CHAPTER SEVEN
Before anyone could say another word, Payton was barking out orders. “Huddle. Now.” We moved into a circle, and doing so blocked our view of the gym outside our ring.
Payton lowered his voice. “CJ, grab your computer and erase the feed from these cameras from the time Mr. Coppola left. Better yet, loop them. Take your brother with you.”
Unbidden, my eyes went to the cameras. One occupied every corner. “I wasn’t talking loudly. Would they truly be able to pick up what I said?”
“Gamma employs dedicated lip-readers just for instances like this, du?o.” As if it was their fault I’d carelessly confessed something that could get me locked up, Brock glared at the surveillance.
Payton continued his orders. “Corbin—”
“Sneak into the monitoring room and delete the hard copies?”
“If needed, Brock and Aleks can divert attention in the shooting range nearby. Their bickering is legendary, and no one will blink twice at Aleks being there with his proclivity for shooting things.”
Aleks bellowed with laughter. “Oh, Boulder. Approved reason to fight with you? This feels like American Christmas because it comes early!”
They started bickering in Russian, their favored language for arguing with each other. Of everyone on the team, Brock found Aleks’s “mistakes” in English the least endearing, so essentially, our team leader had just written Aleks an endorsement to go play catch with a primed nuclear launch button.
After they left, already well on their way to drawing everyone’s attention, Payton glanced around, settling on Bryce. “Since Mr. Myers slipped out, you’ll have to hurry to catch up with him. For something this important, I don’t want him operating on his own. You’re his lookout.”
I’d startled at Payton’s comment, missing Corbin’s exit as well, but sure enough, the tawny mop of hair was gone.
“No problem,” Bryce drawled, strolling along at a sedate pace despite Payton’s demand to rush.
Payton pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Hey, don’t worry,” Duane said cheerfully, clapping him on the shoulder. “Our team knows what they are doing. If people saw Bryce Rost rushing around, they’d wonder where the zombies were. He’s just doing his job and flying under the radar. Speaking of which, you were about to tell me to distract our interim liaison while you take Callie somewhere private and debrief her, correct?”
Payton frowned. “Yes, debrief. Only debrief. Don’t make it sound so perverted, Dr. Scott.”
Duane wobbled his head, miming, “Dr. Scott.”
The crease between Payton’s brows deepened.
“Anyway, I’ll see you two soon. Are we meeting in seven twelve or seven fourteen?” Duane checked, walking backwards as he rattled off the numbers of our temporary living quarters.
Payton considered this but ultimately decided, “Let’s shake things up and meet in CJ’s office.”
“Ten-four, Emerson,” he called.
My heartbeat kicked up when I figured it’d been maxed out. If Payton didn’t trust the classrooms they’d given us, then our situation was more precarious than I assumed. I leaned in close, getting a whiff of the coffee he’d drunk this morning before Aleks swiped it. “Were we watched the entire time?”
Because between Aleks and that shower stall last night, there were definitely actions I didn’t want advertised. Only strength of will kept my eyes from wandering to the girls’ locker room.
Payton paused, his demeanor shifting once more, and it tugged at something deep inside my core when he reacted to me, no matter the situation. “We’re being cautious until we know more.” He glanced at the camera, addressing it. “Mr. Tate Jr.?”
I tried to hide my wince because CJ would not appreciate being junior to his twin.
“Given your expertise and role in writing our firewall protocols, I assume you’ve gained access to the cameras. Spread the word to the others that we’ll meet in your office when they finish. Bring the bug sweeping equipment and any other items you think necessary to conduct a secure conversation.”
The camera inside the protective plastic orb bobbed up and down.
“And am I right to presume you heard me give out the rest of the order, so you know what needs to be fixed on the feeds?” Another bob. “Perfect. Callie, I believe we had a date scheduled this morning to escape the others’ company for a while.”
He tucked my arm into his elbow. It should have felt awkward being escorted by a man in a waistcoat vest and pressed pants while I wore legging capris and a loose tank top, but he kept up a nonstop stream of pleasantries the entire trip down to the fourth floor.
