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CHAPTER10
Zaine
The Manhattan coffeeshop called Dream Beans was the least likely place to house an immortal band of brothers, which made it the perfect front. Zaine nodded at the servers busy meeting the caffeine needs of New Yorkers, and headed through the back. He strode down the narrow hallway, into the storage room, then pulled the rack from the wall and pushed through a heavy security door into Atlas’s new base of operations, which right now wasn’t much more than Raiden and a laptop.
“Hey,” he greeted. Raiden nodded, then poked his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.
Storm had arrived before Zaine and leaned against an empty bookshelf at the back of the small room, his dark mood and skin merging with the shadows. Zaine greeted him with a jerk of his chin. No Mikalis, but he hadn’t been seen since London. Mikalis was on US soil though and hunting Saint, he knew that much.
“What have you got?” Storm grumbled from the gloom. He wasn’t happy. None of them were. Octavius had proven difficult to pin down, hence they’d called Zaine back to the east coast. He preferred it here, since it was closer to Eric and his work at the NYPD.
“Yeah, you’re not going to like it. I got a call,” Zaine said. “From Octavius. He said—”
“So did I,” Raiden interrupted, flicking his eyes up from his screen. “He ranted about some conspiracy against him.” It sounded as though Octavius had shared his theories with Raiden too. He truly must have been desperate. “Atlas is still rebooting but I’ve managed to get into the cell towers. The call came from somewhere in the Ozarks.”
“Can you narrow it down?” Storm asked.
Raiden tapped his keyboard and turned his laptop so Storm could see. He moved from the back of the room and peered over Raiden’s shoulder at the map. “That’s thirty square miles.”
Zaine took a look around Storm’s bulk and saw a whole lot of forest with no large settlements.
“Yes, but…” Raiden pushed his glasses up his nose again and tapped a few keys. “Two days ago, the local police received reports of an explosionhere.” On the screen, he zoomed in on an aerial view of a building beside a lake.
“Zoom out,” Zaine suggested, and watched the trees on-screen shrink. “More.” The area made the perfect place to hide, but the explosion and a call from Octavius in that same location was no coincidence. Fucking Octavius. The little bitch was too smart for his own good. But that explosion was a mistake. He’d need to find somewhere to regroup. “There.” Zaine tapped the screen over a tiny group of buildings. “What’s that?”
Raiden tapped away and brought up pictures of a shabby single-level building. “Motel.”
We’ve got you.“We need to get up there right now.”
“I’ll spin-up the chopper,” Storm said, and made for the door. “You both are with me.”
“My skills are better focused here,” Raiden said. “I’m trying to get Atlas back online. It’s proving difficult without Octavius’s input. With Saint still loose, we need Atlas’s eyes more than ever.”
Storm nodded. “Then it’s just you and I, Z. Ready up. We leave in ten.”
Zaine waited a few beats after Storm had left, then turned back to Raiden. “How long until Atlas is online?”
“A few more days. I had to change some of the programming, go in a back door to work around some of Octavius’s quirks. You know how he was. He had his own way of doing things. Some might say he was careless. To be honest, I fear he’s been failing at his duties for a long time, and I… Well, I didn’t want to say anything. I thought maybe he was just… being him, like he is sometimes.”
“Yeah. Standoffish and a dick.” Zaine folded his arms. During the call, Zaine had offloaded a rant at Octavius and would have said a whole lot more if the prick hadn’t pissed him off within three seconds. “You and him were close?”
“Huh?” Raiden looked up. “Close? I guess. We worked together on the tech, mostly. I mean, are any of us close?”
The call had been hardly worth mentioning to Storm, but the message Octavius had left afterward hadn’t sounded like Octavius at all. He’d seemed almost unhinged, even scared. And he’d said some things about Raiden. It had become clear he was getting desperate, and if he was coming undone, now was the perfect time to catch him. Before he fell too far down the nyk rabbit hole.
“What did he say to you?” Raiden asked, tapping away on his laptop and not looking up.
“Begged me to listen to his crap, that was all.”
“Yes, I had the same.”
Zaine considered having the team listen to it so they knew how far Octavius had fallen, but even after everything Octavius had done, something about that message felt off. It hadn’t revealed any new information, only that Octavius blamed Raiden. Clearly, he’d been clutching at straws and pointing fingers because that was all he had left. Besides, they had the CCTV footage of him delivering the virus into Atlas. And he’d been in charge of comms during the Sebastien fuckup. There were other niggly things about Octavius. He’d always been distant, and when he wasn’t distant, he was a vicious, stuck-up prick who hated Eric, claimed they were all weak for loving someone other than themselves, and added nothing to the Brotherhood—except Atlas, which he’d almost destroyed.
Zaine wasn’t even sure why Octavius was in the Brotherhood. Mikalis didn’t even seem to like him. Although, like Raiden said, none of them liked each other. They were a brotherhood, forced together, not a fellowship. Brothers fought.
It is everything,Octavius had said in the message, as though he had cared.
Zaine glanced at Raiden busy rebooting Atlas. They had been close; perhaps Raiden should have seen something. Or perhaps there was more between them than they’d let on? Some kind ofrelationship? Raiden had kept himself distanced from the others too, always in the labs, always focused on the forensics. Could there be more to all of this? “Is there anything more we should know about you and Octavius?”
