18. Tucker
Chapter eighteen
“ W hat day is it today?” Mina asks, glancing around the breakfast table.
“It’s Saturday, Sugar,” I tell her, and she smiles.
“That means you four don’t have to go to school!”
“That’s right,” I say with a smile. “We’re all yours today.”
“Woo hoo, weekend!” Max cheers, throwing his fist in the air.
“Good, because I think it’s time you all tell me the truth.” Her words make everyone pause, forks hovering mid-air as we all turn to face her.
“I’m not upset with you guys. I kept secrets before, too. I know you’ve been worried about my recovery. But I’m healed now.” Her eyes flick to Dom and Atlas, and a blush spreads across her cheeks. “So, I think it’s time.”
“Okay, Sweetheart, I’ll tell you, then I get a reward,” Max teases with a smirk.
“No!” The rest of us chorus at the same time, making her laugh and him scowl.
“You can’t bargain away something we all need to tell her for time with her,” I say with a shake of my head.
Dom leans forward, his voice steady as he speaks. “We’ll tell you now. Like you said, we weren’t exactly hiding it, but we needed you to recover first. Some of it involves you, and I needed to know you were in a good state of mind before we brought it up.”
She nods, encouraging him to go on.
“The seven of us run a private investigating business,” he says, revealing one of our biggest secrets to her as we all watch closely for her reaction. Her eyebrows shoot up in surprise. She clearly didn’t expect that.
“The twins are actually twenty-two. They’re undercover. Gideon and Tucker are undercover too; those aren’t their real jobs.”
Somehow, her eyes grow even wider. I place my hand over hers and give it a reassuring squeeze. She turns her palm to hold mine, and I slide our joined hands onto my thigh under the table, silently showing her my support.
“Twenty-two?” she looks between the twins with a shocked expression.
“Upset you aren’t robbing the cradle anymore?” Max asks, and Jasper whacks him on the shoulder with a scowl.
“Uhh… no.” She lets out a small laugh. “So you thought I was seventeen while I thought you were eighteen?”
“Yep.”
“Well, I guess the truth works out better for us anyway,” she says with a shrug, making the twins smile.
Dom picks up where he left off. “I come from a family of cops, so it was expected I would take the same route. But when I was in training, I quickly learned that being an officer came with too many rules and regulations, and I like to have control of my life. So a PI seemed like the best choice. There was a team hiring, and I joined them. But I messed up my first case, focusing my attention in the wrong direction. After that, they didn’t want to work with me.” He pauses to take a sip of his coffee.
“The team I was with didn’t want to work with me after that, so I decided to go at it on my own. I did that, a bit unsuccessfully, for a couple years until I was twenty-three. That’s when I met Atlas in a bar one night, and somehow we started talking.”
Atlas continues the story next. “I was a bit lost at the time, having just left the army, and was looking for a new path. So when Dom told me he was a PI and asked if I’d be interested in joining him, I thought it was something I could help with. I had plenty of useful skills from my military years, and it seemed like it would be nice to be in control for once. We could decide what cases to take and what hours to work.”
“Since we got along so well, and money was tight, we decided to live together. Although it was really just moving from one short-term rental to another,” Dom tells her.
“Or hotel rooms, in some cases,” Atlas adds.
“We met Tucker about six months later when we were on assignment. He was working for another PI who was trying to steal the case from us. When we realized Tuck hated his boss, we poached him.”
“Best decision I ever made!” I say with a smile, remembering the exact day they’re talking about.
“It was probably another four months after that when we realized we were in desperate need of a tech specialist,” Dom tells her.
“Ben?” Mina asks, looking at him.
“Yep. They posted online, saying they needed someone for their team, so I applied. One day later, we met, and they offered me the job on the spot,” Ben says with a smile .
“And two months later we met Gideon.” Mina’s gaze turns to him, clearly eager to hear how he joined our rag-tag group.