That acted as a double-edged sword, because I didn’t have to worry about contributing to the ruse—not my strong point—but it also freed up my attention to fret over my blunders and how mad everyone would be when they discovered how much I’d kept from them.
“They’ll abandon you,” a chilly voice chirped. Goosebumps broke out over my skin as I glanced down the hall and spotted Ivanov’s apparition wavering in and out as people passed through and around him. The words had come in loud and clear, as if he’d whispered them directly into my ear, even though he stood at the far end of the eighty-foot hallway.
I shivered when he blinked back out of existence, just as Payton pulled open the door to our destination and guided us inside.
Surprise cut my worries off as we entered and found the twins already there, their faces lit by the glow of their prospective devices.
Considering the short amount of time that had passed, they must have come here straight away.
“Don’t worry, boss man. We’re clear in here,” Jace offered, leaving behind the contraption he’d been messing with as he ambled up to us. “I scanned for bugs the second we got in, and I just finished setting up a noise scrambler.”
“Brilliant,” Payton praised, leading me all the way around the giant desk that housed the megalithic computer CJ had built. “How’s the doctoring going?”
CJ turned and flashed a beaming smile in greeting as Payton dragged over a chair for me to sit in. “Doctoring, huh? We can roll with that. It’s alright. Callie, you caught us by surprise. It would have been better if we stayed and worked out for a few minutes, so I could loop something other than a heated discussion.”
“It couldn’t be helped. If we waited to act, we would risk the information getting out.” Payton shrugged and spun me around, bracing one hand on the desk beside me and the other on the backrest of my seat, fully surrounding me as he leaned down to stare at the monitors.
My reflection stared back on the black screen.
Oh!
I jolted into action, realizing Payton didn’t intend to grill me now, instead sitting me here to contribute to this highly illegal job of pulling the wool over our employer’s eyes. My fingers tapped at a spare keyboard, waking the screen. “How can I help?”
CJ grinned sheepishly. “I’m so glad you asked. Jace tried helping the best he could, but…”
Jace huffed, mirroring Payton’s stance and ruffling his twin’s curls. “But it took too much of his attention to walk me through each baby step, so I relegated myself to the elementary task of running the bug detector. Seriously, a first grader could do that. Beep, you’re getting warmer. Beep, beep, beep! You’re on fire.”
“Can we focus?” Payton interrupted.
“Um, of course,” CJ replied. “Callie, could you work on the audio parts for the loop I made? I’m correcting the time stamps right now.”
“Yeah, I’ll figure something out,” I answered, since I’d pulled off a similar task before. Then, my life had been on the line, but the stakes felt higher now because of the people I loved.
My actions must have popped an alert on CJ’s monitor, because his keystrokes quieted before he asked, “You’re installing a freeware sound program?”
I turned, seeing the notification box asking for his username and password to authorize the installation. “It’s an open-source, multi-track audio editor and recorder, which means it’ll be hard to trace back to us so long as I camouflage any digital signatures, ergo plausible deniability,” I corrected, nudging his arm. “Are you going to approve it or not? Because I could probably hack your password in about twenty seconds.”
He paused, turning to me. CJ was an enigma. He usually went with the flow and avoided friction, but when it came to his areas of expertise, like comics and computers, a confident and occasionally smug side emerged, which some cave-woman part of me found undeniably attractive. He sniffed, holding my gaze. “No, you won’t, Byte-syzed.”
He’d called me my hacker name—something he rarely did. It made me smile because I was talking to his hacker ego in this moment also.
I wondered if he, too, enjoyed my more self-assured demeanor. “Since you sound so certain, I can eliminate anything to do with those Marvel or DC movies you enjoy watching nonstop. That leaves the other comics you love that aren’t a part of either. What’s left?” I pretended to tap my chin. “Hmm, is Teenage Mutant Ninja—”
CJ’s eyes rounded. “Fine! You’re approved. I already typed it in. Go on. Do your thing.”
