by Abigail Roux
He cried out Ty’s name as his orgasm rushed up on him.
Ty gave a muffled groan, scratching at Zane’s hip as he struggled to take all of Zane in and swallow, and Zane was desperately trying not to close his eyes. When Ty began trying to squirm away, digging his heels in to push further into the mattress, Zane closed his eyes and pulled out. He fell to the side, gasping for breath.
Ty chuckled, and Zane glanced at him, squinting as if Ty was simply too bright to see.
Ty threw himself down beside Zane, wiping a thumb over his bottom lip like he might have missed a bit.
“You’re dirty,” Zane told him, his voice cracking.
“You love it.”
Zane barked a laugh. Ty rolled over and straddled him, grabbing both wrists to press them to the mattress. Zane didn’t have time to prepare for the pain, and he gasped and winced away from Ty’s touch. Ty released him like he was hot, holding his hands in the air, eyes wide.
“What’d I do?”
Zane shook his head, trying to grin about it. “Sore wrist. It’s nothing.”
Ty’s eyes darted to the wrist Zane was cradling against his chest and then back to Zane’s eyes. “That where I got you?”
Zane shrugged noncommittally. “Let’s go back to the postorgasm cuddling we were about to do, huh?”
But Ty gently took his arm, frowning at his wrist as he turned it over. “Is it broken? It looks broken.”
Zane pursed his lips, trying to be nonchalant.
“Did I break your wrist?” Ty asked, his voice going higher. Then he was just flat-out shouting. “I broke your wrist!”
Zane tried to hush him, patting at his chest, still shaking his head. “It’s just a sprain, it’s okay.”
“I broke your wrist!” Ty repeated, his voice cracking. “Why the hell didn’t you say something?”
“Probably to avoid this,” Zane muttered.
A knock on the cabin door interrupted them before Ty could work himself up further.
“It’s open!” Zane called, expecting Sidewinder and an amused FBI agent or three.
But it was just Kelly, and he had a hand slapped over his eyes. He took a tentative step into the cabin, then tossed a handful of medical supplies on the bed and retreated without ever saying a word.
Ty and Zane stared at the supplies as the door shut. They included a flexible wrap, some popsicle sticks, one length of metal that could be bent and molded, and a little tube of lubricant.
“Asshole!” Ty called after Kelly.
“You’re welcome!”
When Zane popped his head over the stairwell railing to sniff at the smell of hash browns in the air, he found Nick sat at the banquette, a bottle of Gatorade at his elbow and a stack of papers in front of him.
Zane wondered how he was taking all the people on his boat. He hadn’t handled it well last night. He and Kelly had taken the main cabin because, “Fuck all these people.” And no one had argued. Zane had destroyed the bunks on his rampage, so they’d just thrown the mattresses on the floor of the salon, leaving the others to fight over space between watch shifts. Owen and Digger had somehow wound up in the banquette by morning, their heads on a shared pillow in the corner, Owen’s feet dangling over the edge of Nick’s lap.
“Hey,” Zane greeted under his breath. Everyone else was still asleep, and Julian must have been up top, on watch. Zane stood awkwardly for a moment, and Nick stared at him, waiting.
“You do coffee in the morning?”
“Yeah, I’d love some,” Zane said in relief.
“I don’t have coffee,” Nick answered, looking immediately amused and apologetic.
Zane just rolled his eyes.
“I have tea?”
“You got more of those Gatorades?”
Nick nodded at the refrigerator. “Don’t drink the orange one, it’s spiked.”
“Of course it is,” Zane mumbled as he retrieved a drink and some cold hash browns. He slid into the banquette at Digger’s feet, struggling with it for a few seconds, then finally surrendering and picking Digger’s bare feet up to set them on his knee.
Nick watched him silently.
“What are you doing?” Zane asked him once he’d settled.
Nick studied the files. “I got these out of your bag,” he admitted. “Are these from Burns’s memory card?”
