48. Kiera
KIERA
Leo’s fingers traced the muscles on my calves as I laid back on the couch.
Upstairs, Spencer was getting ready for her froyo meetup with Caleb. She’d wanted some space before she jumped into that deep end.
Dom still wasn’t home from the office, the sun already setting over Valemont as evening turned to night.
“Do you think it’ll go okay?” I asked, looking at Leo’s amber eyes.
Broken from her trance, Leo nodded. “I do. Spencer loves that kid. Caleb will get why she kept the truth from him.”
I hoped Leo was right. Spencer had been on edge all day, pacing around the house and refusing to have any real conversions about how she was feeling.
“Besides, I think it’ll be good for Spencer, to not have to carry all the weight of Jess’s death alone.” Something darker washed over Leo’s face. “Except for the Dom thing, I guess.”
From what Spencer had mentioned to me, she wasn’t going to put Dom on blast. After all, Dom herself had nothing to do with Jess or Christina’s demise. It would only complicate Dom’s relationship with her nephew.
And all of the rest was between Spencer and Dom to resolve. Something I was certain they were well on the way to doing.
“Mm. It won't matter once we take Isaac down anyway – level the scales or whatever.” I shrugged, trying to comfort myself.
There was a part of me that hated not being able to be there, to help Spencer if she got flustered.
But this was her fight and the rest of us would just have to be here for her in the aftermath.
Clearing her throat, Leo squeezed my feet. “Thank you for talking Spence into doing this.”
A rare ding came to my phone, forcing my eyes to the screen.
Mom.
Biting my lip, I tried to look away but couldn’t peel my eyes off the screen. “Yeah, for sure.”
She’d been texting more, with increasingly intense determination to see me. Every message was vague, platitudes about needing to talk and not wanting to be distant. But never any real information.
Leo went on, “I just know I’m not the best at talking with her about this stuff. And I appreciate that you’ve helped her navigate it so much.”
When I didn’t respond, Leo leaned closer and put her hands on my arms. “Hey, you okay?”
I closed my phone and tossed it into the folds of the couch. “Yeah, sorry.”
All it took was one eyebrow raise from Leo for me to confess. “It’s my mom, she’s back to pestering me.”
“Need me to call her back?” Leo smirked, an annoyance in her eyes for the broken boundaries my mother was all too comfortable to cross.
Shaking my head, I looked away. It was too hard to tell Leo what I was really thinking when I looked into her gorgeous eyes. “I’m just starting to wonder…”
“Princess…”
I let out a groan. “No, I’m serious. Maybe I should see her.”
“You should or you want to?”
It was a fair distinction. But the more my mom texted, the more convinced I became that she might actually know something.
Balking at the idea of wanting to see her, I shook my head. “God, no. I don’t want to. I just wonder if she might know something that could help us.”
“How could she know anything useful that we couldn’t find ourselves?” Leo tilted her head. Clearly, she wanted to find out what I was really thinking.
I bit my lip. “She’s obviously in touch with at least Gabe since she was at the press conference, which means she has at least spoken to Isaac. And Gabe is so tied to Zeus that I’d be shocked if Isaac hadn’t gotten his grip around Maura.”
Before Leo could try to dissuade me, I kept going, “He might have told her something, knowing that she’s desperate for more money. We know they have a history, it wouldn’t be crazy for them to have stayed in touch.”
Our visit to Vivienne had reminded me just how close our families were. We’d spent almost all of our childhoods together. If Dom and I managed to find each other again, it wouldn’t be all that insane to imagine that Maura and Isaac still had a connection.
“That’s a fair point.” Considering it, Leo sucked her teeth.
I grabbed her forearms and squeezed them. “What if my mother has information about the IPO and when Isaac plans to take Zeus public? I’d never forgive myself if there was something I could have done.”
Shaking her head, Leo found it all implausible. “It’s just so unlikely.”
“She’s been saying that she needs to talk to me, that it’s really important. What if it’s the IPO?”
Leo pulled me in, moving my hips toward her. “Kiera, you know I adore you. But all of this… it’s just not like Isaac to have loose lips. Your mom wouldn’t even know that the IPO was important to you.”
True. As far as Maura was concerned, Brennan’s shares dissolved upon his death and he hadn’t even considered how we would feed ourselves. A part of me thought she must have hated him for it, that all of her pursuit of wealth was really just anger for the way my father chose to leave.
Or at least the way she thought he left.
“It’s far more likely that your mom is just trying to draw you out, to manipulate you like she always does.” Sadness passed over her eyes as she held me close. “You know I hate saying it. I just know how much she likes having the power over you.”
I wanted to fight her on it, to keep pushing. But the slamming of the front door and the heavy footsteps of my most dangerous captor drew my eyes instead.
Standing in the doorway, Dom’s hair was messy from her bike helmet. She swept it from her face as she stood on the threshold. “Well, Major Callahan, you were right.”
“No shit.” Leo scoffed, lifting my legs off her lap and standing up. “What’d you find?”
Dom’s face darkened as she looked down at me on the couch. “An email cache, thousands if not millions of them on a remote server.”
Pumping her fists, Leo let out a cheer. “Let’s fucking go.”
“We don’t have long, I put a bug in there to give us remote access but it won’t take a while for Zeus’ tech nerds to find it.
We’ve gotta pull everything we can off of there, search everything we can and make sure we have them before we get kicked out.
” There was a glint of hope in Dom’s blue eyes, something in them disturbed but optimistic that we might actually succeed.
Leo ran down the hall and came back with her laptop in hand as Dom got settled in her usual chair, popping open her own computer.
Once Dom got Leo set up on the server, the two of them locked in.
I watched them work, quickly scanning file names and starting to drag them over to their own hard drives. They could spend the next couple weeks reading through all of them, figuring out if any of it was valuable.
But right now, they needed to make sure Isaac couldn’t rip the evidence out from under us.
Spencer clapped her hands as she entered the living room. “So, how do I look–”
Stopping in her tracks, her gaze flicked between Dom and Leo’s laptops before landing on me. “What’d I miss?”
I stood from my spot on the couch, brushing a loose strand of her messy hair from her face. “Leo was right, Isaac’s been hiding a cache of emails on some dinosaur server. They’re ripping files.” Straightening out her vintage leather jacket, I admired her outfit. “But you look amazing.”
Clearing her throat, Spencer blew out some warm air. “And we’re sure this is a good idea?”
Confident, I nodded. “Yes, babe.”
Lifting an eyebrow, Spencer smiled. “Look who’s giving out pet names now.” She bit her lip. “And we think he’ll still want to talk to me?”
“Of course. He’s your nephew, he adores you. It will be completely fine. And I’ll be here when you get home for a debrief.” My eyes flicked to Dom and Leo who were clicking away on their keyboards. “And so will these two zombies.”
Spencer planted a kiss on my cheek. “You’re so perfect, Bunny.”
With that, Spencer headed out to face her nephew.
My eyes caught on my phone, sandwiched in the couch cushions. Shaking the chill that moved through my body, I turned my back on the device.
Tonight, my three protectors needed me.
Even if the question of my mom’s involvement lurked in the back of my mind, there was nothing I could do about it tonight.
I’d have to press my lovers on it in the morning. There wasn’t much time to waste.
With any luck, we could get ahead of the tsunami that was about to engulf our worlds before it all came crashing down on us.