2 Austin

Austin

“I’m here. We can get started,” I joked as my ass hit the seat at the far end of the long table in the conference room.

Not a single thing about this was funny, but I was me… and, therefore, always had to be the one to break the tension and be the least liked in the room with my cocky attitude. However, the way no one reacted to my antics made me think that either I was losing my touch or everyone saw through me now.

The table was full with everyone here. A few people were standing. Like Dune, but I suspected that was more his preference than the lack of seating. Reed was also on his feet., up at the front, no surprise there, looking ready to go off on some sort of speech or something. Milo sat closest to Reed with his tablet ready, likely having graphics to show along with Reed’s story.

Reed took a deep breath, sharing a look with his best friend, Cade, that didn’t set me at ease.

“The FBI is after Ford,” Reed said, face somber. “They found a bunch of files connecting him to The Sons of the Holy Fire.”

His jaw clenched. I looked around the room to gauge everyone’s reaction to this news. Even though we’d agreed to distance ourselves from Agent Ford Priestley and his team months ago, the vibe I was getting from nearly everyone’s was that they couldn’t believe what was happening.

I think I was with the majority.

While I did tend to make myself scarce when the off-the-books FBI team was called to come around, it wasn’t that I didn’t trust them. Agent Priestley had never given me bad vibes. He seemed to want the same thing Reed wanted, what we all wanted. So, none of this made sense to me.

“I believe it’s a setup,” Reed said, and Cade nodded in agreement.

I wouldn’t put it past those Holy Fire fuckers. We already knew they had someone high up in the FBI. This person admitted to Milo when they kidnapped him that they used the files the FBI had on hackers and such. That was how they found Milo, how they knew about his skills. How they knew he was the one looking into their stuff or whatever it was he was doing. Add in the files that Milo found on assassins and other seedy individuals who had connections to the group, and we had a pretty good idea that FBI resources were being used more often than not.

“I don’t think Agent Priestley is part of it,” Kyle said. His gaze was on the table in front of him, expression grim.

Kyle was the reason we were even aware of The Sons of the Holy Fire. He’d once been used by people connected to the group, and he had been a big part of finding them and taking them down. We never knew it would turn out to be such a huge connected group. Never knew the undertaking it would be to go after them. That said, even if we had known what we were getting ourselves into, we still would have done it.

It was easy to see that Kyle felt guilty for shit, though I didn’t think he should. It was a shit situation, and he did what he had to do to survive. The way I saw it, between the brainwashing and the drugs they had him on, he didn’t have a choice.

I turned my attention back to Reed, giving Kyle a little bit of a break from the intense eyes of the room.

The lines around Reed’s eyes told of the strain and heartache he was feeling from this situation. I suppose I understood it to some degree. One of Reed’s partners’ was Kyle’s twin. Kyle hadn’t had it easy, like most of us on this team. Though, I didn’t think any of us would argue over Kyle having had the shit end of the stick compared to the rest of us. Not that this fucked up shit was a competition.

The things he’d been a part of. The things he’d done, not because he wanted to, but because sometimes survival was a bitch that backed you into a corner.

The shit that had been done to him…

The things he’d seen…

All those kids…

My jaw clenched tight and I shook myself from those thoughts. That wasn’t a spiral I needed to go down. Not now, not ever.

I’d gotten good at pushing things down and pretending like they weren’t part of my life. Like they didn’t happen to me.

“I’m not sure where we stand,” Reed said, voice as broken as the look on his face. “We still don’t have a clue who’s behind this. You didn’t want me going to Ford, and I’ve respected that, but—”

“Look at where we’re at now,” I said with a tiny mocking smirk. I knew that was where he was going with it, you know, in that nice way that didn’t sound exactly like ‘I told you so’ even though it would be. He tended to sugarcoat shit so we didn’t feel like scolded children. Which normally was nice, but we didn’t have time for Reed’s coddling right now.

We’d fucked ourselves, and we all just had to get over it.

“Austin,” Jameson growled in warning.

I shrugged. I was only speaking the truth.

We should have ended this group months ago. The problem was, we were trying to go softly, trying to sneak in and put them in a chokehold from behind. It wasn’t working, and I imagined by now, they’d probably caught onto the fact that we were closing in on them, even if they didn’t know exactly who we were. For some reason, they’d picked Agent Ford Priestley as the fall guy.

That was where I was stumped.

Why him?

Did these people know about Ford Priestley’s division that was supposedly super-secret and all? Was there another connection? I was desperate to reveal the pieces we didn’t have yet, and damn near convinced that we would know everything the moment we had them.

