21. Miles #2
"Are we staying away?"
I look at him.
He already knows the answer.
"No," I say.
Mason lets out a quiet breath, it’s half in frustration, and half in resignation. He already knew the answer but asked anyway.
I reach into my waistband and pull out the guy’s phone. I hold it up, and the room goes quiet.
Mason stares at it, then at me, and then back at the phone again. "Is that…"
"One of theirs." I look at it and turn it over. The screen is locked, but the hardware is real and the network connection is live. Whatever is on this device: contacts, messages, and location history is more than I had twenty minutes ago.
"You picked his pocket," Declan says. It’s not a question.
"While he was sitting on my chest hitting me in the head." I look at Mason. "Yes."
Mason's expression does something complicated. Then he shakes his head slowly, the way he does when something is both deeply stupid and genuinely impressive in equal measure.
"Cain taught you well," he says.
I look down at the phone in my hand.
"Yes, he did,” I say.
***
I don’t think my body has ever hurt this much. No, that's a lie. I’m sure Cain almost killed me when we first started training with him.
I throw the phone on the table, and drop down into the chair, closing my eyes as I breath through the pain.
I could have gone to the bathroom to see the damage, but there’s no need to see how fucked up my face looks, I can feel it.
Lifting my t-shirt up, I already see the bruises on my ribs. Fucking great.
Staring at my screens, I see the blank screen, and I wonder how to fix this. How did they get into my system? I close my eyes and lean back for a moment, breathing slowly through the pain.
Three things are going through my head at once.
The phone, how they got into my system and how I know I have to stay away from Sadie to keep her safe.
I can ignore Sadie, be the prick who had sex with her and then never connect with her again. Fuck that makes me a dick, but that’s the only way I can keep her safe. They had pictures of my family, none of her, which is good because they don’t know about her.
Ignoring her is the only way.
That’s my problem solved, now I need to move onto the next.
The phone. I pull my specialized toolkit out of my drawer. It’s the one I use when I need to get into my hardware rather than through it. I push the pain my body is in deep down, as deep as I can get it.
Mason is saying something behind me, but I’m not listening.
My left eye is swelling now, I can feel the pressure of the socket, the heaviness of my tissue swelling from the hits.
My ribs are worse when I sit still rather than when I'm moving, which is my body's way of telling me to keep moving. I’m going to find these fucking assholes, and I’m going to kill them.
"You need stitches," Mason says.
"I need this phone unlocked,” I snap.
"Miles…"
"Mason." I don't look up from the device. "I'm fine."
"You have blood coming from every cut on your face.” Now he sounds annoyed, and worried about me. I don’t think Mason has ever seen me like this before.
"I know."
"And your eye…"
"I know." The first layer of the phone's security comes apart under the bypass tool, at hardware level, it’s the same gap that exists in most commercial devices if you know where to look. "Give me twenty minutes."
He goes quiet. That's the best I'm going to get from him right now and we both know it. But I also know the moment he walks away he will be on the phone to either Cain or dad.
The second layer takes eleven minutes. My hands are steady.
That's the thing I notice, my hands are completely steady despite the ribs and the eye and the unpleasant warmth spreading across the left side of my face where the impact was hardest, and I’m sure is covered in blood.
Steady hands are a choice, not a condition.
Cain taught me that and I've never forgotten it.
The phone unlocks, and the front door opens while I'm working. I hear them upstairs. I knew Mason or Delcan would call them.
I hear voices, but I don't look up until a hand lands on my shoulder and I recognize the weight of it before I see the face.
Cain.
I turn to see Hayden behind him, and Lileah. I hear my mother's voice from the hallway saying something to Mason that I can't make out. That’s when I see Doc carrying a medical bag. I look back at Cain who’s staring at my face for a moment.
Dad will be so pissed off that he had to go to Europe for a business meeting, but I’m sure mom or Hayden will call him the second they know what happened.
Cain pulls out a chair and sits down across from me. "Talk," he says.
I tell him everything, from the screen going dark, the feed, the family photos loading one at a time, and the images of the house. Then about their entry to the house. There were three of them, possibly four. And finally, the message they delivered on their way out.
I know they’ll be back if I don’t stop. I won’t stop, and they don’t scare me.
Cain listens without interrupting. That's always how he listens, with his complete attention. It’s the quality of a man who has been receiving bad news for thirty years and knows the value of letting it finish before he responds.
When I stop talking, he looks at the phone. "And that?" He points to it.
"Theirs. I took it during the fight." I disconnected the bypass tool. The device is fully open now, the contents accessible. "I haven't gone through it yet. I wanted to wait."
Something moves through his expression that I can't fully read. "You waited?"
"You should see it at the same time I do. Plus, I need to figure out how they got into the system and make sure it doesn’t happen again."
He looks at me for a moment, then he nods.
The doctor appears at my shoulder, but I ignore him.