“Don’t lie either,” August warned, studying him like he was a slide under a microscope.
“I’m Dimitri.” Dimitri looked at each of them. “And you’re the Mulvaneys.”
“And how did you and your friend come to be standing in our warehouse, Dimitri?” August continued, pacing closer.
Dimitri frowned, unsure of whether he was being tested or not. “I was told to come here by Calliope.”
“And you’re Calliope’s…?” Atticus asked, trailing off, as if expecting Dimitri to finish the sentence.
“Son,” Dimitri supplied carefully.
There was an excited whoop from Noah and Lucas and a groan from the twins.
“I told you she had a kid. Pay up, assholes,” Lucas crowed.
“You said she had a kid, but you were speculating. There’s no way your psychic powers work via telephone,” one twin said, slapping cash into Lucas’s hand.
“There’s an entire network of telephone psychics who say otherwise,” Noah said, tone superior. “You should know by now to never doubt Lucas’s powers.”
Dimitri watched them all with interest. They were all like him—psychopaths—yet, they seemed so normal, like a family. They didn’t look like people who spent their nights hunting, but they did. They were killers, vigilantes, according to his mother.
But, now, so was Arlo.
“Did my mom ask you to be here?” Dimitri asked. “Are you supposed to help us?”
“Calliope specifically asked us not to be here,” Atticus said, looking around at the others like a disappointed parent.
“Yet, you came, too, Freckles,” Jericho reminded him. “It was just too good an opportunity to waste.”
Dimitri couldn’t imagine anybody calling the stocky ginger man Freckles, but it went practically unnoticed by the others.
Arlo stepped from behind Dimitri, taking two steps past him before Dimitri pulled him back against him, his arm an iron bar across Arlo’s narrow waist. “Stay with me,” he murmured against his ear.
“That’s so cute,” Noah said again.
Adam rolled his eyes, looking sulky at his boyfriend’s assessment. Dimitri wasn’t sure what they should do now. Call his mother? Try to reason with these men? It wasn’t like they were going to call the cops on them. Were they?
“Who’s in the trunk?” August asked.
“What?”
“Who did you kill?” the man said, enunciating this time just in case Dimitri was stupid instead of hard of hearing.
“My dickbag ex-boyfriend,” Arlo supplied, his tone daring anybody to say he wasn’t justified in doing so.
Dimitri stiffened as one twin approached. He didn’t know who was who. When he was inches away from Arlo, he looked down at him, lifting a hand as though he might touch his face. Dimitri made a sound that was almost a growl of warning.
The man grinned, holding his hands up in an ‘I surrender’ pose, a look of mock innocence on his face as he backed up a few paces.
“Why are you here if my mom didn’t want you here?” Dimitri managed, holding Arlo a little tighter.
It was Adam who spoke up. “Because, for as long as we can remember, your mom has been the voice of reason. She’s saved our asses a thousand times, yet we’ve never seen her, touched her, shared a meal. We don’t know her real name. We didn’t even know she had a kid—”
“I did,” Lucas interrupted with a little wave of his hand.
“—until today,” Adam finished, glaring at Lucas.
It surprised Dimitri to hear that his mother had never spoken of him. It didn’t hurt his feelings. He wasn’t sure he had those. But she was always gushing about the Mulvaneys. He’d just imagined that she also talked of her life to them and Dimitri was her life. They were all each other had.
Yet, they thought her name was some kind of code name. While his mom’s work revolved around clandestine meetings and criminal activity, she was a pretty straight shooter, never one to mince words, even if she tempered those words with wit and sarcasm.
Dimitri looked forward to his mother’s sharp tongue. It meant she was okay. She’d spent his early years in a constant state of stress and panic…because of him. The strain of raising a psychopath on her own had all but broken her. Until she met Thomas Mulvaney.
The psychopath whisperer. That was what Calliope had called him. Now, it was what she called Adam’s fiancé, Noah, who looked so innocent. The three Mulvaneys who’d found love had found it with people who were—for lack of a better word—normal.
Did that mean he could find happiness with Arlo? Only if he got him out of this mess. He wasn’t sure what was happening right now. Was this some sort of posturing? Were they just truly curious about his mother?
Dimitri tilted his head to the side, letting all emotion and life drain from his face. “Are we going to have a problem?”
The twins’ nostrils flared, both of them grinning in unison. But it was August who spoke, his tone soothing, like he wanted to put Dimitri at ease. “Easy, kid. We just want to help.”
“How could you help me?” Dimitri asked.
“Don’t you mean him?” Noah countered.
Dimitri’s gaze darted to Noah. “What?”
“Yeah, your mom definitely knows you’re covering for him. She didn’t say who you were, but she definitely told us what happened, and she doesn’t believe your story for a second.”
“Why’s that?” Dimitri asked, his heart thudding heavily against his ribs.
Jericho shrugged. “She said if you were going to kill him, there wouldn’t have been enough left to bury. Seems your weapon of choice is fire. We thought, at first, maybe she was working for another company—” She is. “—but now that we know you’re her son, this all makes so much more sense.”
“Does it?” Arlo asked, sounding bewildered.
August looked at him. “Oh, most definitely. You lucked out, kid. Seems his mother will protect you, and that means we will protect you, too. So, it seems you’ve chosen your new boyfriend wisely, though whether he’s a—what did you call the other one?”
“A dickbag,” Noah supplied helpfully.
August nodded, continuing his thought. “Yes. Whether he’s a dickbag remains to be seen.”
Boyfriend. It seemed like such a meager word to describe the chemical that fired in his brain whenever Arlo was anywhere near. It felt cosmic. Animalistic. Thoughts of Arlo consumed him. But Arlo didn’t know any of that. After tonight, Dimitri would show him. He’d show him every chance he got.
“I have to ask. Did the dickbag do that to your face?” Atticus asked.
“He did. That’s why he’s currently leaking brain matter into a garbage bag in the trunk,” Dimitri answered, wrapping a protective arm around Arlo.
“What did you use?” a twin asked, voice almost excited. “A gun? A knife?”
“A brick,” Arlo said, his voice barely audible.
The twin made a face. “A brick, huh? Weapon of convenience, I’m assuming?”
Arlo stiffened against him. “He had a knife to Dimitri’s throat.”
The other twin sneered in Dimitri’s direction. “You let him get the jump on you with a knife?”