“Austin’s not wrong,” Dune spoke up, crossing his arms over his chest and shoving his hands into his pits, making him look like a beefed-up bouncer. My eyes were glued to the fabric and stitches circling his bicep, just waiting for it to give way. “We made that call, and now we have to at least acknowledge where it’s gotten us.”

Seriously, I liked to work out, but Dune was just…

And if I didn’t know what a docile teddy bear he was inside, I might be a little frightened of him.

I tore my gaze away from Dune’s hulking arms just in time to catch Reed’s head bouncing with a nod.

“You think the agent is part of it now?” I asked the room.

I wasn’t sure where I stood. Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of the FBI. And yeah, when Agent Priestley and his team would show up to help us out on a job, I tended to find the shadows real quick and stay there. Which had more to do with me and less to do with him as a person, but still…

“You think they are pinning it all on him, using him as a fall guy?” I continued on.

Remy and Milo shared a look. One that I think Milo only caught half the meaning of.

“We think Agent Priestley is clean,” Remy said, and I assumed he was speaking for himself and Milo. “We’ve gone over his bank statements, tracked his phone, and dug up what we could about him. We can link his locations to the job. There’s nothing out of the ordinary as far as his spending habits go, and there certainly isn’t an unexplainable amount going into his account.”

“He could have another account,” Jameson pointed out.

“Or have a ton of cash buried in his backyard,” Theon chimed in with, cutting his eyes to his man with a shrug. Cade stared back at Theon with confusion wrinkling his brow, almost like he didn’t recognize his sweet, timid partner for a moment.

“Yes, we thought of that too, but there’s nothing indicating he’s doing shady stuff on the side. We’ve been doing this long enough, we know what to look for.” Remy paused, then shrugged. “If he’s hiding shit, then he’s really good at keeping it hidden. And… no offense to him, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would be able to keep that level of shadiness hidden from us.”

Remy’s face said it was just a statement, while Milo had a bit of a smug raise to his brow.

They were good and they knew it. Hell, we all knew it. And now that they were working as a team instead of at each other’s throats, things had gotten so much better. They were unstoppable… well, except for finding this FBI agent who was in charge of The Sons of the Holy Fire. But other than that, those two were the best *cough* hackers *cough* out there.

“So… what do we do?” Sawyer asked, sounding like he was having trouble keeping up with everything.

Reed scanned the room, holding each set of eyes for a long moment before moving on to the next one.

“I’m not sure what we can do at this point,” Reed said, sounding defeated. “We need to watch closely. Monitor all that we can with the FBI and any developments on this case.” He let out a heavy sigh. “If it looks like they connect me to Ford or any of The Sons of the Holy Fire stuff, we need to be ready to burn everything so no one else goes down with me. And I mean burn more metaphorically.” He turned his attention to the nerd side of the table. “You need to be ready to wipe everything and run.”

“I’ve got just the thing,” Kyle said with pride, which was rare for him. I had to say, it was good to see him coming out of his shell more and more. Confidence looked good on him. His boyfriend must have thought so too, because Roland was currently looking at Kyle with this soft expression that made me want to roll my eyes.

“We’ll go over that in a little bit,” Reed said, looking happy to do so. And I was happy not to be involved in it.

“What about Agent Priestley?” Roland asked just as the same question popped into my head. I was sure I wasn’t the only one wondering that.

“I don’t have a way to get in contact with him.” Reed gave a little shrug. “I can only assume he’s ditched his phone. I have no idea what his plan would have been. It’s not really something we ever talked about, but now I wish we had. I guess I have to wait until I hear from him.” He looked out the windows of the conference room into the open office space that hardly got used. Then he said under his breath, “If I hear from him.”

“What can we do?” I asked as a way to try and snap him out of his darkening thoughts.

He blinked, then turned his attention back to us.

“As much as I hate to say it,” he started, face somber, “we need to take a step back and lay low.”

Except… not a single one of us was good at doing that, and the look on Reed’s face said he knew it all too well.

“Just until we get a better handle on what is going on,” he added, as if that would make us change our minds.

After he looked around the room, he gave a defeated sigh. The kind of sigh that said he knew there was no changing our minds.

Accepting a spot in this team meant you didn’t back down, you didn’t stop.

It didn’t matter if Agent Priestley was innocent or not, we had no other choice.

We had to take The Sons of The Holy Fire down.

We’d been tiptoeing around for too long.

It was time to drop some bombs and end them.