“Yes, well… I moved here from England in my early twenties. I… needed to get away from my parents. They weren’t bad people, but they are typical British parents, keeping their emotions close to the chest all the time, expecting me to do the same. Not allowing me to step out of line or do anything that wasn’t in their plan for me. I couldn’t handle the restraints anymore, so, one day, I packed up and left.
“I had a bit of money that I’d saved away, so I was able to rent a room for a few months while I tried to figure out what to do. One of my roommates was obsessed with this Sherlock Holmes television show. After a few weeks of watching it with him every night, I grew intrigued by the idea of problem solving crimes. As Dom said, not like a police detective. I wanted to be able to choose what cases I worked on. I also had no interest in making the arrests, I just want to solve the puzzle.
“I decided to do a little job hunting for private investigators, even knowing I had no experience. Unfortunately, there was nothing available. One afternoon, I was going to the grocery store, and I saw these guys,” Gideon says, motioning to the four of us. “They were talking to a crying woman in the parking lot. They were acting like cops, but they didn’t fit the look. I decided to ask what was going on, as there were lots of people standing around watching them.”
“I told him that we were there looking for the crying woman’s daughter,” I explain. “She was nineteen, and not considered a minor, but she’d waited in the car while her mom went grocery shopping, and wasn’t there when she came out. The police won’t do anything if it’s under twenty-four hours, so she called us.”
“I noticed a couple girls around the missing daughters’ age, standing beside a parked car, trying not to laugh. So I told Tucker,” Gideon adds.
“It turned out it was just some stupid joke the daughter was playing, trying to get her mother’s attention. But it was because of Gideon’s ability to read those girls that helped us figure it out so quickly,” I tell her. “So we asked him to join us.”
Dom continues. “The five of us meshed really well together, we lived together and eventually started taking cases all around the country. While we moved around, each of us tried dating, but it never worked out for numerous reasons. It was Tucker who convinced us that we needed one woman to share. With our jobs being dangerous and constantly moving, we couldn’t drag a group of girlfriends around with us.”
I jump in next. “And we’re a family. If we started dating and eventually got married, we’d have to settle down and end up separated from each other. But none of us wanted that. We’re brothers for life and want to stay together.”
Dom looks at her as he continues. “We never found anyone, of course. Nobody fit with us. Nobody even came close. Then we meet the twins. They were fresh out of college and working a case with us where we needed younger guys for an undercover gig. They clicked with us. We knew we wanted to keep them, and when we found out they’ve shared girls before, it didn’t take much to get them to buy into our plan. One woman, seven guys.
“With our jobs moving us around and keeping us busy, there would always be at least one of us to take care of her. We know we can’t individually meet a woman’s needs, but together we could take care of anyone, even you, Kitten.”
I watch as she swallows heavily. “Me?” she asks quietly .
“Yes, you,” Atlas answers curtly, as his eyes bore into hers.
“We all want you, Princess, even if some of us haven’t had the chance to officially ask you yet,” Ben tells her with a soft smile as he pushes his glasses up his nose.
“We care for you, Sugar. We want you,” I add, rolling my lucky coin through my knuckles.
“You understand what we’re telling you, Mina?” Dom asks her, leaning forward as he stares at her.
“I think so, and I want to argue with you,” she says softly. “I want to tell you that every damn one of you is worthy of having a woman to yourself. You are worthy of that love. But if you are really saying what I think you are, that you all want… me… Well, I don’t think I’m strong enough to argue with you. I couldn’t imagine not being with all of you, and I could never choose between you.”
“You never have to,” Jasper says gently, giving her a smile.
I lift her hand to kiss it as everyone shares a smile with her.
“For our current case,” Dom starts, pulling the topic back on track, “we’ve been hired to track a serial killer. He’s been crossing the country, raping and killing girls.”
Mina gasps. “That’s horrible!”
Dom nods. “We were brought in a few months ago. We got a lead saying he’s going to hit this town next. And he has, but he’s always one step ahead of us. We can’t figure out who he is, how he picks his targets, or how to stop him. We try following possible victims but always has us come up empty-handed.”
