Chapter 5 The War Room #2
“Oh, God,” Asa added. “If they don’t exchange names, let’s all vow never to tell them who the other person was. We’ll just wait for the awkward reveal at the Christmas party.”
“Are you telling me that my brother is somewhere in the house hooking up with Lake?” Aiden asked again, his tone teetering between scandalized and impressed.
Noah, switched to the private channel. “Adam,” Noah hissed, pinching the bridge of his nose. His pulse spiked with equal parts exasperation and reluctant amusement. “We’re in the middle of a mission.”
He switched to public comms, tone firm. “Guys, can we all focus on the task at hand?”
The laughter lingered like static, white noise under the rising tension. The hunt wasn’t over, but for one strange heartbeat, the Mulvaneys were exactly what they always were: a dysfunctional, ridiculous, unstoppable family.
“Hunting down some old lady isn’t a mission, it’s charity work,” Adam said over the open channel, his tone annoyingly casual.
“I’m just trying to make things a bit more exciting.
I’m sure Matty’s in the family wing. You don’t think Thomas would’ve stuffed him in the children’s wing, do you? Aiden, where’s your brother’s room?”
“Hey, Adam. Fuck you,” Aiden said flatly.
“Damn, it wasn’t bad enough you fucked our dad, now you want me too? You’re the reason our family tree is starting to resemble a Christmas wreath,” Adam taunted, a pure wicked grin in his voice.
“Okay, screw that old lady,” Aiden shot back. “The first person to bring me my brother’s head gets ten grand.”
“Wait, there’s a cash prize?” Nico asked immediately, interest piqued.
“Can we all focus, please?” Noah begged.
“Yeah, yeah,” Adam grumbled, not even pretending to sound sorry.
Noah rolled his eyes and inhaled deeply through his nose.
“Comms check,” he said, voice firm as he forced himself to refocus.
The edge of the metal console was cool beneath his palms, grounding him as the war room buzzed around him, a heartbeat made of static and tech.
The monitors painted his face in ghost-light blues and reds, flickering across his skin like lightning through deep water.
The hum of three laptops filled the silence like background music.
Lola did a quick perimeter report, her tone crisp. “Perimeter secure. All exits monitored.”
“Children’s wing?” Noah asked.
“Locked down,” Calliope confirmed, pulling up the feed.
The screen flickered to reveal Ever sitting cross-legged on the floor, reading to a cluster of pajama’d kids, his expressive hands slicing through the air with the kind of commitment usually reserved for Broadway.
Arlo and Shiloh flanked him, solemn as priests, as if the fate of the world rested on the ending of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Cricket and Charlie handed out coloring books like tiny enforcers keeping order, while Sadie and Dexter sprawled among the children pretending—badly—to be furniture.
Noah’s two newest dachshunds slept curled beneath the massive Halloween tree, matching hot-dog costumes snug around their little bellies, paws twitching as they chased ghosts in their dreams.
“They’re fine. Blissfully unaware,” Calliope said softly, and for just a second her voice cracked through the armor.
Noah allowed himself exactly one second—just one—to breathe. Then the moment was gone. “Hunters?” he said, shifting back into command.
One by one, voices filtered through the comms, a steady rhythm of readiness.
“Adam here. In position.” His husband’s tone was low, controlled, professional, the kind of calm that usually came right before he broke someone’s face.
“August. Aiden. Ready.”
“Jericho and Atticus. Ready.”
“Shep, Mac and I are good to go.”
“Asa and Avi. Ready.”
“Lincoln and Jackson. Ready.”
“Arsen and Dimitri. Ready.”
“Levi, Nico, and Mal. Ready.”
The litany of names filled Noah’s ears like a heartbeat, his family, his army.
Every call sign was another pulse of trust and danger, another reminder that their love language had always been violence.
Somewhere in those dark halls, Bev was running out of time, and Noah’s people were the ones tightening the noose.
He’d considered the comms check complete when two final voices crackled through the line.
“Cree and Jordan. Ready.”
“Were you two on comms the whole time?” Adam asked before he could stop himself.
“Uh, no. We decided to join at the last minute. We went to find our friends,” Jordan said, his tone defensive and a little scandalized. “And…”
“And…” twenty people seemed to chorus at once, a collective purr of predatory curiosity.
“We found them,” Cree said, sounding like a man who’d seen horrors he would never fully recover from.
“And what were they doing?” Avi asked, with entirely too much interest.
There was a pause long enough for static to hiss through the line before Jordan answered carefully, “Getting to know each other?”
