Chapter 21 Dex #2
Waylon shrugged. “You said it, not me.”
I shook my head, giving Lucy a good scratch. “You’ve got my back, my sweet girl.”
She leaned into me for more affection.
As I straightened, it was to find Waylon watching me.
Concern swirled in his brown eyes. He might not show it in typical ways, but he was always there for us.
When we came to live here, traumatized and scared out of our minds, he’d moved at our speed.
And he’d done everything he could to build a sense of safety. It had worked for most of us.
It wasn’t that we didn’t carry scars. We did. But the injuries had healed.
For everyone except Orion.
“Come on in. I got chicken tacos in the slow cooker,” Waylon said, giving me a slap on the back.
“How many salsas and hot sauces?” I asked, knowing that, for him, the tacos were just a facilitator for the “good stuff.”
He opened the screen door and held it for me. “Didn’t have proper time to prepare. Only a dozen.”
I chuckled, heading inside just as the clocks started going off. I passed one on the wall that shot a Bigfoot out like a cuckoo bird. The jerky motion nearly had me stumbling back a step. “Your clocks are violent, just like your damn goat,” I muttered.
Waylon only laughed.
“Took you long enough,” Mav called from the kitchen, where he was dishing up a plate of tacos.
“Some of us prefer not to give the law enforcement in this town another reason to hate us,” I shot back.
Kol glowered at me from his spot at the kitchen table. “You’re the only one flaring that up.”
If it hadn’t already been clear, I now knew I had a battle on my hands. “Sorry. I thought we were trying to help people. My mistake.”
“Hold it,” Waylon said. “Dex, get food. Kol, hold off on the full assault until Orion is here. Don’t want to have to listen to this shit twice.”
Wylder pinched the bridge of his nose in true eldest-brother fatigue. “Me either.”
I snagged a plate, filling it with tortillas, chicken that had been slow-cooking for hours, and some lettuce, beans, and sour cream.
“Sour cream’s for suckers who can’t handle the heat,” Mav jibed as he took a seat.
I just scowled at him as I pulled out a chair, catching sight of Skylar playing in the yard with Tink. The mini-Highland cow wore a feather boa and a tiara while Skylar wore a tutu with ski goggles and had a Nerf gun strapped to her back.
“Not everyone needs a meal to be a gut-rotting competition.”
“Told you DC turned him soft,” Waylon grumbled.
Wylder chuckled. “You know there’s only one way to solve this.”
I groaned, my stomach already regretting what I was about to do. “Hit me.”
“Tier three, two, or one?” Wylder’s hand hovered over the array of hot sauces in the center of the table like he was Vanna White.
Mav let out a hoot. “He’s gonna be feeling this one, ladies and gents.”
“I’d do anything to get you all to shut up,” I shot back.
Wylder’s fingers slowed over the hot sauces on one end of the grouping. “He’s never gone above a level one in tier one. What will he attempt today?”
I met my brother’s gaze. “Give me a level two.”
A grin spread across Wylder’s face. “Might I suggest Hellfire hot sauce, made with reaper peppers and black garlic?”
My stomach churned, but I held out my plate, not losing Wylder’s gaze.
He just grinned wider, uncapped the bottle, and shook some out over one of my tacos. Mav’s hand shot out, tipping Wylder’s elbow and spilling more hot sauce over my food.
I glared at him.
He only shrugged. “Just gotta make sure you get the true flavor.”
“I’m gonna put hot sauce in your mouthwash, you asswipe.”
Maverick barked out a laugh. “You could try. Now, eat up, brother bear.”
I glared down at the tacos but wrapped up the one with the Hellfire on it. Jesus. What kind of a name was that?
The second I bit down, I knew. The fires of hell erupted in my mouth, making my eyes flare wide and then instantly fill with tears.
“Fuck, he’s already crying,” Mav said, laughter in his voice.
Wylder winced, shaking his head. “Should’ve eased back in.”
But I wasn’t about to give in. I kept right on chewing, swallowing, then taking another bite. I ate the taco in three. But the fire did not subside. It got worse, in fact. “What the hell was that?” I croaked.
Waylon leaned back in his chair, his hand resting on his overalls-clad chest. “That’s my personal favorite. Though they’ve got one with ghost peppers that gets you good.”
“What do you think, Dex?” Wylder asked. “Want to go for ghost peppers next?”
I flipped him off, taking a bite of my hot sauce–free taco heaped with sour cream. The dairy helped take the edge off the worst of the burn. “You’re all trying to kill me.”
The screen door at the front of the house slammed, and I took a swig of the beer Wylder handed me from the fridge. Good God, I was out of hot sauce shape.
Orion’s broad frame filled the entryway to the kitchen, and if I’d thought Kol’s welcome had been cold, it had nothing on Orion’s. He glared at me for a long beat.
“A little dramatic, even for you, Rion,” Mav chided.
That glare moved to Maverick, who remained unaffected.
“Get some grub,” Waylon ordered in a way that didn’t put too much weight behind it.
Our great-uncle was the only person Orion listened to, and even then, it wasn’t all the time. But now, Orion moved to plate a few tacos.
“Dex just downed some Hellfire,” Wylder said, lifting his root beer. “You want to challenge for the night’s supremacy?”
Orion jerked back his chair and simply shook his head in a rough decline.
“All right, Kol,” Waylon began. “You called this family meeting.”
Kol straightened in his chair. “I called it because Dex is putting us all at risk.”
I stiffened, the heat of the hot sauce and my anger swirling together. “You’re not involved. You made that clear. And that’s fine, but you don’t get to control what I do.”
That was always Kol’s way. He thought that if he was in charge of everything we all did or didn’t do, he could make us safe. But his way wasn’t always our way. And he didn’t get that.
