Chapter 24
“We’re going to need a bigger bed in there.”
Fingers chilling around a beer bottle, Kit nestled into the corner of the couch. He was trying not to be nervous.
The couch was from James’s living room. Darius’s TV and TV-cupboard-thing sat across from him. The rug was from James’s house, and the armchair was from Darius’s apartment.
Most of Holden’s belongings were still in boxes, waiting on the second floor, but his shoes slumped next to Kit’s in the foyer. Kit just had to turn his head to see them.
Twenty-four hours. The house was already filling with the jumbled evidence of their lives. Kit had spent most of the day hiding from movers, while Darius directed them. James had gone into the office to do CEO things, and Holden had class.
Holden was allowed to drive unsupervised now. That wasn’t an expression of trust. Kit was pretty sure James just wanted to give Holden more rope to hang himself with. His sensible little sedan was parked next to one of James’s sports cars in the driveway.
Now, everyone was home, which was a weird thing to think. Weird in a good way. Darius and James had finished ‘helping’ each other set up the TV. Now they were in the kitchen arguing comfortably about something else. As for Holden…
A familiar blurry figure reflected on the TV screen. Deliberate footsteps gave warning before Holden swooped to kiss the top of Kit’s head. “What are you brooding about, darling?”
“I’m not brooding.” Kit stretched a rainbow-socked foot to poke Holden’s thigh as he circled around. “I’m just thinking, we should pick bedrooms soon. Otherwise, we’ll never organize the furniture.”
There was plenty of space on the couch, but Holden settled right next to Kit. That wasn’t good enough either, apparently, because he lifted Kit’s leg by the knee and hooked it over his own.
“You get the master bedroom,” Holden said. “I’ll get the next closest room. I don’t care where James and Darius sleep. I’d suggest the basement, but the wine cellar is pretty cool. They shouldn’t get it to themselves.”
“Good points.” Kit leaned forward, anticipating Holden’s arm stretching behind him. Cuddling back was so strangely comfortable. Just like settling into this house. “I was thinking, maybe I pick a different room just for me, and the master bedroom is for sharing?”
He didn’t want to claim the biggest room for himself, even though his boyfriends would let him. This was the point of moving in together: to centralize their clinging spiderweb of a relationship.
“I like how you think.” Holden jiggled his leg a bit under Kit’s. “We’re going to need a bigger bed in there.”
A low, pleasant chime interrupted.
“I’ll get the door,” Kit said, extricating himself from Holden’s grasp.
James called from the kitchen, “Remember to check the camera!”
“Don’t worry,” Kit called back. Untouched beer in hand, he headed for the front door.
A newly installed screen hung beside it, six by six inches. Kit tapped a hidden button twice, and the screen brightened into a clear image of Bishop’s face. Tugging the touchscreen to zoom out revealed that Bishop was alone.
They hadn’t decided on bedrooms yet, but everyone was on board with sensible precautions.
Kit unlocked the door and opened it. “Hi.”
“Nice place,” Bishop answered, but his searching gaze was fixed on Kit.
Bishop looked the same as ever. Tall, composed, the dangerous sort of casual. The blue stripes in his flannel shirt brought out his eyes, and a six-pack offering dangled from one hand.
But Kit was getting better at reading Bishop. Tonight’s tension wasn’t one-sided.
Not the good kind of tension. The kind that made Kit want to say—
“I’m sorry,” Kit said quietly, so the others wouldn’t hear.
Bishop blinked. Possibly the most surprised Kit had ever seen him. Then his eyes narrowed above a lopsided smirk. “Does that mean you’re going to spill all your secrets?”
Kit wrinkled his nose. “You wish.”
Bishop’s smirk widened. “You’re just sorry because you feel guilty about it.”
“Basically.” Kit stepped back from the door and swept a gesture with his bottle. “Welcome to our humble lair.”
Something weird was going on between Kit and Bishop. James intended to get to the bottom of it. Not tonight. This was a housewarming party, and James felt pretty fucking great about that. Buying a house together was an important step in any relationship.
Even if only James’s name was on the deed, and he technically bought it entirely by himself. Because Kit and Holden didn’t have incomes, and Darius’s income—while not too paltry—needed more laundering before being house-purchasing ready.
This was the house James bought for Kit, and the relationship they were all building together.
At least until Holden stepped out of line.
“What have you been up to?” James asked, as Bishop put his six-pack away.
Bishop closed the fridge. “The usual. Investigating some murders, covering up others. Clearly not as busy as you.”
His wandering gaze seemed to encompass the whole property.
James wasn’t going to say anything, because Bishop was still in denial. But there was plenty of room for Bishop to move in, as soon as he got over the nonsense in his head.
“What can I say?” James lifted a can in toast. “Psycho Junior does a good slideshow.”
Right on cue, Psycho Junior swung into the kitchen.
“Speaking of presentations,” Holden said cheerfully. “I had something to show everyone before we start the game.”
James shared a glance with Bishop, who didn’t look nearly surprised enough.
Nor did Kit or Darius, when they all sat together at the dining table.
“What the fuck are you all hiding from me?” James said warily.
Holden set a manila folder on the table. “I finished looking at your dad’s scrapbooks. These photos are all the people I had weird vibes about.”
Aluminum creaked as James’s grip closed on his beer can.
