Chapter 27 Tacita #2
He sits for a minute. I can practically hear his brain whirring. Milo reaches over and gives his arm a gentle squeeze before returning his attention to me.
“She is right,” he signs before pulling out a pen and paper from his pocket.
It doesn’t bother me. But I want to know if there are others.
I read the note as Wyatt does.
“There are no others, Milo. The three of you are the first I’ve ever felt this way about, the fact you’ve all managed to make me consider more than a casual hook up at the same time is not something I could’ve seen coming. But it is something I want. I want to try.”
Milo pulls away from Wyatt’s side and rolls forward onto his knees. He cups my face before leaning down and kissing me lightly. The taste of his soft lips against mine soaks relief into my skin, some of the tension I’d been feeling unknots and my hands move to grip onto his waist.
He breaks the kiss and stares down into my eyes.
“Us,” he stammers. His voice tips me over the edge and I can feel tears prick the back of my eyes. His soul is so pure and beautiful, and the love he has to give is a force I’ll protect with my life.
“Mo Stór.” Wyatt’s voice cuts through the moment and we both shift to see that Wyatt has also moved closer. “It’s still exclusive alright. I can share you but I want to know that if you’re with someone that’s not one of us three.”
“I can give you that.”
“Then let me kiss you too.”
Milo sits back on his haunches as Wyatt moves in and brings his lips slamming down on mine.
He dominates the kiss, entwines our tongues, and leaves me breathless.
Wyatt is such a force I can’t deny him the control in this moment, knowing he needs it.
I feel the intense power of his feelings through this kiss.
It's all consuming and quite possibly has the ability to drown me, I either have to fight it or lay my trust bare for him.
I choose to trust in him.
Breaking the kiss, I ask something that’s been bugging me since we met.
“What does your nickname for me mean?”
“It means my treasure,” he whispers.
I kiss him again, my heart no longer belongs to me.
Thunder and rain had driven us inside before I got to tell them about who I really am. Their acceptance of Garrick had filled me with such happiness, I was trying to not drop a second bomb on our fragile new relationship before they’d processed me asking for a third male to join our group.
I didn’t want to go the day without telling them, the lie of omission sitting heavy on my shoulders. I was about to broach the subject when the sky had derailed my plans. We’d ran for cover and run into Seffy and Rio on our way back to the dorms.
With the storm raging outside, all five of us were in Wyatt’s room working on the puzzle game and leaving me no opportunity to reveal my true identity.
In fairness we did need to crack on with solving the game, and no classes today gave us the time to get it done.
All three of us were finding it hard to hide our disappointment though. At least we were making progress on the game. The hours had passed and we were down to two options.
“So, it’s either a knife that we think is buried on the fence line somewhere, or its a bottle of poison that’s hidden up in the forest beyond the compound,” Rio summarises.
“That is the only two we can’t discount.”
“What if both are the correct answer? We know there are multiple cases tangled together now,” Wyatt asks.
“We can’t risk it,” I tell him, caressing his thigh over his joggers. We’re both sitting across his bed, backs to the wall. His arm is around my shoulders and I’m half leaning into the crook of his shoulder, hand resting on his outstretched leg.
Milo is in his usual spot when we’re working, standing on the opposite bed, pen in hand as he tinkers with the sprawling web of notes we’ve put up on the wall.
Another hour passes, and we still haven’t made any progress on either option.
“Fuck, I’m too hungry to carry on. Shall we go and get some food?” Rio asks.
“I feel like we can’t give up. There’s only a couple more days left for us to solve this thing,” Seffy says.
“I agree. We can’t miss the deadline,” I add.
“How about I go grab us some food and bring it back here?” Rio counters. “If I don’t eat I’m going to pass out.”
“To be fair, so am I,” Wyatt says.
In the end Wyatt and Rio leave to go stock up on food, leaving me, Seffy, and Milo to keep working.
They’d only been gone a few minutes, however, when Milo gasps from where he’d been trawling through one of the files.
“What is it?” I say and Seffy’s head snaps up as well from where she’d been reading another one of the profiles for the hundredth time.
Milo turns the page round and points at a specific bit. It's where one of the suspects is accusing another of the murder, but the analogy they use to describe the person is a very specific type of poisoning. The exact effect of the poison we’ve identified to be one of the weapons used.
