“Rose.” He couldn’t keep the rebuke out of his voice.
“I handled what I could,” she told him quietly. “The trapdoors are in place. If Kennedy’s partner searches for Katy again, I’ll know who they are in real time.” She reached over his lap to lace his fingers with hers. “I wasn’t going to call you away from your club for something I could manage.”
The silence between them held weight. Not anger, exactly. More like the friction of two people who trusted each other completely and were still learning the shape of what that trust meant now that they were in the same building instead of hundreds or thousands of miles apart.
“Next time,” he said firmly.
Rose nodded. “Next time,” she agreed.
It wasn’t absolution or argument. Merely the two of them, finding the edges of something new, the same way they’d beenfinding them since the moment she revealed to him the most important secret in her world.
Keys squeezed her hand gently. There was so much that they still had to do. So much that tomorrow would bring. But for tonight, Mount Grove was quiet, Keys was finallyhome, and he was looking forward to a full night’s sleep with Rose wrapped in his arms.
CHAPTER 12
Present
Keys did not get his wish. His system’s alarm blared, startling him awake before the sun even hit the horizon.
On his feet before he was fully conscious, Keys fought to find his glasses on the nightstand in the pitch blackness of the room. He really needed to set automatic lights for when the alarm went off. After shoving his glasses so roughly onto his face that he nearly took out an eyeball, Keys ran from the bedroom and was scrambling for hisThinkPadthat he’d left in his backpack in the living room.
In some recess of his mind that was still figuring out up from down in this early hour, he noted that Rose ran directly across the apartment to comfort a crying Oscar, who also had been violently woken from the obnoxious alarm, too. Shit. When Keys had designed the system, he hadn’t imagined a kid living in the building with him. Hell, he hadn’t imaginedhewould be living in the building. Another downside of the attack on the bar hadshown Keys just how absent he’d been from his club recently. Not digitally, but physically.
As soon as Rose and Oscar were safe, and she felt comfortable coming out of hiding, Keys planned to amend that. But even if she wanted to build a house on the club’s property next to his brothers’, it wouldn’t change the fact that he needed to be alerted as soon as his system picked up on something major. Maybe he could switch the alarm to something on his person, like a watch, so it would not disturb Oscar’s slumber, too.
Movement caught his eye, and Keys looked up to see Rose holding Oscar to her chest. Guilt and sadness at the boy’s tears held Keys’ attention for several precious seconds. In his dinosaur pajamas, Baxter clutched to his chest, his hair sticking up in four directions, and his tight hold on his mother’s shoulders, Oscar looked so small and vulnerable.
“It’s okay, baby,” Rose told him, rubbing his back. “Keys is turning off the loud noiseright now,” she added pointedly to Keys.
Shit. Fuck. Several strokes of his fingers later, and the blaring noise became nothing more than an echoing memory.
Glancing up, Keys mouthed, “Sorry.”
The expression Rose gave him said not to worry about it, but he most definitely would—afterhe figured out what had tripped his alarms. The system wasn’t alerting him to something or someone physically in the building with them. That was a completely different alert notification, one where the building itself would protect them. No, this was something more specific, something that had triggered one of his many protocols.
As Rose brought Oscar back into his bedroom, Keys reached for his tablet. Sitting on the couch with hisThinkPadin his lap wasn’t ideal, so he might need a second screen.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Keys hadn’t been paying that close attention to Poison’s whereabouts and doings while dealing with Becks’ and Ranger’sabductions, the bar explosion, and everything else that had come up in the past week.
He hadn’t looked at Rose’s traps yet. What if she’d tripped something herself? It didn’t seem like her, she was too good for that, but they both were exhausted past their limits, plus she could have been distracted by Oscar. Keys didn’t like wondering if she had made a mistake—a normal, well-rested Rose would not have—but even he’d made some doozies this week.
Regardless of how, Kennedy had found Poison and had issued a capture order for Ivy “Poison” Benson. In Rose’s defense, Poison also had never been one to hide. It was MV’s doing that kept her hidden digitally and her movements from being tracked. Had Rose not been keeping up with that this week? That didn’t seem likely, as she should have tightened her protocols since they laid their trap for Kennedy, but again, possible.
The timestamp on the order was forty minutes ago, with the clinical instruction to bring her in alive, by any means necessary, and to kill anyone who got in their path.
Keys’ hands were already moving, pulling up the tracking data Rose had planted in Kennedy’s network three days ago. He hadn’t had time to look into it fully yet, making this his first real window into the man’s operational structure. It was certainly more extensive than Keys would have thought, after the man had been imprisoned for five years. Clearly, someone had kept his operation running while he was, hopefully, becoming someone’s bitch behind bars.
The three men were moving. Based on their bank data, he didn’t think they were guns-for-hire. There were too many regular transfers for that. He could see their rough positions from cell tower data, all three converging on Providence, Rhode Island, the last known position Kennedy had for theNon Cras, from various points across the country.
He had a day, tops, before they caught up to the club.
Keys grabbed for his phone.
Thorne picked up on the second ring, which made Keys wonder if he hadn’t gone to bed yet or if he was already up. “Yeah, Boss?”
“I need you and Grimm to roll out.” Keys was already sending the brothers the location data and calculating the fastest route for them. “Kennedy sent three men after Poison. They’ll be on her within the day.” He pushed the coordinates through to Thorne’s phone as he spoke, his fingers never pausing over the keyboard. “I want them alive and here. They’ve got some answers I need to pick from their brains.”