Jace coughed. “And to think you’re constantly harping on and on about my passwords.”
CJ stopped, regaining his in charge attitude as he fixed his twin with a glare. “Password1234 has to be the most commonly used password in the United States. I’m shocked programs even let it through without laughing in your face.” With that, he resumed fixing the code and time stamps for the video files to ensure they wouldn’t appear to have been tampered with.
Jace picked up some doodad or other from the mess of computer hardware and wires scattered about like dissected creatures in a mad scientist’s laboratory. “You’re right. They don’t. Sometimes I have to add an exclamation mark to hit that ‘special character’ requirement. Besides, your constant complaints annoyed me, so I changed them all.”
“Yes,” CJ deadpanned, without slowing, “to Password5678.”
“And sometimes an exclamation point, baby brother.”
CJ groaned. “Callie, can you believe our DNA is identical?”
“Well, everything is identical physically, so yeah,” I said, converting the MPVs into separate audio and video. It wasn’t necessary, but I had an idea for later where having two separate files would be handy, especially since I’d glimpsed the piecemeal job CJ had made of the visual side. To be completely fair, he’d had no time or material to work with.
Wrapped up in my process, I didn’t realize the others had stilled until Jace exclaimed in a Southern belle voice, “Callie King, how scandalous of you. You’re making CJ and I blush, talking about matters better left in private. Were you raised by monkeys?”
My fingers stumbled across the keys, losing their rhythm.
I’d said something?
When I couldn’t figure out the issue after three reruns through my reply, I said, “Wolves, actually, but what did I say?”
Payton cleared his throat, but Corbin’s voice rang out with jubilant energy. “Oh, pick me! I know the answer!”
“Corbin?” I jolted, spinning to confirm I hadn’t lost my mind, but sure enough, there he stood, sky-blue eyes glowing brightly with the added light from the array of monitors. Putting aside the fact that I failed to hear his entrance, how the heck had he slipped in from a sunlit hallway into the darkened bat cave environment CJ favored without drawing attention to the door opening and closing?
“Yay, you picked me,” Corbin answered. “Callie, you commented on the physical appearance of twins.”
That was what they were fussing about?
I frowned. “But they are identical.”
This time, I noted Bryce entering the office with a flare of light from outside before shutting the room into darkness. “What’d I miss?”
“Not much, just kinky things going over Callie’s head again,” Corbin answered from six inches to my right, ruffling my hair.
His proximity didn’t startle me. At least that was my story since I’d masked my jump at the last second as adjusting the height of the rolling chair to get more comfortable. “Explain it to me.”
“You’re busy.”
“Multitasking. It’s a thing. Look it up,” I teased, opening a notepad on the computer and coding out the functions of the trap idea.
Corbin answered Bryce’s earlier question as Brock and Aleks returned, still bickering from their argument that seemed to have turned into a real argument if the name-calling flying back and forth was any indication. “CJ asked if she could believe Jace was related to him, to which Callie replied, everything is identical physically.”
I frowned, weaving in another loop of if/then statements tied to actions that I would take while attempting to break down a foreign file’s origins. “I didn’t say it with all those inflections.”
Brock grunted, apparently only needing those two sentences to be brought up to speed. “Doesn’t matter how you said it, du?o. These idiots are a bunch of pervs.”
Sensing a weak link despite his intimidating appearance, I paused my work to glance at him, widening my eyes. “Will you explain it to me, byapok?”
Brock folded his arms and widened his stance, a visual “hell no” if I’d ever seen one, but I remained calm and composed because, for whatever reason, he found it difficult to deny me when I asked him things directly.
“Fuck me,” he muttered in Russian, likely because he’d been arguing in the language on his way up. Yeah, there were no question mark words in my Russian. In fact, some of the first vocabulary I’d learned were curse words due to the filthy men Ivanov employed. “Fine. Just stop with the eyes, du?o.”
I’d done nothing but widen them, so I turned to the computer screen since the light naturally caused me to squint.
