Chapter 22
“Do I look okay?” Ansel asked.
Enzo rolled his eyes. “We’re going to Calliope’s house for work, not a social visit. If you’re just gonna be weird, I’m leaving you in the car.”
Elio snorted. “When is he not weird?”
Enzo glanced at Seven in the passenger seat, watching him bite that plush bottom lip to keep from laughing as his teen brothers started a shoving match in the backseat.
There was a throbbing behind his right eye that was only getting worse since they’d left the city.
He understood now why Calliope chose to work remotely.
She and her wife lived in the middle of fucking nowhere.
“Why are we going to Calliope again?” Elio finally asked. “Not that I’m complaining! We’re dying to meet her. But don’t you have everything you need to get Neith’s charges dropped?”
Seven nodded. “Yeah. Brioni was arrested, made a deal for conditional immunity, and she and her mom are now stashed somewhere safe until we know whether we have to disappear them permanently.”
“Kill them?” Ansel practically shouted.
“No, you idiot. Relocate them,” Enzo said, shaking his head.
He’d never seen two people so smart and yet so dumb in his whole life.
Neith was all but in the clear. But that wasn’t good enough for Seven…
or Neith for that matter. If there was one thing that truly tied Enzo and Seven’s families together, it was that they both believed that justice was best served soaked in blood.
They’d spared Brioni because she’d made the right choice; the others wouldn’t be so lucky.
But in order to ensure all parties died screaming, they needed names, and while the names of the donors had been easy enough to identify, the names of Grant’s bosses were harder to pin down.
Brioni had been forward-facing enough in the operation to easily corroborate which donors were actively buying victims, but not who ultimately financed the operation…
or if the women were even still alive. For that, they’d need an expert.
An expert who had goats named after fictional vampire hunters and chickens named after a very real K-pop group.
Their lives were really fucking weird. Calliope had already found the information they needed, but when they’d asked her to send it to them, Seven had let it slip that Enzo’s brothers were fans.
She’d then asked if they wanted to come to her place.
The answer had clearly been yes. That was how Enzo found himself on the longest short car ride of his life.
When Calliope had said she didn’t live on a farm, she hadn’t exactly been lying.
There were houses dotting the landscape, sitting on land that had plenty of room, but it wasn’t farm country.
There weren’t crops or cattle. If anything, the town looked more like a commune, or maybe an artist’s colony.
Did those still exist?
They drove through a small downtown area that looked quaint during the day with its little galleries and bookstores, but probably took on a far more sinister appearance at night, all darkened streets and a church spire that pierced the sky.
“Oh, can we stop there on the way out?” Elio asked, pointing at a cafe with a wooden storefront and a large window filled with baked goods. “It says they have apple cider donuts,” he cried, like a little kid.
Right. He was a little kid. At least in Enzo’s eyes. Both his brothers were still in their teens. He forgot that sometimes. “This isn’t a vacation,” he muttered.
Seven’s quiet laughter filled the car, low and warm enough to ease some of the tension at the base of Enzo’s skull. He could feel the boy’s amusement like sunlight through glass, soft and impossible to ignore.
His breath hitched as Seven’s hand found his on the center console, threading their fingers together and giving his hand a squeeze.
“Relax. Why are you so tense?” he asked softly.
Enzo looked at him from the corner of his eye, not sure he dared to look full-on. “I’m not a hundred percent sure, but if I had to guess, it’s because it’s my first time taking my baby brothers to a black-hat hacker’s home to plot a group murder.”
Seven grinned, flashing his pretty white teeth. “It gets easier. Especially if you get donuts after.”
Enzo huffed out a surprised laugh, shaking his head and giving Seven a raised brow. “Is that your way of saying you want to stop for donuts, too?”
“Yes, please,” Seven said, then mouthed, Daddy, giving him a look that would have melted solid steel.
Enzo’s cock twitched, his response nearly Pavlovian at this point. Seven said Daddy and Enzo’s dick was at the ready immediately. How had he gotten sucked so deep into this boy’s orbit without even realizing it?
He’d never had someone who could both short-circuit his body and steady his mind with the same look. Somehow, Seven had become his worst distraction and his calmest center.
Once they exited the little town, they ended up on dirt roads with houses sitting on four to five acre parcels of land.