Zane nodded as he ran a hand over his face. His wrist was wrapped in the bandage Kelly had brought him last night, but he kept forgetting it would hurt when he poked it.
“Ty break your wrist?” Nick asked after popping a hash brown into his mouth.
“I’m not sure. If he did, it’s just a crack.”
“Watch it close. If your fingers start doing weird, we need to get it set right.”
Zane nodded. “You’ve probably dealt with broken wrists before, huh?”
Nick frowned at him carefully.
“Ty told me about your dad, how he knocked you around. Fractured wrist is pretty common, right?”
Nick raised one eyebrow. “I used to wait ’til recess, fake a fall off the slide or something. Football or hockey practice, when I was older.” He popped another hash brown in his mouth and returned his attention to the photos. “Johns said this was a digital steganography code. You pegged it?”
“Yeah. We ran it through the Bureau computers; it spit out what you’re reading now.”
“You make sense of this?” Nick asked dubiously.
“I haven’t looked at it.” Zane shrugged. “All I could see was Ty.”
Nick returned his attention to the messages Richard Burns had hidden in the photos. “It’s all numbers. It’s a simple replacement cipher.” He winced. “God, I’m so fucking sick of replacement ciphers.”
Zane snorted. “When do we get to hear what you and Doc got up to over the summer? How did you get a favor from Cross?”
“Kelly tells the story better than I do,” Nick answered. He set the paper on the table. “To solve this, we need to find the cryptovariable Burns used, or it’s useless.”
Zane nodded, staring at the pages. Then he grinned up at Nick. “He hid it in a book.”
Nick smiled slowly in return. “There you go.”
“What book was it?” Zane asked.
“I don’t know,” Nick answered with a sigh. He glanced into the salon, and Zane followed his eyes to an armchair where Liam was sleeping under a furry throw blanket. “He might, but he claims he doesn’t.”
“I don’t,” Liam answered without moving or opening his eyes.
Nick grunted.
“We’ll have to go back to the house,” Zane decided.
A moment later, something thumped belowdecks, and Ty appeared a few seconds after. He gave everyone a suspicious once-over, probably wondering how Zane and Nick had come to be sitting there together, sharing a plate of hash browns as they acted as footstools for sleeping Sidewinders.
But Ty just shrugged and moved beside them, nodding at the papers. “Anything?”
“We need the book the memory card was in,” Zane said. “We think it’s the key to the replacement cipher.”
“Edgar Allan Poe,” Ty said as he slid the hash browns closer and stole one.
“How do you know that?” Nick demanded.
“I had it last night,” Ty said through a mouthful. “I forgot to go back and get it after Doc beanbagged me.”
“We need it,” Zane said. “Has to be the right edition or it’s useless.”
Ty nodded, going to the refrigerator to get a drink. “Easy fix, I’ll just go back and tell her I forgot to take it with me.” He popped the refrigerator open.
“Don’t drink the orange one,” Liam told him, still curled up with his eyes closed.
Ty straightened and glared at him, then turned to Zane and Nick. “Is it spiked?”
Nick nodded, sighing as Owen kicked him in his sleep.
An hour later, Ty took Owen with him to retrieve the book, and while they were gone, Zane went about trying to organize his thoughts s
o they could plan their next move. He sat up top with Clancy, Lassiter, and Perrimore, writing in a notepad he assumed had once been the one Nick used on the job.
“We have three leads, right now,” he was telling them. “The accounts I had you hunt down, Freddy, they’re still out there. We have to find them. And then O’Flaherty said Laura Burns gave him two names of people who may have known about that safe in her floor. A man named Jack Tanner, who still works at the academy in Quantico, and . . . Earl Grady.”
“Is that . . . Ty’s dad?” Clancy asked.
Zane nodded.
“Is he a suspect?” she asked, sounding even more tentative than before.
Zane shook his head, but he couldn’t say no with any confidence. The only person he trusted implicitly right now was Ty.
“So what’s our play?” Lassiter asked.
Zane licked his lips. “I want you three to follow those accounts.”