“Twins are an inherently sex-oriented subject.”
I paused. “They are?”
His mouth opened and closed as he appeared to struggle with how to explain something before he settled on, “I wasn’t entirely correct earlier. It’s not just our team who are idiot perverts. It’s the entire world.” He ran his hand through his inky black hair. “Du?o, what you have to understand is people get a little crazy with twins.”
“Really? Why?”
“Fuck if I know.”
Aleks frowned at Brock. “Don’t lie to medvezhonok, Boulder.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are,” Aleks argued as he sat next to my screen, although doing so probably dislodged and broke about half a dozen projects CJ had been working on. Aleks switched to Russian. “Little bear, have you ever slept with the twins together?”
My cheeks burst into flames, because I knew he wasn’t talking about sleeping.
“Holy hell, what did he say to her, Brock?” Bryce murmured, transfixed on Aleks’s and my conversation.
Brock grunted instead of answering, and luckily Aleks was too invested in our moment to interpret either.
“N-Nyet?” I replied.
Aleks’s arctic eyes danced with mirth. “Are you asking me? Because I would not have asked if I knew—”
“Nyet!” I declared more firmly, despite the radiant heat still occupying my cheeks.
“Okay, but you’re thinking about it now, right? What that would be like?”
I nodded, unable to meet anyone’s eyes. “Bryce told me once that they… get off on the twin sandwich thing.”
Bryce straightened from the wall. “Hey, why’d you say my name?”
“I’ll tell you later,” Brock answered, following along with our conversation to keep Aleks reined in if necessary.
“Yes, precisely. You have heard of this ‘twin sandwich thing?’” Aleks asked.
“Not really, other than Bryce mentioning it and that the twins enjoy it.”
“A twin sandwich is exactly what you are imagining.”
I’d sort of figured. Also, I wondered why CJ and Jace hadn’t brought it up if it was something they enjoyed. We’d had plenty of opportunities.
“I see questions in your eyes, little bear, and that is something you should ask them,” Aleks cautioned.
I bit my lip and returned to adjusting the frequencies of various sounds just enough to distort the audio and make it obvious that it’d been tampered with.
“Now, can you imagine the unlucky billions of people who don’t get to experience what you do but can only imagine it? People get crazy about twins. They get cocky, overconfident. They think that if one finds me attractive, then the other must as well, and then their imagination takes it from there. Men are praised and revered for convincing twins to sleep with them. Add in how our relationship naturally encourages interesting pairings, and their minds instantly jumped to—”
“Okay, okay! I get it! No more explanation necessary, big bear.”
Aleks nodded, satisfied with his job well done.
I paused the recording, having recorded bits and pieces of our current conversation to replace the original audio, just in case they bypassed my written fail safes and managed to uncover and eliminate the background noise of a train, lion roaring, kids playing in a park, and computer keys clacking on a typewriter.
Let the Russian translation department have a heyday with twin sandwiches.
“Have you slept with more than one person at once yet, little bear?” Aleks continued.
“That’s none of your business,” Brock finally cut in. “Leave Callie alone.”
I kept my eyes glued to my screen, finishing up the coding and burying the file within the original video, combined with CJ’s updated time stamps.
Aleks’s gaze felt heavy as it bounced between Brock and me. “Really, Boulder? I didn’t think you had it in you. Who’d you partner up with to please our girlfriend?”
Brock seemed resolute against answering him, so I figured it would be the perfect moment to test out CJ’s and my combined end product and hit play. They all migrated closer. Even CJ swiveled in his chair and propped his elbow up on the desk beside me.
The video glitched twice, and the sound of the conversation between Aleks and I played, spiking in volume and pitch to match the video.
“We could rerecord that if you wanted. You know, to synchronize who’s talking. I can write a script of mundane topics,” CJ offered. “I don’t think anyone realized you were recording.”
