Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Gunnar McKinley, former SEAL and CEO of The Four X’s Group, adjusted the headphone in his right ear and made a mental note to yell at his younger brother, Remi, for insisting these wireless ones were better than his old over the head ones which hadn’t survived a dunk in the pool last week.
“Bastard does shit like this just to annoy me on purpose.” He adjusted the speed on the treadmill and kept running.
He was sixteen miles in on a twenty-six-mile stretch.
Only ten to go.
Easy day.
I’ve got this.
He glanced at the clock and pushed his legs to move faster.
Even if he beat yesterday’s time by a second, that was improvement.
He’d take it. Getting shot on his last mission had sucked.
It had sucked even worse that recovery was taking longer than he’d like.
He was determined to get his ass back in the field as fast as possible.
Passing fitness tests was the first step.
Although he was sure their medic would have a shit fit if he knew Gunnar was throwing down miles on the treadmill, but Gunnar didn’t give a shit.
He was over the coddling. Tyrone Power had better remember who paid his fucking wages.
He just wasn’t over it enough to pull rank and insist he didn’t need to pass the damn tests.
He would not put his people in danger because he was impatient.
That would never be acceptable in his book, especially as three of the men relying on him were his younger brothers.
His mom wouldn’t like it if they got hurt because of him.
He did not want to be on his mom’s wrong side.
Especially not this close to her annual visit.
“Yo, Gun?”
“What?” He didn’t dare glance over his shoulder at Talon, his youngest brother. Most of his concentration was required to ensure he didn’t fly off the ass end of the treadmill. He’d never live that shit down.
“Remi needs you in his office, stat.”
Damn it. He’d been so fucking close to hitting the twenty-six miler and under time to boot. He hit the stop button and slowed his steps in time with the machine. “Why didn’t he call me? I have my phone.”
“He did.” Talon tossed him a bottle of water. “Said you didn’t answer, so he sent us.”
Gunnar snatched the bottle out of the air.
He forced himself to breathe as normally as possible.
If Talon figured out that he was winded from the run, he’d tease him, and Gunnar really wasn’t in the mood today.
“I didn’t hear it. Sorry.” He wiped sweat from his brow, draped the towel over his shoulders, and plucked his phone out of the pocket on the treadmill.
“What happened?” He figured it couldn’t be a problem with the team he had in the field.
All the warning lights in this room would have started flashing if a situation that dire had transpired.
“Someone is hunting us.” Talon twirled his finger next to his hip and his ever-present K9 twirled on the spot to place himself back at Talon’s heels as they both walked toward the door.
“Remi said shit is pinging, but he’s still looking for the who and where.
” Talon pushed through the door, held it for him, then let it swing closed behind them.
“Why is someone looking for us?” Gunnar ducked his head to avoid the hanging basket of geraniums. “We’ve been off radar for weeks.”
“There’s always someone after something,” Talon said dryly. “You know that, bro. Everyone wants something. Usually for nothing.”
“Truth.” He stepped into the office at the other side of the courtyard.
“SITREP.” He figured Remi wouldn’t give a shit that he was being short on words.
When his brother worked on computers, he tended to get lost in the patterns and shit he said existed in the codes.
Gunnar didn’t give a flying fuck about those codes and numbers as long as Remi kept deciphering them Barney style so he and the others could understand what was needed.
“We’ve had hits on the website.” Remi pointed to his computer screen with the chewed end of a pen. “See?”
Gunnar looked at the mumbo jumbo on screen. “Nope, I don’t see.”
“You were shot in the leg,” Remi muttered. “Not the fucking head. How can you not see that?”
“Why does someone looking at our website cause an alert strong enough that you sent Talon to bring me in here?”
“Because this one came from an IP address which is a known VPN IP.” Remi spoke as if he were explaining things to a four-year-old. “There’s nobody we know who would do that.”
“Did you break it?” He hoped like hell those were the right words. If they weren’t, then they had to be close enough that Remi understood what he was asking, as his brother nodded.
“Yup, someone in Hamburg clicked on our site three times in the dark hours of the morning.”
Dark hours of the morning could mean anytime between midnight and dawn. “I told you, using four X’s instead of writing out the word four was a bad idea,” Gunnar muttered. “It was probably someone looking for a porn site after coming home from a night on the booze.”
