Now, I wasn’t usually one to judge how another dressed or looked in their own time, and Alessio, well, his style definitely wasn’t mine. But if I’d thought he looked rough earlier tonight, he looked like absolute shit now.
His long hair hung down around his face, the stubble on his cheeks looked longer than I could ever remember seeing it, and the dark circles around his eyes were becoming more and more prominent with every hour he didn’t sleep.
Add in the fact he was sitting in his bat/tech cave with barely any light and he looked like crap. Or a runaway from a nineties grunge band.
“What do you need?”
Okay, so not exactly the greeting I’d been hoping for, but the one I’d expected after his outburst earlier. It was obvious Alessio was carrying around a heavy dose of guilt about everything thathad gone down with Theo, and while we all knew he was doing his best, he didn’t give a fuck, knowing he hadn’t been able to work out who was behind this.
But I wasn’t here to try to assuage him of that guilt. Hell, I knew all about feeling guilty—I was busy carrying around my own load.
We’d all have to deal with that in our own way and our own time, but right now we needed to come together to work out what thefuckthis new piece of information meant—and Alessio would just have to suck it up and work with me, because I wasn’t going to sit back and twiddle my goddamn thumbs.
Keeping my voice low, so as to not wake Theo, I said, “I want to know how your search is going.”
Alessio grunted and leaned back in his seat. “Clearly awesome, since I haven’t contacted you.”
I narrowed my eyes and tried to remind myself he was going through something. But honestly, we wereallgoing through something, and I was getting sick and tired of his surly-ass attitude.
“Clearly, but that doesn’t mean you might not have come up with some ideas, places to look, possible locations…”
“All of which I’ll tell you when I work it out.”
“I don’t want to wait until then.”
“Meaning?”
“I want to work with you.”
There was a pause, and then, “I don’tdothat.”
“And I don’t fucking care,” I said a little louder than I meant to, and when Theo shifted on the couch but didn’t wake, I let out a breath. “Listen, I know you usually work solo, but I can’t just sit here and do nothing, okay?”
Alessio sighed and moved back in closer to the screen. “I think it’s a street or road or something like that. I don’t know where exactly yet, but if we’re going off the idea that whoeverthis motherfucker is is part of Libertine, then I’m thinking something local.”
“Yeah, I could see that for sure.”
“And based off that, we have a Mott Street that runs through Chinatown?—”
“You don’t think that’s a little…obvious?”
“I think it’ssuperfucking obvious, but that might also be the appeal.” Alessio ran his hand through his hair and turned to the computer on his right. “Doing all this right under our nose, in our backyard? It would track with it being an inside job.”
That thought pissed me the hell off—that they would have some sort of meeting place here in our city. Fuck that.
“Let’s check it out,” I said, and opened a secure browser to pull up a map. “Great, only a half-mile of restaurants, shops, and buildings to sift through.”
Alessio grunted, then his face was back in the camera. “Theo didn’t mention anything else he might’ve heard?”
My eyes shifted above the computer screen to where Theo lay sleeping peacefully for the first time in days.
“No.” I shook my head and looked back to see Alessio’s mouth twisted into a thoughtful expression.
“He was being taken there, right? That’s what that fucker said?”
“Right.”
“Theo was pretty beat up when you got to him?—”
