The things he’d been a part of. The things he’d done, not because he wanted to, but because sometimes survival was a bitch that backed you into a corner.
The shit that had been done to him…
The things he’d seen…
All those kids…
My jaw clenched tight and I shook myself from those thoughts. That wasn’t a spiral I needed to go down. Not now, not ever.
I’d gotten good at pushing things down and pretending like they weren’t part of my life. Like they didn’t happen to me.
“I’m not sure where we stand,” Reed said, voice as broken as the look on his face. “We still don’t have a clue who’s behind this. You didn’t want me going to Ford, and I’ve respected that, but—”
“Look at where we’re at now,” I said with a tiny mocking smirk. I knew that was where he was going with it, you know, in that nice way that didn’t sound exactly like ‘I told you so’ even though it would be. He tended to sugarcoat shit so we didn’t feel like scolded children. Which normally was nice, but we didn’t have time for Reed’s coddling right now.
We’d fucked ourselves, and we all just had to get over it.
“Austin,” Jameson growled in warning.
I shrugged. I was only speaking the truth.
We should have ended this group months ago. The problem was, we were trying to go softly, trying to sneak in and putthem in a chokehold from behind. It wasn’t working, and I imagined by now, they’d probably caught onto the fact that we were closing in on them, even if they didn’t know exactly who we were. For some reason, they’d picked Agent Ford Priestley as the fall guy.
That was where I was stumped.
Why him?
Did these people know about Ford Priestley’s division that was supposedly super-secret and all? Was there another connection? I was desperate to reveal the pieces we didn’t have yet, and damn near convinced that we would know everything the moment we had them.
“Austin’s not wrong,” Dune spoke up, crossing his arms over his chest and shoving his hands into his pits, making him look like a beefed-up bouncer. My eyes were glued to the fabric and stitches circling his bicep, just waiting for it to give way. “We made that call, and now we have to at least acknowledge where it’s gotten us.”
Seriously, I liked to work out, but Dune was just…
And if I didn’t know what a docile teddy bear he was inside, I might be a little frightened of him.
I tore my gaze away from Dune’s hulking arms just in time to catch Reed’s head bouncing with a nod.
“You think the agent is part of it now?” I asked the room.
I wasn’t sure where I stood. Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of the FBI. And yeah, when Agent Priestley and his team would show up to help us out on a job, I tended to find the shadows real quick and stay there. Which had more to do with me and less to do with him as a person, but still…
“You think they are pinning it all on him, using him as a fall guy?” I continued on.
Remy and Milo shared a look. One that I think Milo only caught half the meaning of.
“We think Agent Priestley is clean,” Remy said, and I assumed he was speaking for himself and Milo. “We’ve gone over his bank statements, tracked his phone, and dug up what we could about him. We can link his locations to the job. There’s nothing out of the ordinary as far as his spending habits go, and there certainly isn’t an unexplainable amount going into his account.”
“He could have another account,” Jameson pointed out.
“Or have a ton of cash buried in his backyard,” Theon chimed in with, cutting his eyes to his man with a shrug. Cade stared back at Theon with confusion wrinkling his brow, almost like he didn’t recognize his sweet, timid partner for a moment.
“Yes, we thought of that too, but there’s nothing indicating he’s doing shady stuff on the side. We’ve been doing this long enough, we know what to look for.” Remy paused, then shrugged. “If he’s hiding shit, then he’s really good at keeping it hidden. And… no offense to him, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would be able to keep that level of shadiness hidden from us.”
Remy’s face said it was just a statement, while Milo had a bit of a smug raise to his brow.
They were good and they knew it. Hell, we all knew it. And now that they were working as a team instead of at each other’s throats, things had gotten so much better. They were unstoppable… well, except for finding this FBI agent who was in charge of The Sons of the Holy Fire. But other than that, those two were the best*cough*hackers*cough*out there.
“So… what do we do?” Sawyer asked, sounding like he was having trouble keeping up with everything.
