Right.Escalated timeline.He wants me to find a wife and settle down, or I’ll no longer have access to the family money or resources.I’m being forced into Boudreaux leadership–and a marriage–against my will.And if I don’t agree, I’ll be cut off, in which case I won’t be able to save Brooks.I have good men, but without the credentials as the Boudreaux heir, I lose power in this city.
As my father very well knows.
So it’s either get married, or desert Brooks.
I don’t have a good option, here.
But I might have a plan.
I just need Brooks to keep her mouth shut and her head off the chopping block until I can execute it.
Lucien
Iput my phone firmly down on the table and turn to the kid in the corner, his head ducked down over a laptop and his back curved.
“Hunter, where are we?”I snap.
He looks up, all enormous green eyes and thick-rimmed glasses, and I wonder again where the fuck this city found him.The kid is evidently the best hacker in town, according to some measurement I never knew existed, and when I told my men I needed someone who could get into Dom’s files and get me information, Daniel immediately said “Hunter Roman,’ like this was a name everyone knew and I didh’t.
Though of course I did.No one got as good at his job as Hunter without me knowing who they were and what they did.Where they lived and who their family was.
What they wanted most in the world—and where I could find their pain point.
Hunter had been easy, luckily.He might be the best tech genius in the city but he was also only nineteen, and didn’t come from a crime family, so didn’t have much experience with men like me and certainly didn’t have a mafioso father pulling his threads in the background.His family weren’t smugglers or drug runners who somehow managed to produce a kid that could handle computers.Hell, I didn’t even think they’d been here during the years of the Civil War, when everything in New Orleans shifted and went underground.
No, they’re transplants from California.And they’re artists.Glass blowers, to be exact, who own a shop down in the French Quarter where they make custom pieces for residents and tourists alike.
I don’t know how they ended up here or what they did to get a kid like Hunter, but it was easy enough to convince him to come work for me.And so far, I haven’t been disappointed.
“Well?”I ask, when he’s still staring at me with that mossy green gaze.
He jerks like I’ve hit him—which I would never do, of course, but he doesn’t know that—and then glances back at the thing he calls a laptop in front of him.When I told him we were coming to this cafe, he insisted on bringing that along with him, and I didn’t forbid it.The thing looks like it belongs on a fucking battlefield, but I’m not a hacker.Maybe that’s what hacking computers looks like.
“We’re close enough that I’ve got the network,” he says finally.“I’m working on getting into it, though.Once I’m in, I’ll find who else is on it, locate the right computers, and enter them.”
I allow myself the ghost of a smile.“Locate them an enter them?I hope you don’t speak to women like that.”
When he turns his gaze to me, it’s dead serious.“I never talk to women about hacking.They don’t follow the same rules we do.”
I stare at him, trying to figure out whether he’s serious, and then seal my lips shut, exchanging on loaded glance with Daniel before I turn away.I have so many potential answers to Hunter’s question that I don’t know where I’d start, and something tells me he wouldn’t understand any of them, anyhow.Hell, I’m not even sure if I’m breaking some rule by talking to him while he’s hacking.
But he’s right about one thing: Women don’t follow the same rules as us.
Starting with Brooks.
I make my way to Daniel and the stack of papers he has on the table in front of him.I tasked him with going through everything we’ve collected in the last week and finding my fucking sister—plus Aislyn, if he sees anything of her—but so far, he’s been quiet.
“Anything?”
He doesn’t even look up, and I see that he’s going through grainy photographs right now.Shots from security cameras on parking lots, then.Looking for girls getting picked up by that fucking van.
“Nothing.You get eyes on Brooks?”
It’s a loaded question, but I don’t give him what he’s truly asking.
“Her father has her.They came out of the brothel, got into a van, and left.”
Now he does look up, his eyes full of questions.“And you just let them go?”
