mine. The front facing wall was all glass, giving him a perfect view down the hall while the three back walls were all exposed brick, the ceiling opened to show the ductwork, beams, and pipes of the old building. This place used to be the operation for bootleggers back during prohibition, and he wanted his space to be a nod to that time.
But my destination was Gage’s office that sat in the very middle. His door was open, his desk a total mess of paperwork and files and days-old coffee cups that needed to be trashed. It was complete chaos, no sense of organization anywhere, and every time I stepped inside, my eyelid started to twitch. I didn’t have the first goddamn clue how the man could work like that.
He looked up from the paperwork he was studying as I crossed the threshold. The corner of his mouth trembled with a suppressed grin. “Mornin’, brother. How was your night?”
I had to stuff my hands into the pockets of my jeans to keep from launching myself across Gage’s desk to strangle the life out of him. “I think you know, jackass.”
He rocked back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. “You seem upset.”
“Damn straight I’m upset.”
“What’s going on?” Jensen asked from behind me, coming down the hall with a cup of coffee in one hand and a muffin in the other.
I was too busy laying into Gage to answer him. “She was drunk and vulnerable, and instead of looking out for her, you sat there taking fucking pictures.”
Jensen had pushed his way into the office and sat down in one of the chairs in front of Gage’s mess of a desk. He’d just taken a bite of his muffin when I let that statement drop and whipped around to face the asshole in front of him. “What the hell is he talking about?” he asked, spitting muffin crumbs everywhere.
The carefree façade he’d been wearing a second ago fell away as he shot up straight in his chair. “I’d be careful about what you’re suggesting if I were you,” he warned on a growl. “Not once the whole fucking night was she in any danger, and if she had been, I would have been the first one to have her back, and you damn well know it.”
The air in the room sparked and crackled with the anger coming off both of us, and Jensen quickly stood, sensing something was about to go down, and pitted himself in the middle. “All right, now. Let’s just take a breath and calm down before someone says or does something that can’t be taken back.”
Gage’s nostrils flared on an inhale as he worked to keep himself in check, and I took a few deep breaths as I counted down from ten, trying to find my calm.
When he realized we weren’t about to rip each other apart in the middle of the office, he sagged on a breath of relief. “Okay. Does someone want to fill me in on what the hell is going on?” he asked before taking a massive bite out of his muffin.
“Well, Laeth here has his panties in a bunch because his nanny was at Bad Alibi last night in a lip-lock with Holton Clarke.”
“Which you were all too happy to snap pictures of so you could text them to me in the middle of the goddamn night.”
Jensen’s eyes bugged out as he choked on the bite he’d just taken. He coughed, nearly hacking up a lung as I glared at Gage,trying to melt the skin off his face with my mind. “Deva did that?” He blinked. “Wow. I didn’t know she had that in her.”
“She wouldn’t have kissed him if she hadn’t been drunk.” The words sounded defensive and pouty.
