One by one, voices filtered through the comms, a steady rhythm of readiness.
“Adam here. In position.” His husband’s tone was low, controlled, professional, the kind of calm that usually came right before he broke someone’s face.
“August. Aiden. Ready.”
“Jericho and Atticus. Ready.”
“Shep, Mac and I are good to go.”
“Asa and Avi. Ready.”
“Lincoln and Jackson. Ready.”
“Arsen and Dimitri. Ready.”
“Levi, Nico, and Mal. Ready.”
The litany of names filled Noah’s ears like a heartbeat, his family, his army. Every call sign was another pulse of trust and danger, another reminder that their love language had always been violence. Somewhere in those dark halls, Bev was running out of time, and Noah’s people were the ones tightening the noose.
He’d considered the comms check complete when two final voices crackled through the line.
“Cree and Jordan. Ready.”
“Were you two on comms the whole time?” Adam asked before he could stop himself.
“Uh, no. We decided to join at the last minute. We went to find our friends,” Jordan said, his tone defensive and a little scandalized. “And…”
“And…” twenty people seemed to chorus at once, a collective purr of predatory curiosity.
“We found them,” Cree said, sounding like a man who’d seen horrors he would never fully recover from.
“And what were they doing?” Avi asked, with entirely too much interest.
There was a pause long enough for static to hiss through the line before Jordan answered carefully, “Getting to know each other?”
“Getting to know each otherhow?” Calliope asked, words dripping with mischief and promise.
There was a shaky exhale. “Biblically,” Jordan said.
Adam made a triumphant sound that was entirely too pleased. “If you snapped a pic, I’ll give you ten grand.”
“Youwantpictures of our friends hooking up?” Jordan asked incredulously.
“When you put it like that, it sounds creepy,” Adam grumbled, tone that of a sulking child caught mid-crime.
Noah shook his head. How could a cold-blooded killer also be such a twelve-year-old? If it weren’t for the fact that Adam looked like a Greek god in Kevlar, no one would ever believe he was the playboy/badboy the tabloids painted him to be.
Before Noah could ponder the paradox further, Aiden chimed in, voice dry. “You want pics of your nephew—er—uncle?—hooking up?” A beat of silence, then, “He’s barely old enough to vote, you perv.”
The correction came too late. The other Mulvaneys smelled blood in the water.
“Yeah, see,” Asa shot back. “Evenyoucan’t keep it straight.”
“It’s fucking weird,” Avi added helpfully.
Noah could practically hear Asa’s grin when Avi followed with, “Why couldn’t you have married someone else’s dad instead of your own?”
Thomas’s voice cut through the laughter like a whipcrack. “Enough, you two.”