Enzo wasn’t sure what he’d expected of Calliope’s house, but it wasn’t the massive farmhouse that looked like it had been sitting there for a hundred years.
He might have thought they were in the wrong place if not for the security measures.
They stopped just outside an ancient iron gate—too ornamental to simply be a barrier—and he wasn’t surprised when it swung open without them alerting anyone to their presence.
Once on the property, they followed a well-worn gravel road, his tires instantly falling into the narrow grooves carved into the drive over time.
He found himself scanning the property as they drove the short winding path.
There was a weathered outbuilding with oddly modern fixtures, a birdhouse perched a bit too straight on its pole, and a goat standing on the top of a small shed covered in solar panels, because, apparently, even the livestock here were preppers.
When they parked, they found Calliope standing on the porch, a dish towel thrown over one shoulder.
She wore skin-tight jeans and a vee-neck tee that showed off her curvy body, dark hair flowing over her shoulders.
She had to be close to fifty but didn’t look a day over thirty-five. She smiled, then gave them a wave.
“Holy shit. Is that her?” Elio whispered.
“She’s so hot,” Ansel said, mouth hanging open.
Enzo shook his head. “I thought you didn’t like girls,” he muttered, not addressing either of them by name.
“We like everything. Gender is a construct,” Elio said, as if Enzo was ancient for even hinting at a preference.
Seven snickered as the car rolled to a stop, squeezing Enzo’s hand once more.
It was a small thing—that squeeze—but it felt like a silent promise, an I’ve-got-you amid the madness.
Every time Seven did it, Enzo swore he could breathe again.
Seven had leaned on him for weeks, trusting him to save his mother with his legal knowledge, but now that he’d done that, he felt a bit out of his element.
He wasn’t opposed to murder if it was justified, but he had never been an active participant.
Now, he was playing in Seven’s wheelhouse.
On the porch, a battered laptop played gardening blogs while, off to one side, a travel router and a compact antenna sat casually on a stack of seed catalogs.
A “broken” lantern hid a discreet cable where a brand-new conduit snaked into the wall.
Calliope hadn’t built a homestead; she’d built the world’s most discreet fortress.
She beamed at them as they made their way onto the porch. “Come on in. I made cookies.”
Enzo rolled his eyes as his brothers practically fell all over themselves at the idea that this mythical digital goddess had made them a treat.
The inside of the house was beautiful, every inch remodeled, but in a way that honored the bones of the place instead of erasing them. The air smelled of coffee and something tart. Jam or jelly, maybe? His question was answered when she led them into a large country kitchen.
“You caught us on prep day,” she said, gesturing to the clearly lived-in space. Something bubbled in a pan, a large pot of water boiled beside it, jars were lined up on the counter, and a loaf of bread still steamed on the cooling rack.
Enzo pinched the bridge of his nose as his brothers started peeking into every nook and cranny.
“Are you making strawberry jam?” Elio asked.
Calliope smiled in a way that reminded Enzo of his mother. “No, strawberry simple syrup. I sell it at the farmer’s market. It’s healthier than the stuff you buy at the store. I make chocolate syrup, too.”
Calliope was a fascinating creature. Quirky, and so terrifyingly smart, the government had given her open access to their systems rather than try to outsmart her.
Yet, she loved animals and her son and son-in-law, had a wife, a quiet home and—apparently—a side gig at the farmer’s market.
Enzo felt like he really didn’t know anything about making the most of his days.
“How do you have time to hack the planet and make syrup? And bread?” Ansel asked, giving voice to Enzo’s thoughts as he hovered over the loaf, inhaling deeply.
Calliope sighed wistfully. “There’s surprisingly little to do lately. Arsen has taken over some of the digital heavy lifting with Jericho’s interests. Thomas has slowed down since Noah took over. Idle hands and all that.”
She offered them a plate of chocolate chip cookies, seemingly pleased when the teens began to gobble them up like uncultured gremlins. His mother would have been mortified.
“You have quite the security set-up here,” Enzo said.
She grinned. “Well, shit. You noticed that, huh?”
“I’m trained to notice things like that,” Enzo countered. “It’s good that you keep yourself safe out here.”
Her smile became a smirk, her tone edged with something sharp. “I’m always safe. The other measures are to give whoever’s stupid enough to come after me a chance to change their minds before they ruin their own lives.”