Chapter 23

TWENTY-THREE

After I shifted back,Felix and I spent a little more time kissing on the shore before packing up the picnic we hadn't touched and heading back to the house. Claiming Felix had been the single most amazing moment of my life, but over the past few minutes, I'd felt his mind starting to spin. I knew he was curious about the drive and the file, and if I were honest with myself, I was too.

We needed to figure out what else we were up against.

My brothers still weren't back when we walked into the house, so Felix and I ducked upstairs to take a quick shower and change. We were just getting out when I heard laughter from downstairs.

"Guess we'd better get down there." I reluctantly pulled on a pair of sweats, even though I would have much preferred to stay naked and inside of Felix for the rest of the day.

Felix was pulling on his own clothes, moving easily like he hadn't had the shit beat out of him just a few days before. "Guess so. I'm anxious to officially meet Jack."

I pulled him into my arms and kissed him deeply until we were both out of breath. "Then let's go."

Felix shook his head and looked down at where his dick was tenting his sweats. "Thanks."

I winked and handed my mate his glasses as he did his best to adjust himself. "My pleasure."

In the kitchen, Cal and Jack were pulling takeout boxes from several large bags patterned with a green crane. "Is that from where I think it's from?"

Cal nodded. "Least I could do. I know Mei's food is your favorite."

Felix nudged my side, and I cleared my throat. "You can be done groveling now. I forgive you."

Some of the mischievous light that was usually in Cal's eyes returned. "Really?"

I sighed. "Really."

In a move almost too fast to track, Cal wrapped me in a bear hug. "I'm so fucking sorry, Nero."

"I know." Cal's grip on me was so tight I almost couldn't take a breath.

"Let the man breathe, sweetheart," Jack drawled, and I felt Cal tense. Whatever was going on there had my brother on edge.

Julius and Felix passed out plates and silverware, and everyone got comfortable around the table.

"Are we going to wait for Quin?" Cal asked, even as he cracked into a container of beef lo mein and spooned a healthy portion onto his plate.

"He's going to be late. Said to start without him." Jack snatched the lo mein from Cal's hand.

"Since when does my brother talk to you?" Cal glared at Jack.

Jack glared back at Cal, then cracked a huge smile. "Jealous?"

"Not at all."

"You sure?"

"Fuck you, Jack."

"I know you want to, sweetheart."

Cal started to retort, but Felix, who had been watching the whole exchange like a spectator at a tennis match, stepped in. "Hi, I'm Felix." He held out his hand over the table. Jack wiped his on a napkin before shaking it.

"Jack Grayson. Pleasure to officially meet you."

"Same. Thanks for helping to rescue me."

Jack gave him a lopsided smile. "My pleasure." And I suddenly understood why Cal didn't want Jack talking to Quin. Felix placed a hand on my thigh and squeezed, and the flash of jealousy dissipated.

"Pass me the egg rolls." Felix winked as I passed him the waxed paper bag right after stealing one for myself. Felix passed the bag to Julius. "Nero told me Cal was able to recover the drive."

Julius nodded. "I hope you don't mind, but I went through the rest of your drives until I found the decryption key. Took me a while, but I have the decryption running now."

"I don't mind at all. That saves us time."

Julius swallowed the bite he'd taken, then asked, "You really don't know what's on the drive?"

"No. I took it as proof, showed the people online just enough to prove I really had it, then tossed it on that drive and didn't really think about it. I always planned to take a look at whatever I'd taken—hell, I'd even thought about putting it back—but every time I pulled it out, something else took precedence. After a while, I kind of forgot I had it. But I wonder if that was all part of the setup."

"Setup? What setup?" Cal asked around a mouthful of food.

"Agent Cooper set the whole thing in motion. He apparently found out about my skill set when I was in college and set up the whole thing that led to me stealing the file." Felix set his fork down and pushed back from the table. "He orchestrated everything, me meeting Jordan and helping him steal money from innocent people, my arrest, my parents' death. He was pulling strings the whole time. He didn't expect that I had taken a file he'd need later, and once he figured out I was the one who'd stolen it, he did everything he could to make sure I was always in his sight."

"Shit." Cal whistled.

Julius's face was scrunched up like he was thinking hard about something.

"What?" I asked, directing the question his way.

"I don't get it. If Cooper knew you had the file, why make it hard for you to get information on Amanda Vanderkaamp? I don't see how the two things are related."

