Ari drifted up to his side, a slice of lemon iced cake in one hand, his eyes on his daughter. There was a certain amount of fond resignation in his expression. “Your parents just adopted my daughter, didn’t they?”
“Indubitably.” In a confidential tone, Brannigan admitted, “Between four uncles, two doting fathers, two enchanted grandparents, and Tricksy, I don’t think there’s any hope for Remi. She’s going to be utterly spoiled.”
“Five uncles,” Ari corrected with a long sigh. “My brother is just as bad. I think once Carter’s parents and siblings get to know her better, and vice versa, things will pick up there, too. Maybe we need more kids in this family to spread the love around. Remi’s case will be hopeless otherwise.”
That was a very intriguing idea. “You and Carter?”
“Eh, maybe. We’re talking about it but no decision there yet. Ivan and Aiden fully plan to once Aiden’s done with residency.” Lips pursed, Ari stared at his thief brother cuddled in next to Aiden on the couch. “Limits need to be imposed there, I think. Ivan’s the type to go hog-wild once he gets enthusiastic about a project. I fully expect to go over to his house and find he’s suddenly got a dozen kids.”
Ivan clearly heard him as he drawled, “You say this like it be problem. No problem.”
“Problem!” Aiden jerked in semi-panic, frantically shaking his head. “I am not raising a dozen kids. No. This is me, putting my foot down.”
Ivan tilted his head to look down at Aiden’s face, eyes narrowed shrewdly. “Okay. Half a dozen. Only six is good, da?”
“Are we negotiating this now?” Aiden rolled his eyes expressively. “Seriously, now?”
Looking about at their setting, and amused audience, Ivan shrugged. “Perhaps later be better.”
Aiden’s look at his husband conveyed, You think?
They were saved by the doorbell. Literally. Brannigan went to the front door to answer it and suddenly acquired Carter on the way, who oh-so-casually guarded him as he let Tricksy in. She noted the guard and grimaced.
“Good that you’re taking precautions. You’re not going to like this.”
Brannigan winced. “That bad?”
“Well, it’s certainly not good.” She sailed past him and into the living room as if she already knew the layout. (She probably did. Brannigan chose not to think too hard about that.) To the group already gathered, she gave a smile. “Hello, all. I bring bad tidings of no joy.”
“That’s not how that Christmas song is supposed to go.” Shaking his head, Kyou introduced her with a wave of the hand. “Tricksy, this is Mattias and Deidra Genovese and their friend, Piero. This is Tricksy, a good friend and one of the informants I hired.”
“Hello, everyone.” Tricksy sauntered over to shake hands and give Remi a quick hug. “Nice to meet you, wish it were under better circumstances. Is that cake I spy? God, I need sugar.”
Ari, being a wise man, fetched her a slice and handed it over.
Taking it, she inhaled the smell with a blissful expression. “You’re now my favorite. Let me eat a bite of this, then I’ll tell you how stupid things just turned.”
Brannigan didn’t like the sound of this at all. He went to join Kyou, sliding in next to him on the loveseat. Kyou shifted to allow this but didn’t take his eyes off the woman.
Tricksy in fact ate two bites before groaning in pleasure. “I want either the recipe or the name of the bakery before I leave tonight.”
“Done,” Brannigan promised her.
She shot him a quick smile of thanks before the expression was chased off by aggravation. Tricksy shifted to the only open chair, putting her near Remi. “Okay. So Emura, in his desperation, stupidity, and general depravity, did something I never thought a sane man would do. He’s started the criminal version of a GoFundMe with the intent of hiring an assassin to take K out. He claims he’s found exactly where you live. That he can track you through Brannigan. Probably isn’t wrong on the second part, not sure about the first. It hardly matters. He can find K.”
Kyou’s wince was so hard it was almost audible.
“Now, this is where the stupidity comes in. He’s made this visible, probably so people can readily find it, but that meant I found it. K and I both did, I should say. The idiot didn’t take the necessary privacy precautions when he set up the page.”
“I didn’t even have to hack into it,” Kyou pitched in with another wince. “It was a little alarming how much money he’d gathered and how many donors there were.”
Tricksy regarded him with a tilt of the head. “How many people have you pissed off in your career, anyway?”
Kyou shifted under all of the curious eyes, about as comfortable as a novice fakir on a bed of particularly sharp nails. “Too many. Apparently. Anyway, we called the meeting because donations came to something of a standstill yesterday, and Emura seemed to be on the move, looking for an assassin. Without physically getting out there to track him, I can’t figure out who. He’s being very careful to stay offline right now.”
Brannigan thought the reason for that fairly obvious. Anyone trying to take out a hacker would keep their online footprint as nonexistent as possible.
“This man is evading everyone I associate with,” Mattias informed the group. “I’ve found no word of him outside of the website.”
And it frustrated his father; Brannigan had seen him swear more than once. “Tricksy, were you able to figure it out?”
“I’ve been tailing him since last night.” She lifted the plate with her half-eaten cake in illustration, as if to explain why she needed the sugar rush. “The people he was meeting with are not people you’d even tell the time to, let me tell you. Seriously bad guys. He finally found someone to take the job sometime around o’dark thirty this morning. Ari, it’s a man by the name of Edgar Lewis. Ring any bells?”
Ari’s lips curled back from his teeth in a slow, menacing manner. You could call it a smile, if said smile was held between a stone wall and a spear point and forced to beg for its life. “I do indeed. Oh, this will be a downright pleasure.”
Ivan perked up, as hopeful as a dog eyeing a bag of new treats. “Is it playtime?”
“It’s totally playtime,” Ari assured him with dark promise.
Eyes bouncing between the two of them, Brannigan suddenly felt concerned for Boston. Hell was apparently about to break loose. He could not imagine what the man had done to garner this reaction.
Mattias cleared his throat. “I think we skipped ahead, gentlemen. Why don’t we go back a few steps and you explain?”
“This was, oh, some number of years ago. Kyou and I had done a single job together, so I knew him and Ivan by that point. I took a job to kill the head of a cult, and was happy to do it, as I hate cults. What I didn’t know at the time was that the person who hired me had, in fact, contacted three other assassins about the job before contracting me to do it. I spent a week planning, as the cult had a compound with some tight security. The night before I was set to go in, Edgar Lewis beats me to the target, but he doesn’t target just the cult head. Instead, he blows the compound to hell. It was not what my client wanted; he wanted to free his daughter from the cult. She gets very hurt in the blast, and the cult head wasn’t even there that night, so he goes to ground and is never seen again. I get in trouble because the client thought I’d blown the place sky high and injured his daughter in the process.”