“Something feels off about this one,” Remi insisted.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” Remi scratched at his forehead. “It just does.”
Gunnar narrowed his eyes at his brother.
Something didn’t look right. He exchanged glances with Talon, who in his typical style was lounging against the wall to the right of the door with Zombie at his feet, the dog’s muzzle on Talon’s boot.
Talon lifted one shoulder, silently telling him he too didn’t know what was going on.
Gunnar swept the room with his gaze. When he landed on the trash can, he figured it out. “How much Monster have you had, Remi?”
“What? None.”
“Liar.” Gunnar reached into the trash and snagged some crumpled blue cans. “How many?”
“Jeez, you aren’t Mom…”
“And your ADHD has a shit fit when you have too much sugar.” Gunnar dropped the cans back in the trash.
He reached for the stash of water bottles stashed next to Remi’s workstation.
He ripped open the outside packaging and placed a two-liter bottle on the desk in front of Remi.
“Drink that, shower, and come find me when you are done. We’ll figure it out then.
” The traumatic brain injury which had ended Remi’s career in Teams hadn’t affected his ability with computers.
What it had done was put a spanner in the mix for how he processed his own ability to know when he’d overdosed on sugar, which in turn made his ADHD batshit.
The same tenacity Remi used to hyper-focus on the facts and intel then backfired into him, latching onto something obscure and seeing demons in the shadows.
“Maybe you’re right.” Remi scrubbed his hand down his face. “It still feels all kinds of weird though.”
“I promise if you still feel that way after you’ve stepped back and reassessed, then we will give it everything we have in our arsenal and figure it out.”
Remi eyed him over the water bottle as he drank from it. He swallowed the mouthful, burped, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “I hate this shit.”
“I know.” Gunnar knew he was struggling.
He just didn’t know how to fucking fix it.
They hadn’t found anyone who Remi was happy to have messing with his computers to hire.
Gunnar refused to bring just anyone inside the wire of The Four X’s Group.
They all had to agree on new hires, and so far, Remi had vetoed everyone at the CV stage.
“When the right person shows up, I promise we’ll hire them on the spot.
” Almost immediately once the words were out of his mouth, he wanted to backpedal and say nope.
They’d find one of their own to help Remi.
But he already knew no one on their teams was suitable.
Hell, most of them including himself got hives at the thoughts of accidentally touching Remi’s systems, never mind working on them.
“I’ll hold you to that.”
At least Remi was more open to the idea at this point. Gunnar decided that was a win, and he’d take it. He looked at his two youngest brothers. “Where’s Colt?” Usually when they gathered here in the Intel Zone, all four of them were there. It was unusual for Colt not to have shown up too.
“He ran into town for something.”
"Damn it, ten bucks says he’s up to something.
” This was the last thing they needed. He understood that Colt was bored.
They all were bored since he’d been shot.
Well, maybe except for Remi and his overactive brain, but Colt was more on edge than was normal, even for him.
Him getting in a bar fight or starting shit with the locals wasn’t good for anyone.
“Go find him and get his ass back here to the house,” he ordered Talon, knowing their youngest brother would relish the challenge. “Zombie might relish the walk.”
“Hah.” Talon snorted and straightened off the wall. “We all know your Spidey senses say something is coming too. You just don’t want to admit it.”
“You’re totally wrong.” He ushered Remi out the door after Talon and Zombie. “My Spidey senses ain’t saying shit.”
“Liar.” Talon waited for Remi to disappear into the main house. Clearly, he hadn’t lost any of the intuition which had earned him his spot in Delta Force. “We might be a bunch of washed-up warriors, but trusting our guts runs too deep to ignore it now.”
Gunnar paused. “You feel it too?”
“Yeah, it’s not just Rem freaking out about his computers and shit,” Talon replied.
“We all know we can’t explain why our internal warning systems are usually spot on.
Ignoring them now would be a stupid move.
Last time you did that…” He nodded to the puckered red scar which peeked out the underside of Gunnar’s shorts. “That happened.”
“Fuck.” So much for the unease which resided inside him coming from being injured and having Draven Kilkenny and his woman staying with them for a few days last week.
He scowled after Talon when his brother just gave him a shit eating grin and walked away as if he’d decided the conversation was over. “Just fuck.”