Nope. Not Lola.
Aiden sat up, heart dropping. “Noah?”
The anger in the younger man’s voice was immediately replaced with confusion and a bit of indignancy. “Yeah, didn’t you look before you answered?”
No. He hadn’t. He’d forgotten that not only Thomas had this number. Noah was Thomas’s second-in-command so it was only logical that he would have Aiden’s emergency contact. He ignored Noah’s comment, assuming it was rhetorical. “What’s up?”
“What’s up?” Noah snapped, instantly angry once more. Aiden winced as his voice rose an octave. “What’s up? Are you fucking serious right now, Aiden? You kidnapped Dad. What do you mean, what’s up?”
Aiden rolled his eyes, his misery temporarily paused by Noah’s sulky tone. “I didn’t kidnap your father, you drama queen.”
Noah made an indignant sound. “Did you or did you not abscond with our father in the dead of night?”
Adam’s garbled voice could be heard in the background, like he was talking around a bite of food. “A thousand dollars says they ran away and eloped…finally.”
Noah must have him on speakerphone. “Tell Adam to fuck off. And who says abscond anymore?” Aiden asked, doing his best to deflect, hoping they would just let this go as something innocent and easily fixed. “We left pre-dawn at best.”
“Don’t be an asshole, Aiden,” Noah muttered.
Aiden smiled in spite of himself. “It’s kind of my default setting, Noah.”
Noah fell silent, forcing Aiden to listen to the sounds of their domesticity as Adam could be heard roughhousing with their dogs. Aiden wasn’t sure if he was supposed to say something more, but just as he was about to say Noah’s name, the boy spoke, this time sounding ten years younger and more than a little afraid.
“What’s going on, Aiden? Seriously. Who’s blackmailing him and why? What do they think he did? Are they implying he killed his family? Because you know that’s fucking insane. Why did we not know about this? Why did he call you and not us? Why didn’t you tell Calliope the whole story? What are we doing about this? How do we—”
Aiden pulled the phone away from his ear as Noah became progressively more upset, finally interrupting to say, “Jesus, kid. Breathe. Just…just breathe, man.”
Aiden wasn’t sure if he was talking to Noah or himself. He’d obviously expected them to know Thomas was gone, that was why he’d told Calliope. But how had they known about the video? Or had something else happened? Had the blackmailer contacted the family? Sent more copies of the message?
“What are you talking about?” he asked, just in case Noah was fishing somehow.
Noah scoffed. “I’m talking about the blackmail video sent to Dad. Why didn’t you tell us about it? Why did you just kidnap Dad and tell Calliope not to worry about it?”
Aiden frowned. How did they know about the video? He shook his head. Fucking Calliope. She must have been monitoring Thomas’s emails. Did she read all his correspondence? His heart galloped as he thought of some of the heated emails he and Thomas had exchanged over the last twenty years. Fuck. She was so nosey.
“I took Thomas with me to get him away from the family. If someone is after him, you’re all safer with us gone. I’m…figuring it out.”
“Figuring it out?” Noah echoed, his exasperation obvious. “Without us? Without his family?Ourfamily? Without Calliope? How?”
“That’s no way to talk to your future stepfather,” Adam called from across the room. Aiden huffed out a sigh. The next time he saw Adam, he was going to punch him in the face. That was a promise.
“Adam,” Noah snapped. “You need to fucking take this more seriously.”
“Why? Dad didn’t kill anybody. I don’t care what some rando perp says. We’ll find this guy and rip out his insides and everything will go back to normal. You need to just relax. You’re going to give yourself an aneurysm before the wedding,” Adam said.
“Did you finally set a date?” Aiden asked.
“I meant yours and Dad’s,” Adam said, then cackled like a super-villain.
“I’m going to kill your fiancé before you ever make it to the altar,” Aiden promised Noah.
Noah gave a long-suffering sigh, then asked, “How serious is this? You know you can’t do this without us, right? You need the family. You need Calliope.”
Aiden huffed a breath out through his nose. How did Thomas tolerate these kids every goddamn day? “I have connections, too, you know. I do this for a living, remember?”
Adam’s voice was suddenly blaring in his ear like he was now lying on top of the phone…or his fiancé. “You bust cheating husbands, bro. You’re not the FBI. Even Calliope hasn’t been able to find anything in that video and she’s searching frame by frame.”
Well, that was disconcerting. He didn’t tell them that he wasn’t working on tracking down the blackmailer yet and hadn’t even started going over the video.