“What?” Perrimore boomed out. “You mean you’re going off to storm the fucking beaches with all those assholes downstairs and you want us to go skiing in Switzerland?”
Zane smiled fondly and nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I mean.”
“Garrett, come on, we can keep up with those Recon guys,” Clancy spat.
“It’s not about being able to keep up. Those guys down there, they know how to blow holes in things. But you, you’re trained federal agents. You know how to follow a lead, and you know how to handle red tape, and I need you.”
They all stared at him mutinously.
“If we don’t find that money, we have nothing. And I go down for it. Ty goes down for murder because the CIA made it damn clear they’d only help if he brought the money in. Without that money, it doesn’t matter how we handle the cartel, Ty and I go down.”
They shared glances, shifting uncomfortably.
“I’m not sending you after those accounts because I don’t believe in you, or because I don’t think you can handle the heat,” he stressed, and was surprised when he got choked up over it. He scrubbed his hands over his face, taking a moment to compose himself. “I’m sending you out there to save us. Because I don’t think anyone else can do it.”
When he raised his head, they were all meeting his eyes. Perrimore was nodding. Clancy had clenched her teeth and looked frighteningly determined, and Lassiter’s eyes were shining like they were about to water.
Zane gave them all a weak smile. “I love you guys,” he said impulsively. “You’re the first family I found in a long time that took me for what I am. And now I need you to go save me.”
Clancy nodded curtly, then lurched to her feet and threw her arms around his neck. “We can do that.”
Zane held her tightly. “I know you can.”
An hour later, Ty returned from retrieving the book and accosted Zane with questions because he’d noticed one of their vehicles missing from the marina parking lot. Zane understood. When Liam Bell was involved, Ty worried about everything.
“They’re on their way to the airport,” Zane informed him.
“What, why?”
Zane explained what he’d done, and Ty was visibly distraught over the realization that Clancy, Perrimore, and Lassiter were gone.
“I didn’t get to say good-bye.”
Zane patted his shoulder. “You’ll say hello when this is over.”
Ty tried to smile and nod, to fake that confidence for Zane. He didn’t quite manage it.
“The only other lead we have is the safe,” Nick informed the others after they all gathered in the salon. “We need to get eyes on that house in case whoever got after it comes back. Six, have you heard from your CIA contact?”
Ty shook his head, obviously still struggling internally, judging by the tempest in his hazel eyes. “Some beanbag destroyed my phone.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Snuffles, would you rather I had let you stab your husband in the eye?” Kelly snapped. “At least it was me with the beanbag and not Bell with an armor-piercing tank cutter again!”
“Hey!” Liam shouted. “I already told you, that was an accident.”
As the salon devolved into a mishmash of shouting and confused questions, Nick crossed his arms and sighed, staring at the coffee table like he was thinking about bashing his face into it.
Ty put two fingers in his mouth, whistling to get everyone’s attention. The others quieted, all of them grudgingly turning toward him.
“Past is the past,” Ty growled. “Whatever happened before we set foot on this boat, it’s over. It’s done. From here on out, we live and die with the actions of the man next to us. Get a fucking grip on it.”
Sidewinder looked ashamed, and Liam and Julian were both wearing eerily similar frowns. Zane smiled serenely at his husband.
Ty waved at Nick. “Gunny.”
Nick said nothing for a few seconds, probably thrown by Ty’s use of his new rank. He cleared his throat, though. “We have two names to check on: Ty’s dad, and a man named Jack Tanner. Both of them knew Burns well and might have known about the floor safe. If we can find the person who tried to get into it, we may pick up a lead on the money itself. And we all know finding that money is the key for Grady and Garrett.”
“I think it should be added that Burns wasn’t the only one close to Jack Tanner,” Zane said when Nick paused. “Ty and I both knew him well when we went through the academy. He . . . he made a huge impact on me. He’s a good man.”
Everyone remained quiet.
“Will that be a problem?” Nick finally asked.
Ty bit his lip, glancing at Zane and studying the deep furrow in his brow.
