Chapter 19 Dex
CHAPTER NINETEEN
DEX
Crunching down on another potato chip, I watch Wren as she frowns down at the laptop resting on her thighs. She adjusts the headphones on her head, then clicks a button and listens intently.
“She needs a break,” I say to whoever’s in earshot.
“She said she’d take one at two,” Pete says from the ground beside me.
“What are you doing?” I ask, looking at him lying on the floor.
“I was doing pushups, now I’m resting.”
I snort before popping another crab-flavored chip in my mouth, the salty, slightly sweet taste making me moan in approval.
“You’re as bad as Wren,” he says, sitting up and letting his hands hang over his knees. “Moaning about your damn food.”
“Does this mean you’re attracted to me, too?” I tease with a big grin as I try to bat my eyelashes at him.
“I think you have something in your eye,” he says in amusement, pushing to his feet.
“Chyort poberi!” Wren suddenly curses in Russian, at least I think it’s a curse. I watch as she pulls the headphones from her head and tosses them on the coffee table along with the laptop.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, quickly moving to sit at her side and offer her some support. She never turns down my cuddles. I wrap my arm around her, and she instantly sinks into my side as she lets out a huff of frustration.
“It’s these stupid phone calls I’m listening to. They don’t make sense.”
“You can’t translate them?” I ask, trying to understand what she meant.
“No, I can, and the software is doing that as well. But parts of what is being translated don’t make any sense to me.”
“What do you mean?” Elias asks as he moves from where he was sitting at the dining table with Sly to the other armchair. Pete takes the one I’d been sitting in, and Sly leans against the arm of his chair while Jagger stays seated on Wren’s other side.
We’ve all been sort of lounging around all day. After last night's activities, everyone was feeling a little tired this morning. Wren, Jagger, and Elias went to work while the rest of us mustered up some brunch for everyone.
“They keep mentioning Blackburn, my brother. But he’s dead.” She lifts her head to look at Elias as she asks, “He was dead, right? I slit his throat.”
“He was definitely dead.”
“Then why do they keep mentioning him?” she asks in frustration.
“I’m not sure.” Elias frowns down at the laptop as Jagger starts signing.
“Do you have any other family members who go by that name?”
She shakes her head. “My dad was an only sibling, and as you know, the women go by their mother’s name.”
“Wren Rivers,” I say out loud, trying to help ease some of the tension she’s holding on to. “I love the sound of your name.”
“Thanks,” she says, tilting her head up to me with a small smile.
“Dexter Rivers,” I say with a nod. “Has a nice ring to it.”
“You want to take my name?” she asks, looking both confused and surprised.
I shrug. “Of course. It’s not like you’d be able to choose between ours, right?”
She tilts her head up and kisses my jaw, offering me one of her dazzling smiles. “You know me so well, Dex. But don’t you only take your partner’s name when you get married?”
“Is that not an engagement ring on your finger?” I fire back, pointing to the ring she hasn’t taken off.
“The ring Elias gave me?” she asks as she stares down at the shiny ring on her hand.
“We’re a package deal now, baby,” I tell her while giving her a soft squeeze of reassurance.
“Since when?” Elias asks. He doesn’t sound upset; he sounds surprised.
“Since you jumped in front of a bullet for me.” He just stares at me in shock, as if unsure what to say.
Jagger breaks the tension slowly building as he diverts us back to the conversation. “Maybe there’s another Blackburn,” he suggests.
“That makes the most sense,” Elias agrees while Wren stares at Jagger with a frown.
“What is it?” he signs when he sees she’s staring.
“Sign his name again,” she asks. He repeats the action, and she nods. “Okay, that first part means black, but the sign you did for burn, that’s different from what I would have done.” She raises her hands and does a different action, and Jagger nods.
“They are close. This one,” he repeats his sign, “means b-u-r-n,” he spells out the word. “And this one,” he repeats her sign, “Means h-e-a-t.”
She gasps, her eyes growing wide. “That’s it!”
“What?” Elias asks as she leans forward, pulls the headphone cord out of the laptop, and replays what she was listening to aloud.
The Russian words play out, and I have no idea what it’s saying, but she clearly does. She suddenly pauses it and yells, “There! Did you hear it?”
Elias and Jagger both frown, shaking their heads, and she restarts the clip, playing the same part again. “Right there. Where they’re saying chyornyy ozhog, but it’s not ozhog with an o, it’s uzhog, with a u! They aren’t saying Black burn, they’re saying Black heat!”
“Black heat?” Elias asks, and she nods excitedly.
“What’s the difference?” Pete asks, taking the question right out of my mouth.
“I don’t know, but it must mean something,” Wren says excitedly.
“Elias?” Sly asks, and when I glance at him, he looks deep in thought.
“I feel like I’ve heard that name before, but I can’t remember where.
I need to do some digging.” Jagger slides the laptop over to Elias, who pulls it into his lap and starts clicking away.
After about thirty seconds of us all staring at him, he lifts his head and looks at us.
“This might take a while. You don’t need to watch me. ”
Wren looks around at the rest of us before asking, “What should we do while we wait?”
Pete and I exchange grins.
“No,” Sly says when he sees the looks on our faces. “I’m sure Wren is still a little sore and needs more time to recover.”
I glance down at her. Had we gone too far last night? It seemed like she’d loved it at the time.
Her cheeks start to grow pink as she looks down at her hands and shrugs. “That’s an affirmative,” Sly translates for us.
“Are you sore today, baby?” I ask quietly as I pull her back to my side.
“I wouldn’t change anything about last night,” she says, glancing at each of us. “But my butt is a little sore.”
Elias’s wide eyes shoot up to look at her. “Shit, Wren, I’m so sor—”
“No,” she cuts him off quickly, holding out a palm to him in the universal sign of stop. “Don’t apologize. I loved it, and I want a repeat. I’m just a little tender today.”
Jagger turns in his seat to face her with a stern expression on his face and starts signing. “I want to take you on a date.”
“It’s not safe,” Sly tells him, but Jagger doesn’t even look at Sly; he keeps all his attention on Wren.
I can’t fault him for that. I am always staring at her.
She is my obsession. “Dex took you to dinner, Pete took you go-karting, and Sly took you stargazing. I want my turn with you,” Jagger signs.
“It’s only fair,” Pete says in Sly’s direction. “And it’s not like we’d let them go on their own.”
“Where did you want to go?” Elias asks, joining the conversation. Jagger gestures toward the laptop and appears to pull up a map to show Elias. He nods in approval. “It’s secluded, so you should be fine there. Just stay alert. I’ll stay here and keep digging.”
Jagger turns back to Wren and holds out his hand to her in question. She smiles, placing hers in his as she tells him. “I’d love to.”