Jack raised a hand. "I think this might have been a coincidence. I'm the one who flagged the information about Amanda."

"What? Why?" Felix asked.

Jack sighed. "It's kind of a long story, but I think everything is connected." Cal made a go-on gesture, and Jack started talking. "When I showed up on your doorstep, I told you I worked for a friend of your grandmother's, Reuben Machas."

"Right. I remember that." I nodded.

"Reuben used to work jobs with your grandmother until she retired. Since then, he's become a bit of a recluse. He lives on a huge estate outside Queensland, and he rarely, if ever, leaves his compound."

"Okay, and?" Cal waved a hand, the gesture impatient as he tried to get Jack to make his point.

"He doesn't leave, but he has a network of people all over the globe that report to him on topics of interest. A few months ago, he started hearing rumors that there was something big going down in his former world. He'd heard conflicting details about a major heist, then about art thieves and forgers going missing. That's when he hired me. He heard someone was specifically looking for Amanda Vanderkaamp."

"How does he know Amanda?" Julius asked.

"They're old friends or something. He never really explained their connection. Anyway, after he heard her name being tossed around at the center of a kidnapping plot, he sent me to go get her."

"But no one was supposed to know where she was." Felix was hanging on Jack's every word, trying to make the pieces fit.

"Reuben knew and sent me to make sure she was okay. I caught up with her in Amsterdam and watched her for a few days. I thought Reuben's intel was shitty until two guys approached her at a cafe. They kept asking her about a list, but she didn't know what they were talking about. One of the guys grabbed her arm, and I intervened."

"So where is she now?" Felix asked.

"She's at Reuben's lying low."

"That explains why there hasn't been any activity on the bank accounts tied to her new identity." Felix appeared happy to have put at least that small part of the mystery to rest.

"Exactly. When we got to Australia, I set up alerts all over the web and dark web for any mention of her name and a list and made sure the international law enforcement organizations all knew she was missing and that whoever wanted her also wanted this list." Jack looked at Felix. "I'm guessing that's how you ended up looking for her."

Felix nodded.

"I also set up a trigger that would let someone dig into Amanda's identity only so far. Once they hit a certain point and I'd had enough time to get a rough idea of why they were looking for her, they'd get booted out of her accounts."

"That's clever." My mate sounded impressed, and Julius looked it. The only part of what Jack had said that made any sense to me was the part about watching Amanda. All the tech talk went straight over my head.

"You"—Jack turned his attention to Julius—"were the first person not associated with law enforcement to go looking for her, and that made me curious."

"So you decided to share information with me?"

Jack shrugged. "Sort of. More like I wanted to see what you already knew. See if you'd hang yourself with enough rope, so to speak. Took me no time to figure out you were bluffing about the list—you more or less told me you didn't have it or know anything about it—so why else were you looking for Amanda? I embedded code into some of the files I sent you that let me track your other movements online, and from there, I figured out we were on the same team."

"But none of that explains how you ended up here." Felix pushed his empty plate away.

"I figured out Julius's IP address. Or rather, where the address originated. Turns out I was already headed out this way to check on your grandmother at Reuben's request."

"Okay, but why send Felix a death threat?" Cal asked.

Jack looked confused. "Death threat? I didn't send anyone a death threat."

Felix shook his head. "That's right. He didn't. The threat was all Cooper. The timing was a coincidence, but I don't think your boss hearing something big was going down and Cooper making his move was at all. I have a feeling we'll have more pieces of the puzzle once we see what's in that file."

Julius tapped the screen on his phone. "It's at ninety-seven percent. We'll have those details soon enough."

"In the meantime, I'd better check in with Agent Stone and McMahon." Felix felt his pockets for his phone, then smiled. "Shit, I forgot I don't have a phone."

I pulled mine out and passed it over. "Here. Use mine. I've got McMahon on speed dial."

Julius cringed. "No one says that anymore. I swear you are the oldest thirty-eight-year-old I know."

I gave him a single-finger salute in return.

Felix found McMahon's contact and hit the button to connect the call. He put the call on speaker just in case McMahon had information that would help us and set the phone in the middle of the table. Felix kept the details around how he'd found out Agent Lance Cooper was the FBI's mole vague, and when McMahon asked where the agent was now, he responded that he had no idea.

Technically, he really didn't know where the agent had ended up. Jack and Cal had gone back to the warehouse after the fire was put out and took care of anything that might have been able to be used as evidence. It was a little scary how good they were at that kind of cleanup.

