Page 68 of Bad Enough

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” TB muttered, grabbed his coffee, and crossed over to the seat beside her. After he put his cup down, he grabbed the chair Nemo was sitting in, pulled it from the table, unceremoniously dumped him out of it, then put it back to the table and sat down with his own butt in it.

Nemo went and sat in his usual seat on the opposite side of the table, to the right of his brother and directly across from Flame, smiling from ear to ear. “This seat’s better anyway. I can sit here and gaze at her without getting a crick in my neck.”

Flame was blushing, and TB did not like it one bit.

She’s not going to succumb to his shit, is she? I’ll kill him.

A booming voice came out of nowhere. “Is everyone here?”

Flame looked around the room. TB motioned to the speaker in the center of the table and mouthed, “Our boss.”

“All right, everyone, let’s get going.” Waters focused everyone’s attention. “So, already, we’ve had an escalation in contact. Looks like our security system pushed him into making a call. Midas, were you able to pull it off the system?”

“Yup.”

Flame’s posture went ramrod straight, and all color fled from her face. Midas looked at her. “I only pulled your conversation with him, not with Kubrick.”

She clearly understood that Midas had heard the other conversation as well. Midas put a hand over hers that were shredding the napkin in front of her. He leaned in to whisper in her ear, “I promise.” Midas’ eyes glanced quickly at TB.

She nodded, immediately stopped shredding the paper, and withdrew her hands, putting them, tightly clasped, in her lap.

“Okay, here comes the playback,” Midas warned her.

“Kai, I don’t want to be a part of a triad with you, even if it’s just verbal. If you’re calling me to?—”

“I won’t share you.”

“You were promised to me, Jolie. You’ve always been mine. And soon, you’ll be mine to do with as I please. But first I’m going to take care of that new boyfriend of yours. And it will hurt, Jolie. I’ll enjoy hurting him. Then it will be your turn.”

There was a dial tone, a scream from Flame, the thunk of the phone hitting the floor, and then nothing.

“Call lasted sixteen seconds from connect to disconnect. Burner phone, but he was close by. Within a mile,” Midas said.

“How did he get past Nemo?”

Nemo frowned. “No one got past me. But I was pretty close to the house in the big cedar tree.”

“He didn’t necessarily need to be by the house,” Midas explained. “Depending on how he’s monitoring, a telescope and a clear sightline is all he would have needed. He could have been in a lot of different places. All he needed to know was that her line was clear. We swept for bugs and cameras. Found nothing.”

“Well, if his comments are anything to go by, he clearly knows about TB and that he’s connected to Flame,” Waters observed.

“Play it again, Midas,” God barked.

They listened to the recording again.

“He said, ‘You were promised to me.’ Odd turn of phrase,” Steel commented.

Waters nodded. “Like it’s connected to something before. Do you know what he’s talking about, Flame?”

TB watched her closely. Her eyes were watching her hands twist in her lap.

“No. I’ve no idea.”

Truth.

“Do you recognize anything about the voice? I know it’s going through a synthesizer, but anything about the language used or the cadence of the speech pattern?” Midas asked. He played the recording again. “Anything?”

Flame shook her head, eyes still not leaving her lap.

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