“Getting to know each other how?” Calliope asked, words dripping with mischief and promise.
There was a shaky exhale. “Biblically,” Jordan said.
Adam made a triumphant sound that was entirely too pleased. “If you snapped a pic, I’ll give you ten grand.”
“You want pictures of our friends hooking up?” Jordan asked incredulously.
“When you put it like that, it sounds creepy,” Adam grumbled, tone that of a sulking child caught mid-crime.
Noah shook his head. How could a cold-blooded killer also be such a twelve-year-old? If it weren’t for the fact that Adam looked like a Greek god in Kevlar, no one would ever believe he was the playboy/badboy the tabloids painted him to be.
Before Noah could ponder the paradox further, Aiden chimed in, voice dry. “You want pics of your nephew—er—uncle?—hooking up?” A beat of silence, then, “He’s barely old enough to vote, you perv.”
The correction came too late. The other Mulvaneys smelled blood in the water.
“Yeah, see,” Asa shot back. “Even you can’t keep it straight.”
“It’s fucking weird,” Avi added helpfully.
Noah could practically hear Asa’s grin when Avi followed with, “Why couldn’t you have married someone else’s dad instead of your own?”
Thomas’s voice cut through the laughter like a whipcrack. “Enough, you two.”
“Fine,” they chorused, still laughing under their breath.
The moment of levity faded like smoke when Zane exhaled beside Felix, knuckles bone-white where he clasped his hands in his lap. “I want eyes on her,” he said, voice steady but strung tight with strain.
“Got you,” Noah said, fingers already moving.
He pulled up the timer on the main screen, the red dot blinking steadily in the east wing.
Every tick of the clock echoed in his chest. “Bev was last seen heading toward the east wing, second floor. She’s armed with a rather pitiful kitchen knife from the butler’s pantry. ”
“Amateur,” August said dismissively through the comms.
“She doesn’t know the layout,” Noah continued. “Use that to your advantage. Wear her down. Aiden’s workshop is the end goal, but we’ve got an hour or so to play with her first.”
“Understood,” multiple voices confirmed, overlapping into a steady rhythm.
The war room door opened, and Lucas stepped inside, his expression calm but alert beneath his creepy joker makeup.
“Where’ve you been?” Felix asked, arching a brow.
“Checking the children’s wing,” Lucas said. “Wanted to make sure the guards were standing their ground and had their posts locked down.”
“You went out there alone?” Noah asked, voice rising an octave.
“Okay, one, I was a trained FBI agent,” Lucas said dryly. “And two, even if I wasn’t, I’m not getting taken out by some decrepit old hag.”
Zane let out a startled laugh, short and hoarse, like his body didn’t quite remember how. He nodded toward the screens. “Did you get…uh, any impressions while you were out there? Of…her?”
Lucas hesitated, then gave a single nod. “She’s terrified,” he said softly, “but still in disbelief. Not that I blame her. Imagine finding out a celebrity billionaire was a secret mass murderer?”
“I mean, aren’t all billionaires mass murderers?” Lola asked, deadpan.
Noah’s focus stayed locked on the feeds.
Beverly had found a window on the second floor and was wrestling with it, pale arms straining, her movements jerky with panic.
Calliope had already locked all the exits remotely; the glass didn’t budge.
The camera caught the tremor in Bev’s hands, the flash of desperation in her eyes.
Even through the grainy stream, Noah could feel the shape of her panic, a cornered thing, mean and wild.
“She’s gonna run for the stairs,” Calliope predicted, her voice low but certain, eyes darting across multiple screens. “Heading down, probably trying for the main entrance.”
“Jericho, Atticus, cover the main staircase. Don’t let her out the front,” Noah ordered, fingers flying across his tablet, dropping satellite pins and marking positions with surgical precision.
“Murder muppets, cover east wing exits. Avi, Asa, I want you in the gardens. She’ll run there eventually. ”
The hum of the war room deepened, everyone moving in sync. Noah’s pulse thrummed with it, the rhythm of strategy and inevitability.
His gaze flicked to another monitor: Adam, a dark figure in the library shadows. The trench-coat Sherlock silhouette dominated the frame, every movement coiled, deliberate. He held a tranq gun in one hand, a hunting knife in the other, that knife.
Noah flushed. It was the same blade Adam had pressed against his throat in the kitchen yesterday. The one that had ended up inside him. He shifted in his chair, biting his lip hard enough to sting. The memory wasn’t helping his focus.