McMahon promised to update Agent Stone and see what he could do about getting Felix's phone returned to him, then he hung up.

"That could have been worse." Cal leaned back in his chair, rocking it up on the two back legs.

Jack and Julius nodded.

Felix smirked. "I'm not an idiot. Ironically, it was Agent Cooper who had coached me to keep my answers honest but vague when I was being interrogated after Jordan and I were arrested. I thought it was a strange thing to say at the time, but I'd taken the advice. Bet he never thought I'd use it against him."

A shudder rolled through my body as an image of Felix tied to that chair on the warehouse floor surfaced in my memory. I was trying to keep all of that locked down, but it was proving harder than I thought it would be.

Felix found my thigh under the table and gave it another reassuring squeeze.

Julius's phone beeped, and he glanced at the screen. "The file decryption is complete."

Felix was out of his chair and halfway through the kitchen before Julius had finished speaking, and the rest of us stood too.

Jack motioned to the takeout containers covering the table. "Do we need to put this away?"

Cal shook his head. "We'll do it later."

By the time I got to Julius's basement lair, he and Felix were already set up in the chairs in front of the wall of computer monitors. Julius had a screen with a progress bar showing one hundred percent up on the largest monitor.

"Ready?" he asked Felix, who nodded, prompting Julius to hit a button that flooded his screens with information. Files, folders, and documents cascaded over the screens so fast it was impossible to keep up.

"What is all this?" Cal asked.

"Hold on." Felix reached over Julius, and with a few confident keystrokes, the files resolved into an organized hierarchy. "There, that's better."

"This is still an insane amount of data to wade through. Where do we even start?" Julius moved the cursor of his mouse, and the list of folders and documents went on and on.

"Look for anything that has the word list in it," Jack suggested.

Julius nodded. "Good call." He ran a keyword search that narrowed the options down to ten. The folders were dated going back to the late nineteenth century. He clicked on the first one, and a profile of Lucien Crowe appeared on the screen.

Crowe was a nineteenth-century artist, philosopher, and scientist. While Charles Darwin was writing his theory of evolution, his contemporary Crowe had made the claim that man was only a steppingstone along the way to the complete evolution of humanity and survival of the fittest. Lucien Crowe believed that shifters were the true final evolution of man and that ultimately all humans would evolve into beings who could take the form of both man and animal. Up to and even during that time, shifters were largely persecuted by society and religion, and if someone was known to be a shifter, they were often cast to the edges of humanity. Crowe's work was largely criticized because people didn't want to understand anything that was different. His work, including his most famous piece of art, The Evolution of Man, was incredibly controversial, and he and Darwin were known to get in public debates that often turned uncivilized.

The Evolution of Manwas also thought to be the most stolen piece of art in recent history. It wasn't currently on display anywhere, and most people in the art community believed that was because nobody knew where it was. Every once in a while, it would pop up only to go missing again. The longest it had stayed anywhere was on display in the Musée d'Orsay from 1976 to 1979. It was taken down for dating and restoration after someone claimed it was a fake, and it disappeared from the restoration rooms. The last I'd heard that anyone had seen it was in the mid-2000s.

Cal looked as confused as I felt. "Everybody who has ever taken a history class knows who Lucien Crowe is."

My brother was right. Every shifter and most humans on the planet at least had a vague idea of who Lucien Crowe was. I probably knew more than the average person because I'd been forced to study him and his famous painting for years, but the real question was why this particular file of information about Crowe was worth Felix's life.

Like he'd plucked the thought from my head, Cal asked, "Why would the FBI have a file on him, especially since he's been dead for almost two hundred years?"

"I don't know." Felix's eyes danced over the screen. "There's too much here to weed it out, but there should be a master dossier that explains what is in this archived file and why." He gestured to Julius's spot in front of the screens. "Can I sit there?"

Julius rolled out of the way, and Felix took his place, scrolling through the file directory on the hunt for the document he was looking for.

"Every archived FBI file has a master dossier. It's never where you'd expect it to be, though." A crease formed between his brows, and he leaned forward until his nose was only inches from the screen. "Aha! Gotcha."

Felix clicked on one of documents, and what looked like a series of notes on official FBI letterhead opened on the screen. We all read over his shoulder.