“Yeah, but I timed the distortions to coincide with the glitches. On routine reviews, they’ll just assume the tech was having problems for that frame of time, but if anyone was actively surveilling our team, then they’d already know something was up by our behavior and the suspicious feed. I figured we could lean into that and set a trap for them.”
Interest piqued, CJ sat up. “Really?” He rolled even closer, his armrest brushing my elbow. “Show me the coding.”
I did so, blushing from the praising whistle he released.
“This will work?” Payton asked, his carefully neutral tone doing the opposite of what he’d intended and practically betraying his doubt on the matter.
“Oh, it’ll work. It’ll work six ways to Sunday and then some. Like she said, if anyone is surveilling us and they go to dig further, it’ll spin the file into a black hole so distorted they wouldn’t be able to recognize their own mother on the feed.” CJ leaned closer, his nose centimeters from brushing the monitor. “I’ve never seen such an elegant array of if/then statements. It’s… I’m speechless.”
“Calm down, baby brother,” Jace teased. “You haven’t asked the girl to marry you, and you’re already picking out the color of your drapes.”
Despite his teasing tone, the joke fell flat instantly, and I glanced down at my empty ring finger.
“Didn’t we though?” Bryce drawled.
“You did not,” I denied, because it felt like yesterday.
Aleks’s arctic blue eyes pinned me in place with their intensity. “Callie, I’m going to ask you in Russian, because I don’t want to mess this up. There should be no misunderstandings. This way is also faster. We might not have much time.” His gaze shifted to the room’s corner, where I knew a video feed was located.
My confusion mounted.
“Okay. What’s on your mind, big bear?” I asked, switching to Russian with him. Whatever he wished to discuss, it seemed serious.
“For a while now, probably longer than you realize, I’ve meant to ask you something.” He slowly reached a hand into his pocket, when out of nowhere, a strong force line drove him to the ground.
A small object went flying in the opposite direction, tumbling end over end.
I didn’t even glance at Aleks. He could have been attacked by an intruder, but my focus had been stolen by the thing he’d dropped.
It was a small velvet box, and I tried to figure out why it seemed so familiar. Then, I gasped because I remembered. It was when the Emerson and Tate Teams were still separate. I’d spent time with Aleks, and he’d given a very impassioned speech about his feelings for me.
With all the buildup, I had expected him to get on bended knee, only to find out that wasn’t the case.
But, my mind whispered, Aleks had been shocked when he saw it held candy inside.
Had it actually been a marriage proposal?
My thoughts screeched to a halt.
Wait, was this a… a…
Unable to finish the thought, the rest of the room disappeared. Vaguely, I realized others had arrived, apart from the two figures who had frozen while wrestling on the ground, but my brain tuned out the stilled chaos as I bent to retrieve the dropped box, holding it flat in my palm as I inspected its surface.
“The color of pine trees,” I murmured, certain this was the same one Aleks had been so bewildered and then outraged about when he discovered the candy bracelet. Had Corbin switched out Aleks’s ring to prank him, or to stop him from proposing because they’d all been interested too, and if I’d said yes that early on, then we would never be in the relationship we were in today.
My mind overflowed with countless thoughts and questions, too vast to convey or digest, resulting in a blank expression on my face.
I glanced at the others, remembering more had entered at some point.
They were all there.
My heart thudded fast for a split second, but their expressions of terror left me confused.
I redirected my attention to the box, questioning its nature as another prank I didn’t understand.
Or… what if Aleks had never intended to give me a ring? He could have picked a suspiciously shaped package, and inside, it cradled a nice pair of earrings or a bracelet, and if the team didn’t know that, of course they’d all worry, so…
Open it before you drive yourself crazy!
The tip of my pointer pushed the corner of the small box, turning it on my open palm, but I chickened out at the last second.
“I recognize this box…” A frown pulled my brows down as I tried to figure out how to ask them if this was for real without offending anyone. “There used to be a candy bracelet in this box.” No one offered any explanation, leaving me floundering with my spiraling thoughts. “It was so long ago. I’d only been at Delta a couple of months.” I glanced at Aleks where he lay tangled in a fight with Brock. “You threatened Corbin’s life when you saw it had a candy bracelet in it, as if…”
I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know what was up any longer. They’d always said I was a lousy liar. Not one of them uttered a word.