Kol’s jaw clenched, the muscle along it rippling. “I’m trying to keep you from being an idiot. This already got dropped on our doorstep. The sheriff’s department flooded Wylder’s bar today.”
“Yeah, because some sick fuck is tormenting Brae. Called her from her missing friend’s phone or a cloned number and did some heavy-breathing shit. That’s why the cops were there,” I bit out.
Waylon muttered a curse. “They track it?”
I let out a breath, trying to calm my anger. “It was off before they could.”
Wylder took a swig of his root beer. “Means they know what they’re doing to a certain degree.”
“Maybe.” I hedged. “Anyone who’s seen a thriller movie probably knows that.”
“But I assume you tried to turn the phone back on remotely,” Maverick added.
He knew me and my moves too well.
“I couldn’t, which means the SIM card or battery’s out of the device.”
Wylder scrubbed a hand over his face. “A lot of trouble just to mess with someone.”
It was. And that had my gut churning. Because someone who got pleasure from causing that sort of pain was not the kind of person I wanted aware of Brae’s existence.
“I’m sorry for her,” Kol said, his voice dropping. “I’ll help you put in a security system at her house. Talk to Roger about making sure she’s on the drive-by list. But we can’t get involved. It’s too risky.”
“Like I said, you don’t have to. But I make my own choices,” I clipped. “And Mav and Wylder want to help, too.”
Kol’s gaze jumped around the table. “Seriously?”
Wylder winced. “She’s a good person. Been through hell. And she doesn’t have anyone.”
“You don’t know her,” Kol shot back. “This could all be a manipulation.”
My eyes narrowed on Kol. “You can’t fake a missing person case like this. You know that.”
Orion’s hands lifted, finally giving in to the signing that was his last resort. “We don’t trust anyone outside the family.”
“You don’t,” I shot back, being harsher with him than I had been since we were kids. “I don’t want to live like that anymore.”
And for the first time, I realized that was true. I was so tired of looking at everyone with suspicion. It made life so damn depressing. And it kept us from helping people who needed it. People like Brae.
Waylon cleared his throat. “We can help without letting her know about the side project.”
The side project being the Hourglass Network: our volunteer missing persons assistance. The website no one knew was attached to us. The network we’d put together in the shadows because time was slipping through fingers for so many.
“Doesn’t matter,” Kol gritted out. “It still gets us on Miller’s radar. We need that like a hole in the head. He’s made life hard enough for us just because of who our father was.”
Orion bristled at the word father, his fingers fisting so tightly I worried he’d dislocate a knuckle. The muscles in his forearms rippled as tension radiated through him in waves.
Miller had made his opinion of the Archer brothers crystal-clear a number of times, but it was the touchiest for Kol.
When he applied to be a Forest Service investigator, Miller had made sure his superiors knew every twisted detail about what we’d come from.
Thankfully, Kol’s bosses hadn’t been supreme assholes and still gave him the job. But it exposed Kol in a way he hated.
“She doesn’t have anyone,” I said quietly. “Imagine if we didn’t have each other to get through what we have.”
Sympathy swept across Wylder’s face, and he gripped his root beer tighter.
“Her parents kicked her out when she wouldn’t put her baby up for adoption.
The kid’s dad isn’t in the picture. Nova was the only person who was there for her, and then she disappeared almost in front of Brae’s eyes.
That should turn someone dark. Make them look at every single person with suspicion. ”
“But it didn’t,” Mav surmised. “I could see that much. She’s like sunshine.”
No, it was more than that. She wasn’t just the sun. She was the sunrise. Even though darkness had claimed her for a time, she still rose. Every damn day.
My fingers flexed and clenched. “She does everything humanly possible to give her son an amazing life. She trained a dog to help search for lost people. She uprooted her whole life to look for her missing friend. She’s fighting with everything she’s got but doing it alone. I’m not going to let her.”
“Me either,” Wylder said quietly. “I get why you don’t want to be involved, Kol. But I don’t have the same risks as you.”
A muscle fluttered in Kol’s cheek. “I’m all Skylar has.”
I knew he felt that weight like a hundred-ton stone on his shoulders.
He had no room for missteps or fuckups. He felt like he was already failing as a father and didn’t have room for any other mistakes.
It was a toxic mix of him blaming himself for not being there when everything went down with our dad and the bullshit Sky’s mom had filled his head with.
His fingers gripped the edge of the table. “But Brae shouldn’t have to do this alone. No one should.”
Everyone was quiet for a long moment, but I could feel Orion stewing from across the table, his anger and annoyance mounting. I did my best to ignore it. Instead, I focused on the concession from Kol. It was as much of a win as I figured we’d get from him.
“We keep it aboveboard,” Wylder said.
“You mean we keep him on the boring shit,” Mav cut in.
I jabbed him with an elbow. “If there are risks on this one, I’ll take them. I’m the one who brought her in. I carry the liabilities.”
Because there were always risks. My less-than-legal walks through firewalls and security software to start.
But there was more on the rare occasion we were on the scene.
Potential trespassing, breaking and entering, theft.
All of them were sometimes necessary to figure out what had happened to someone who’d vanished.
Orion shoved back his chair and stood, glowering at me. His hands lifted in quick, staccato beats. “I hope you aren’t putting your entire family at risk because you want to fuck her.”
And with that, he stormed out, the screen door slamming in his wake.
My fingers fisted, and I was glad my brother had left. Because if he hadn’t, I likely would’ve decked him.
Waylon cleared his throat. “I want to meet her. Bring her for dinner. Think she likes three-pepper chili?”
Jesus.
I hoped Brae was as strong as I thought because she’d need it to get through a dinner with my family.