“No,” Zane answered after a few seconds. “We’ll go in two groups. We have to assume that both the Vega cartel and the NIA are onto the fact that we didn’t die in that fire. No one goes anywhere alone from here on out. Watch your back and your front.”
“How do you want us to split?” Owen asked.
“We’re down to eight, now,” Zane answered. “Four and four.”
Digger huffed. “Who gets stuck with Bell?”
“Hey, I have feelings,” Liam said, pressing his hand to his chest dramatically.
“Bell stays with me,” Nick declared, and Ty almost did a double take. “I’ll take him, Cross, and the Doc to take a first run at Tanner,” Nick continued as he met Ty’s eyes. “If he’s cagey, we’ll hit him a second time with the two of you.”
Ty nodded.
“Hold on, do we really want Ty interrogating his own dad?” Zane pointed out.
“Do you really want to walk into Mara’s house without her son?” Nick countered.
Zane shook his head violently. “West Virginia it is, then.”
“You know how I always complain about having to trek my ass up here for Christmas?” Ty was saying as he drove the rambling old landscaper’s truck over the icy, treacherous roads to his parents’ place in Bluefield.
Zane was trying hard not to grip the handle above him, focusing instead on Ty’s words and keeping his aching wrist from being jarred.
“Well, trekking my ass up here to tell my dad his oldest friend was a horrible human being, that’s worse.”
“Are we just discounting the possibility that your dad might have been horrible-human-beings-in-cahoots, then?” Owen asked from the cramped backseat.
“Hey! That is my dad you’re talking about, jackhole.”
“I think Grady might need to sit this one out,” Owen said to Zane.
“Agreed,” Digger offered.
“Fuck you both!” Ty shouted.
“They’re right, Ty,” Zane said regretfully. He winced when Ty shot daggers at him. “Please watch the road.”
“I am watching the road, you watch the road!”
Zane finally grasped at the handle.
“I am not sitting anything out. I’m not going to drive you assholes up to my dad’s front porch and then let you go in and accuse him of being . . . evil!”
Zane tore his eyes away from the road to face Ty, and he sighe
d as he glanced over his shoulder at the two men in the backseat. They were both shaking their heads.
“Tyler,” Zane said sternly. “You’re going to stay outside until I let you come in.”
Ty gaped at him, almost sending them off into a snow-filled ditch before he got control of himself and the truck. He snorted angrily. “Fine.”
Zane nodded, pleased with himself.
“You’re wearing my boots,” Ty grumbled a few minutes later.
“What?”
“My go bag boots. You stole them. Asshole.”
“They’re nice,” Zane acknowledged, grinning instead of offering an apology. “Do you want them back?”
Ty glared at him, then shook his head. “Keep them. They might save your life one day.”
Ten minutes later, the truck had managed the climb up the side of the mountain, and they sat with the engine off, the freezing night seeping into the cab. Zane was fighting the bubbling of nerves as he stared at the dark porch. What if he went in there and told Earl what they knew, and the man never forgave him? What if this was the moment he lost the new family he’d so recently earned a place in? Maybe he’d been wrong, maybe they needed Ty in there to keep things smooth. But then, would they really get answers in an atmosphere charged with grief and emotion?
No. No, they wouldn’t.
“You guys know we don’t have doors back here, right?” Owen finally said as he rested his chin on the back of the front seat.
Ty snarled and turned to Zane. His eyes were blazing, and he’d obviously been going over an inner monologue that had gotten him worked up. He looked absolutely livid.
Zane took a deep, soothing breath. “Okay,” he said quietly. “We’ll go in, ask a few questions. I’ll flash the porch light when it’s clear for you to join.”
Ty sat silent, glaring.
Zane didn’t linger further, just popped the handle and slid out of the cab. He pulled the seat forward so Owen and Digger could follow, and they left Ty sitting in the cold.
Ty seethed as he watched them walk up to the unlit door and knock. A few seconds later, his mother answered, her face morphing into a pleased smile as she pulled Zane into a hug.