Unfair resentment burned through James. They had all ambushed him. Kit had a sheepish grin as he took James’s beer, and James recalled it had been Kit’s idea to call Bishop over tonight.
And fucking Holden, who had… looked at the scrapbooks, doing exactly what James told him to. The bastard.
James had managed to forget about that assignment. All his energy had gone into the new house’s security system for the past few weeks. Some of it legal, some of it not, all of it necessary if James wanted to keep everyone he cared about in one place.
Most of all Kit, least of all Holden, of course.
“You took them out of the binders?” James asked, unable to keep the sharpness from his voice.
“I labeled them with sticky notes on the back,” Holden said serenely, sliding the folder towards James. “I can put them in the right order later.”
How thoughtful. Fucking bastard.
James hated how childish his anger felt. If only he was a little less self-aware, because that anger was so clearly a mask for pain. Every new piece of his family’s violent puzzle, every step closer to taking down the Rat Kings, forced him closer to closure.
Whatever that meant.
“Do you want to look at them alone?” Kit asked quietly.
James exhaled, anger fading. Because his anger didn’t control him, and looking around the table, he had a pretty good idea what closure was going to look like. Four people who understood him, like nobody else did.
“Of course not,” James said, and squeezed Kit’s thigh before reaching for the folder.
“There’s one photo of Nazario, then five other people,” Holden said. “Eleven photos total, with a few repeats.”
James paused on the first photo. It was a group of four men in suits at some charity gala, with a sticky tab marking a skinny white man. The sticky tab had a question mark. The photo meant nothing to James.
He could feel everyone around the table straining to see.
“I’ll pass them around,” James said, amused despite himself. “What was wrong with this guy?”
Holden shrugged. “He just seems sketchy.”
James passed the photo to Kit, who squinted for a second before passing it to Bishop.
“The next guy is also just sketchy,” Holden said. “Your dad was pretty good about labeling things, but the only name he labeled in these was Nazario.”
There were three photos of Sketchy Guy Number 2. They followed Sketchy Guy Number 1 around the table, from James to Kit to Bishop, who inspected them the closest. The photos continued to Darius, then Holden, who stacked them neatly.
All the photos were taken at events. Charity galas, gallery openings, chamber of commerce dinners. The public formality reassured James, in a weird way. His parents had kept the darker side of their business away from their family.
Until they couldn’t any longer.
The tall Latina woman in the next photo was marked with a sticky note too, but this one had a star instead of a question mark.
“The star means I recognized them,” Holden explained, sounding a bit more excited. “She was arrested for vehicular manslaughter eight years ago. There was a ton of speculation that it was murder, but they couldn’t prove it.”
“Is she in your psycho murder scrapbooks?” Darius asked, looking up.
Holden grinned. “She practically has a whole chapter. The next guy has a star too, but he was boring. Wire fraud.”
“I remember that one,” Bishop said, as the photo reached him. “Ended up out of our jurisdiction, but my sergeant thought we were missing something on him.”
The next photo was taken at an art gallery. James’s dad smiled next to a short, tattooed blond woman. Her sticky note had a question mark—unknown. There were two more photos of her, and James passed them all down before brooding over the last.
Nazario Bradach, the known Rat King. James didn’t need the star sticky note to pick the bastard out of the group. Nazario beamed through his curly brown beard, holding a glass of wine aloft. Toasting with him were both of James’s parents, also smiling.
Maybe Mom and Dad weren’t the perfect people James always thought they were, but that didn’t matter. It turned out James was more like them than he had ever realized. A secret life of crime didn’t change the fact that they were his parents. His. James protected his people.
Soon, Nazario would never smile again. That thought was coldly reassuring.
Glass clattered on the table, jolting James from his murderous fantasies.
“Fuck,” Darius swore, righting his beer bottle before it tipped over the table. He winced apologetically. “Sorry, forgot this was there.”
Holden helpfully rescued the photos of the tattooed woman. Maybe he wasn’t so bad. Or maybe he was just showing shitty blond person solidarity.
“If you ruin Dad’s scrapbook, I’ll shoot your hand off,” James said cheerfully. “Did anyone conveniently recognize these people?”
“Just Mr. Wire Fraud and Ms. Vehicular Manslaughter,” Bishop said. “I can call in a favor and get SCPD’s files on them.”
Kit shrugged, pulling his feet up onto his chair. “I don’t recognize any of them. Uh, not that I expected to.”
Darius leaned forward—more careful with his beer under James’s glare.
Skepticism wrinkled his brow. “The first sketchy guy looked a little familiar. I’ll see if my sources have intel on any of them.
But what’s our methodology here? I don’t get why we’re steering this investigation based on Blondie’s vibes. ”
“I can justify it all with body language analysis if you want.” Holden didn’t quite smirk. “But that’s mostly junk science. Take the vibes or not, doesn’t matter to me.”
“The Rat Kings are good at cleaning up actual evidence,” James said. “If I was working alone, honestly I would have just blown up Nazario’s house by now. That’s still on the table—but first, I want to pull some threads. See what unravels.”
Darius stared a moment longer, then chuckled. “Damn. Guess I’m just not used to seeing you careful.”
“Don’t get used to it,” James warned.
As the others moved into the living room, James lingered in the kitchen. He wanted to check the various tracking devices hooked to his phone. There was Kit, safely on the couch. There was Holden, unfortunately next to Kit.
James switched feeds to Terry—and froze.
Error: No Signal