Aiden covered a lot of fraud cases, sometimes missing persons. It kept him in the industry but gave him enough plausible deniability when it came to the extracurricular activities the Mulvaneys still required of him.
“I also need a favor—”
“Anotherfavor,” Lola corrected.
Aiden frowned. “What?”
“Anotherfavor. Taking over your cases is the first favor,” she pointed out. “But go on.”
Aiden sighed. “I need you to—discreetly—do some digging into something?”
“Discretion is my middle name,” she said mockingly.
Aiden rolled his eyes. Discretion was barely in her vocabulary. There was nothing about her that was discreet, from her wild, kinky curls that fanned around her like a crown to the knee-high boots she wore that made her look like a heroine in some movie. Lola liked to be seen. “I thought your middle name was Mabel?”
“I told you not to bring that up?” Lola muttered. “Anyway…what do you need me to do?”
Aiden didn’t know how to phrase his question without making her suspicious. The last thing he needed was her getting a bug up her ass about his family. But he also couldn’t ask Calliope. Not yet. “I need you to look into the explosion that took out the Mulvaney family.”
Once more, that hesitation, then, “You want me to look into your family?”
It was on the tip of his tongue to say, “They’re not my family,” but he just couldn’t bring himself to say it. His brothers were his brothers. Thomas just wasn’t his father. But that got complicated and Aiden was so fucking done with complicated.
“I don’t need you to investigate how they died. It’s hardly a mystery.” Except, it actually was. “I need a list of everybody who worked on the case. And I mean everybody. From the coroner to the dude who strung the crime scene tape. Everybody.”
The crime scene photos were ground zero. Whoever made that video had access to them. That couldn’t have been a huge pool. Not with the cover-up that clearly took place. But why the cover-up? What had Thomas done? Aiden refused to believe he’d killed his family as the video implied. Thomas was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a family annihilator. They were a very specific breed of killer.
“Yeah, yeah, I got it. Everybody,” she said, like she was quickly tiring of his shit. “Is that it?”
Was it? Yeah. Did he want to hang up with her? No. Talking to her was better than dealing with the man currently unpacking upstairs. Aiden was too pissed.
The minute he hung up the phone with her, he would go upstairs and find Thomas and push his buttons until they both snapped. That was what happened last time. But it wasn’t the only thing that happened last time. And Aiden wasn’t sure he could taste Thomas and then pretend like nothing happened.
Not again.
He leaned his head back against the chair and closed his eyes, seeking patience he’d never had. “Yeah. Let me know what you find.”
They were ghosts haunting the same house, floating past each other in otherwise empty halls, but never communicating—never acknowledging the other existed. Thomas stood in the living room, gazing out the huge window, doing his best to avoid Aiden, who was moving around the kitchen out of sight.
Outside, snow blanketed the ground, but despite the artificial heat pumping through the vents, it felt far colder inside. Aiden couldn’t look at him, and when he did, there was a barely contained…somethingthat caused a grimace to appear on his face, like Thomas’s mere existence pained him.
He hadn’t uttered a single word since he’d ordered Thomas upstairs the day before and it was untenable. The worst kind of torture. Like when his parents would give him the silent treatment when his grades slipped, or how they’d take his siblings on trips and exclude him as punishment. Aiden had unwittingly found the perfect way to torment Thomas. A dark empath indeed.
It was ironic, really. Thomas rarely felt lonely despite living alone in a house far too big for him, but with Aiden within arm’s reach, he’d never felt more isolated. The compulsion to touch him, to hold him, to bury his face in his throat and just inhale him was a physical constant ache inside him. But they were like magnets with the same polarity, repelling each other at every turn.
“Breakfast.”
Thomas snapped his head around, startled by Aiden’s gruff announcement. By the time he went to say thanks, Aiden was already gone. He should’ve followed him. Maybe this was an olive branch of some kind. A way for them to work together amicably…at least, until Aiden learned the truth.
Surely, he must have softened a bit. He’d gone to the trouble of making breakfast. Now was Thomas’s chance. But try as he might, he found himself rooted in place. The back door opened, then shut, then Aiden appeared on the other side of the large glass window of the main room.
Thomas watched, riveted, as Aiden crossed the yard, and he imagined hearing the snow crunching beneath his booted feet as his gaze snagged on the wide strides he made as he walked. Somewhere along the way, Aiden had passed Thomas in both height and muscle mass, turning him into an imposing figure, not only in stature but in appearance. His hair was too long and his jaw remained covered in a permanent five o’clock shadow.
Aiden pulled something from his pocket and then scraped his hair off his face into a knot before pulling off his flannel and tying it around his waist, leaving just an eggshell-colored thermal that hugged his well-muscled arms and torso. Thomas couldn’t help but take notice.
Aiden snatched an ancient-looking ax from a tree that was likely just as old, then grabbed a log, setting it on a wooden stump, before bringing the ax down in a perfect arc, splitting the wood in half and tossing it onto the ground.
Thomas watched, eyes glued to Aiden, as he broke down log after log. He was just letting off steam. There was already more than enough firewood inside. Thomas always made sure the safe houses stayed stocked.