I keep reading and they make another reference further down. Seffy joins me, reading over my shoulder.
Milo turns to pick up the other pages of the same file. He then shoves the character profile at us, pointing at the basic information section. They work at a pharmaceutical company.
“You think this is the proof we needed?” I ask.
My gut is telling me it's the link we had been missing. Poison had become an option when some of the other characters had described how they found one of the bodies, the state it was in. What we’d been unable to do until now is link it to one of the suspects.
Seffy moves back to her own file. “Yes, that guy lives in the woods as well.”
“How’d you know that?”
“Here, this woman describes the cabin he lives in. She’s sleeping with him.” She passes over the pages and Milo and I read. “This is it, I can feel it.”
Milo nods in agreement, his eyes alight after looking as frustrated as the rest of us for the last few hours.
With some of our motivation renewed, we scroll over everything with a new purpose and find more links and more details that we hadn’t picked up on before. We get a more exact location for this cabin and are feeling confident in our deductions.
“Shall we go get it?” Seffy asks.
“Shouldn’t we wait for Wyatt and Rio? They should be back any second,” I say.
A knock at the door seems like impeccable timing, but Wyatt would just use his wristband. We all freeze, going quiet as we all reach the same deduction.
The knock comes again, although cuts short as it sounds like something else hitting the door.
“Let me get it, you two stay back,” I instruct them. Thankfully, neither of them argues as I don’t want to try and explain that I am much more indestructible than their frail human bodies.
Positioning myself so whoever is on the side won’t be able to get the jump on me I grab the handle and snatch the door open.
Deflating in relief, I find a loaded-up Rio standing in the hallway, the scent of hot food wafting from the many paper bags he’s carrying.
“Sorry, did I scare you?” he says as he crosses the threshold.
“Yes. I thought we were about to meet the killer. Where’s Wyatt?” Seffy steps forward to help Rio with the stash of takeout.
“He said he had an errand to run and to head on up.”
“Did he say what this errand is?” My adrenaline spikes once more, please don’t let him be off hunting down Garrick or something equally stupid.
“Said he needed to see a man about a treasure,” Rio answers, “I asked him if he’d figured out what it was we were looking for but he said it was unrelated.”
Treasure… “It means my treasure.”
Fuck.
He has indeed gone to see Garrick.
I’m up and gathering my shoes as Seffy bursts into a recap of our discovery. Pulling on my trainers, I look across the room to where Milo is watching me curiously.
“I won’t be long,” I say to him.
I’m swinging the door open once more when Seffy catches my arm.
“Wait. You can’t go as well,” she admonishes. “We need to go after the prize.”
“That can wait half an hour.”
“But Rio just said the rain has eased off. It’s the perfect opportunity.”
“What about Wyatt?”
“We won’t hand it in until he’s with us but we need to go get it. What if the other teams have been working today as well, they might’ve figured it out too.”
She’s right, we really shouldn’t sit around on the correct answer. It’s waiting to lose. And I won’t be losing this task.
Sending a silent plea that Wyatt isn’t about to get himself shredded by a very grumpy panther shifter, I find myself conceding. I’m not about to let Milo out into the woods without me, and I kind of like Seffy and Rio as well.
“Okay, let’s go,” I concede.
It’s dark and still drizzling outside, but the winds have died down somewhat and the air has a fresh bite to it.
The trees overhead swish and rustle, a few branches creaking as we close in on the area we believe the poison stash to be hidden.
“Why did they have to hide it in such a creepy place,” Seffy breaks our silence. We’d all been quiet since we’d left the compound, following Milo as he guided our way with the very basically drawn map we had quickly scribbled from the notes we’d put together.
“Not a fan of the dark?” Rio asks mockingly.
“No, I don’t think I am. Give me literally anywhere else right now.”
“It’s not that bad,” I tell her, not mentioning that we ought to be grateful for the wet night because otherwise we might be dealing with the sprites who love to settle in hollowed out tree trunks within these forests.
Milo’s fingers give mine a squeeze. His hand had found mine as soon as we’d left the compound.
The warmth seeping up my arm from the contact makes my heart beat that little bit harder.
In the darkness, I find it harder to read his expressions but as he strolls beside me without much reaction to the noises of the trees, I didn’t think he’s that nervous, in fact he seems to like it.
It’s almost like we’re simply out for a nice evening meander through the forest.