"Holy shit." Julius's eyes were wide as he scanned the list of documents. "This file has information on every person who has even been allegedly associated with the theft of Crowe's painting, The Evolution of Man, since the first time the painting disappeared from the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1884. The file was archived because there is no open investigation and no leads on the painting's whereabouts. Looks like a lot of this data is from INTERPOL with investigation notes and reports from several FBI legal attaché offices abroad over decades." He pointed at a paragraph near the bottom of the page. "The FBI Art Crime Team created this informational archive in the mid-2000s after the last reported appearance of the painting as several US nationals were on the short list of suspects capable of stealing The Evolution of Man."

"That explains the date ranges." Jack leaned over Felix's shoulder. "Open the most recent file."

Felix did, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach.

"Fuck," Cal hissed.

On the screen in the middle of the list of files was a folder labeled "Hunter, Juno."

"Look." Jack pointed to the screen. "Reuben has a file too."

A few lines down from our grandmother's folder was one labeled "Machas, Reuben," and even farther down was a file titled "Vanderkaamp, Amanda."

"Seems we were going to end up involved in this thing one way or another." Cal rubbed a hand over his face.

"Seems that way." My brother was right, but I sure as shit didn't like it.

"What do we do now?" Felix asked, spinning in his chair.

"Jack, did Reuben mention anyone else whose name is on this list?" I asked.

Jack studied the list of folders. "Not specifically, but I recognize a few names from the research I did on Reuben before I agreed to take the job. I can check in with him and see if he's heard anything."

"Good. I think you and Cal should go back to Australia and find out what you can from Reuben. My gut is telling me someone is looking for this painting, and my guess is it's someone on this list. Whoever had Agent Cooper tracking down the file was desperate enough for this information that Cooper kidnapped Felix. I'd bet whoever was looking for Amanda Vanderkaamp is on the same person's payroll. I have a feeling they aren't going to give up easily."

"You want me to work with him?" Cal asked, pointing at Jack. "Seriously? I think I'd rather have my balls cut off."

Jack flashed his teeth at my brother. "That can be arranged, sweetheart."

"Stop calling me that!"

I tuned out their bickering and turned my attention on Julius. "You follow the money. See if anyone on this list is shelling out cash or doing big-ticket jobs. If someone on this list knows where the painting is and is planning to steal it, they are going to need a crew. See who's hiring."

Julius nodded and pulled a second laptop in front of him. "I can do that."

"What about me?" Felix asked.

"How do you feel about meeting my grandmother?"

"Really?"

I nodded. "If someone is targeting art thieves, she's going to be at risk."

"Fair point."

"I also want you to comb through everything we have here. See if the FBI knows more about the painting and its whereabouts than we do."

"No problem." Felix spun back around and started opening other files.

Cal and Jack were still bickering, and I pushed them out of the room, sending them away to either fuck or fight. I needed to think, and I needed it quiet. There had been a moment in time before she retired that my grandmother had been obsessed with finding Crowe's painting. She thought it could be her crowning glory, but despite years of research, her holy grail eluded her, and she retired without ever finding out where the painting was so she could make a play for it. While her major area of interest was classical antiquity, I doubted there was another person alive who knew as much about The Evolution of Man as she did.

Looked like ORCA was picking up another case.

"Hey. Cal and Jack said you were down here. What's going on?" Quin walked into the room wearing a pair of dress pants and a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up on his forearms. He was holding an egg roll he'd wrapped neatly in a paper towel and leaned against the doorframe.

Julius and Felix gave him a fast rundown of what we'd discovered, and Quin walked over to the computer screens, leaning down to look closely at an image of the painting Felix had pulled up. The canvas was large, at least three feet tall by five feet wide, and showed a man emerging from a pool to take the form of a two-legged creature, then an ape, then a primitive man, then a modern human, before retaking the form of a great ape.

"Why are you looking at that?" he asked, gesturing with his half-eaten egg roll at Felix's computer screen.

Julius rolled his eyes. "We just told you. We think someone knows where this painting is, and they're going to try to steal it."

"Yes, I get that, but where did you find that particular photo of the painting?"

Felix tipped his head and studied Quin, eyes narrowed. "It was in the file. It's been a while since I've seen the painting, so I pulled it up for reference."

"That's not the original." Quin popped the last bite of egg roll into his mouth and wiped his hands with the paper towel.

"What?" Felix asked. "What do you mean? How do you know it's not the original?"

Quin shrugged. "An artist always recognizes their own work."

Cal and Jack's rivals to lovers story, Grayscale, is coming soon!