Needing to confirm the contents more than I needed my next breath, I opened the lid, careful not to give any expression away to betray my racing thoughts. My hand flew to my mouth to cover another gasp that fought to escape. It definitely wasn’t a pair of earrings, nor a candy bracelet, for that matter.
Inside, nestled among the dark pine velvet bed, was a ring sparkling in the sunlight filtering through the wall of windows. Though it was a modest size, the crystal clear diamond and swirling, intricate design erased all doubts. This was engagement jewelry.
“Is it the ring?” someone whispered. “I can’t tell.”
Aleks shifted from within Brock’s chokehold, his face red with the exertion to speak. “Medvezhonok, you will marry us, da?”
There it was.
Brock released his hold to punch the Russian in the arm. “You could have fucking practiced the line.”
“I did,” Aleks defended hotly.
“No, it’s ‘Will you marry us?’ not ‘You will marry us.’”
“I practice it! I just make tweezes is all.”
“Tweaks,” Jace corrected, but I’d returned to studying the ring, admiring its beauty but focused on my thoughts. They were all here, but they didn’t seem happy. This obviously wasn’t planned.
“Da, what Jace say. Twix.” Aleks heaved Brock farther off. “American way is too much wishy-washy.”
I reached for the box.
“Shit,” Jace murmured. “It’s like her only speed right now is set to tortuously slow.”
I studied the piece in all its glory, affording the guys the opportunity to see it was in fact a ring in case Aleks’s unique proposal hadn’t clued them in. The precious stone glittered in the October sun, and I pretended to study it, granting them a chance to gather their own thoughts—to stop this or support it, because I couldn’t read them all at once.
However, nothing would beat Aleks’s determination this time, it seemed. “I say America way now. Callie, will you marry us? All of us, though Brock can stay or go. Is no difference.”
Brock growled and shoved him.
No one else spoke though.
Impatient, Payton prodded, “Callie?”
Our leader didn’t sound happy, and that cinched the deal for me. If he wasn’t happy, it was because this hadn’t been their intention.
Tears filled my eyes from a mix of emotions too tangled to decipher, but I smiled anyway, trying not to hurt Aleks’s feelings. “I—” I paused, gathering my thoughts. “Sorry, but I can’t—” Not right now, Aleks, I’d wanted to say but didn’t want anyone to feel like I was leaving them out and favoring him. Instead, I settled on a neutral, “I can’t. Sorry.”
I blinked from my musings to hear Bryce saying, “No, Callina. We were there. I definitely remember a proposal happening.”
“But you didn’t,” I denied.
“Don’t lump me in with idiots, medvezhonok,” Aleks started.
I pointed at the giant Russian. “Exactly. Aleks did. The rest of you weren’t ready, and that’s okay. If people in normal relationships take years to reach that level, it makes sense that with nine of us, we’ll need more time.”
“In Russia,” Aleks began, “man know from first look if he wants to marry girl. There is no—”
“That’s fine for you, Aleks, but it wasn’t for the others.” I squeezed his hand where it sat next to my keyboard. “Forget being on the same page, but I’d like us to at least be within the same book when we think about taking that step, okay, bol’shoy medved?”
He sighed, as if very put upon. “If you in the sist.”
I gave him a soft smile. “Yes, Aleks, I do insist.”
“Quite right. Shelving for the time being,” Payton said. “With the feeds handled, we need to have a discussion that I think would be best held outside our usual spaces, so let’s converge on the multipurpose floor. Stagger our arrivals, but be there within the next hour.”
Everyone agreed and left to make their whereabouts known in the meantime, but CJ grabbed my hand and held me back until the room emptied.
“Just so we’re clear, Callie, Aleks and I are on the same page.”
My eyes rounded as he pecked my cheek and left me flabbergasted in the doorway of his office.