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Their thumbprints never changed, which meant he’d been locked out. What the fuck was Raiden playing at? They all needed access to Atlas, even in its limited state.
He went in search of Raiden in the rabbit warren of storage rooms and corridors that stretched behind the coffee shop frontage, but nobody was home. The temporary base was deserted.
Mikalis wasn’t here either, although that wasn’t a surprise. He’d be out tracking Saint.
Zaine dialed Raiden’s phone. It rang until the voicemail kicked in. “Hey man, what’s going on with Atlas? I need to get in and it’s not reading my print. Call me back.” He hung up and dialed Storm.
“Yeah?” Storm’s voice reverberated through the phone.
“Do you know why my print is locked out of Atlas?”
“Not a clue. Ask Raiden.”
“Oh wait, why didn’t I think of that,” he drawled. “Raiden’s not here and he’s not answering his phone.”
“Where is he?”
Storm’s tone had changed, turned flat, as though he was trying to hide the fact Raiden being AWOL concerned him. “How should I know? What’s going on?”
“Stay there. I’m coming to you.”
“Storm, what’s going on—”
Storm hung up.
“Assholes, all of them.” Zaine had wandered back to the ops room and the working laptop. It was still at eighty-five percent, so whatever it was doing, it was doing it slowly. Why would Raiden leave the laptop open and working if he wasn’t here to monitor it?
Zaine straightened, huffed, and did not like the unsettling sense of unease trying to ruin his already pretty damn sour mood.
The ops room was quiet, apart from the laptop’s humming fan.
There was no reason to believe any of this was out of the ordinary. The Brotherhood was still reeling after Octavius had fucked them over.
But as Zaine stood in the quiet, the unnerving sense of dread got worse. Something was wrong. Something big. He could feel it. He’d been feeling it for a while now, since before Octavius had locked him in a kiln. Long before that.
He dialed Eric again. “Hey, can you get here quicker. Something’s up—”
“Already am.” Eric said, then shoved open the door and grinned. “Hey, you look good.”
“I always look good.” Zaine wrapped his arms around Eric and kissed him hard. The dread eased a little, probably from relief at having Eric close. It never ceased to amaze him that this man stuck with him.
Eric molded close, eagerly responding, his mouth hot and greedy, until he gasped away with a laugh. “I missed you too. Must have been bad, huh? What happened? You didn’t get Octavius?”
“No, and he is working with Saint, but some things he said… Saint is powerful, I learned that much. The two of them together are bigger than me, maybe bigger than all of us. We need Mikalis on it, but he’s distracted, and then there’s this.” He freed Eric from his arms and showed him the laptop.
“What am I looking at?” Eric asked. “Is that Atlas?”
“What’s left of it. Raiden left it open and running, and now he’s disappeared.”
“Disappeared like…?”
“He’s not answering his phone.”
Eric frowned. “Maybe he just went out?”
“Maybe, but Raiden has been working to get it all back online. It was Octavius’s creation, and the prick made it so nobody else had administration access. It’s been slow going. We all thought Raiden had it in hand, right?”
“All right, so why are you looking at me as though I’m missing something big here?”