“Lisa?” Mina asks, her eyes darting to Max, no doubt remembering the day he told her about her death .
“And Rachel,” I tell her. She didn’t know about Rachel since it happens the day everything happened to her with Brad and her mom. Ben updates her on that, and I can see how worried she looks.
“All right, let’s show her the rest,” Dom says, standing.
We all stand, and I keep hold of her hand as I lead her upstairs to the office. I walk her straight over to the wall where Atlas has mapped out the serial killer’s path and the timelines.
“What is all this?” she asks with wide eyes, gazing around at everything pinned to the wall.
“These red tacks are where murders have taken place,” Atlas says, pointing to them. “The red string connects them in the order they were committed.”
She traces her finger over the string, then moves it to the blue line that follows a similar path but through slightly different cities. “And this one?” she asks quietly, frowning as she tilts her head.
Nobody replies at first, so I squeeze her hand and tell her, “that’s your path.”
She yanks her hand back like it’s been burned. “What do you mean?”
Ben answers this time. “We took the dates and cities you remember living in and lined them up here. I found some alternative IDs for your mom to build a bit of a timeline. They don’t match exactly, but are within a few weeks. Just like how the towns don’t match exactly, but they are close.”
“I don’t understand. Do you think I’m a serial killer?” she asks with wide eyes, taking a step backwards as fear laces her tone.
“We think the killer could be your mom,” Atlas tells her.
“My mom?!” She asks with wide eyes. “No—I thought you said the girls were… raped? ”
“They were, but she could have done that with some sort of object,” Dom tells her carefully.
“Oh god!” Her hands fly to her mouth. Her eyes dart all over the map before she drops her hand and steps closer again.
“I want to say I can’t believe it. But she’s obviously insane,” she says before sighing, still scanning the wall.
She moves over to the section with photos pinned to it. Some are victims, others are suspects, and a few are surveillance shots. There’s a section for her, with her picture at the top and people connected to her beneath it. She strokes her fingers over the photos of her house taken from the security camera.
“You were watching me,” she says quietly.
“We were watching your house, yes. We knew something was going on. But we knew you weren’t involved. We just can’t figure out how you’re tied to the killer, if at all.”
“How did you know I wasn’t involved?” she asks, turning as her eyebrows pinch in confusion, her eyes dancing between us.
“Because we know you, you’re too kind and sweet to do anything like that,” Max answers quickly.
“But before you got to know me, was I a suspect?” The tension seems to suddenly grow thick in the room, and I fear this conversation is taking a route that none of us considered until now.
“Technically, everyone in this town was a suspect,” Gideon answers smoothly.
“But you didn’t follow everybody’s movements, did you?” she asks, sounding hurt as she turns back to the board. “In fact, I don’t see any other suspects up here besides Jeff, Brad, and my mother.”
She whirls around to face us again, her eyes full of pain .
“Did you—is that why you four were always around me at school?” she asks as her eyes bounce between the twins, Gideon and myself.
“N—” I try to answer but she cuts me off, her voice raising with anger and hurt.
“You… You were all asking me questions about my home and my family. I thought you liked me, and wanted to get to know me… but you were just trying to solve your case, weren’t you?” She wipes the tears that are spilling down her cheeks as she looks at the twins and asks, “was it part of your job to get close to me?”
Neither of them answers straight away, clearly unsure what to say as we were all told to get close to her. They look at her with pained expressions, and she sucks in a sharp breath. “Was any of this even real?”
“Of c—” Dom tries to reach out to her, but she steps back, her back pressing to the wall. The fear in her eyes, as she looks at all of us like she doesn’t know us, breaks my heart.
“I—I need to be alone, let me go,” she whispers, sounding terrified. We all quickly part, giving her an easy exit out of the room and not wanting her to feel trapped by us, and she runs. Her door closes, and the sound is like a dagger through my heart.
What have we done?