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“About time you two got your act together,” Leo muttered, then flicked water at both of us for good measure.
“Leo…” I warned, but next to me, Arlo was chuckling, and God, I loved it when he chuckled because it would grow, and then, he’d be shaking with laughter, and that, waseverything.
“I’ll leave you to it.” Arlo made his excuses, standing and stretching tall, his back to Leo, his morning wood outlined in his thin sweats. Brothers were just mobile cock blockers. Assholes.
“You don’t have to leave,” I said, this side of desperate.
“I’m just getting a shower,” he told me, then bent and dropped a brief kiss on my lips before sidling past my brothers, his hand over his groin. If my brothers said anything, or sniggered, or… I’d kill them. “Then, I’ll do breakfast,” Arlo threw back at me as he left the room.
“Make it for four!” Leo called after him and indicated me sitting there in sweats probably looking like shit. “You need a shower,” he said with a wrinkled nose. “You’d best go help Arlo. You have thirty minutes. Go!”
He was teasing, and I gave him the middle finger, but I kissed Charlie good morning on the top of his head, then hustled up to the bathroom as fast as I could.
I had thirty minutes and didn’t waste a second, following the sound of water, darting into the guest room, and locking the bathroom door behind me. Arlo, humming under the spray, wasn’t expecting me, but he didn’t even start when I stepped inside.
He didn’t say a word when I went to my knees; and when it was me—pressed against the wall of the shower, him holding me as if I weighed nothing at all, getting himself off, kissing me deep and long—all he said was one possessive growly word.
“Mine.”
We madeit downstairs a few minutes over our thirty, ignoring the smirks. I settled at the small table in the kitchen watching Arlo make breakfast and bouncing Charlie on my knee.
“Are you awake yet?” Leo asked, and took the chair kitty-corner, nursing a coffee.
“Why, what’s wrong.”
“I got this,” Reid said, and placed a piece of paper in front of me, a simple email with only a few lines.
I read the words, then read them again out loud, as if that would make any difference to my understanding. “Zach’s okay. Kai.” Who wrote a stupid-ass message like that, as if it meant something? I glanced up at Reid. “Is Kai the other man who Arlo talked to on the porch? How did you get this? You really think this is for me? Is this about my Zach?”
Reid pulled over a stool and perched on it, looking ridiculous all the way up there compared to the level of our chairs. From his lofty position, he made it worse by crossing his arms over his chest. “Okay, so listen to this weird shit. I checked my email after shift ended, midnight or so, and there it was in the secure inbox—the one the team uses for internal mailing, confidential stuff, encrypted, all that.”
“And you think it’s about Zach?”
“Well, it’s pretty fu—fudging cryptic, but your name in the subject line makes me think it is.” Reid shrugged as if to indicate how puzzling it was. “There’s no trace back to who sent it, and I had my friend in cybercrimes team check deeper than I could, which didn’t go down well given I called her at two in the morning. Still, she looked, and we owe her one.”
“Okay, and?”
“She suggested it might have come through the dark web.”
My stomach churned, and I stared at the tiny Christmas tree on the table that kept me focused for a moment. Wasn’t the dark web corrupt? The kind of space where bad people did dreadful things, or arranged horrific things, or…
I couldn’t say what I thought, because suggesting Zach was indeed a bad guy meant all the feelings bottled inside me were wrong. I felt a fierce tug of protection toward Charlie, and for the first time, a sliver of doubt pierced my conviction that Zach was a good guy doing heroic deeds out there.
“We don’t know if it’s him for sure,” Leo said. “But if this is the guy who was with Zach, he hasn’t given anything away, no date, or place, or time, or even person. What if he’s not a dark web hacker, but a white hat hacker?”
I glanced up at Leo with hope—that sounded like a good thing. “He could be.”
“If he’s anything like you, Zach couldn’t do a bad thing to save his life,” Reid murmured and reached out a hand, same as he used to when we were kids. I laid mine on top, then Leo, and it was enough to know I had them in my corner.
And maybe out there, Zach was thinking of Charlie and me, and everything would work out.
“Mel said she’d do some more digging for us,” Reid murmured.
“Mel is your cybercrime contact?”
He nodded. “Yeah. She’ll let us know.”
“Are you okay?” Leo asked.
