Page 22 of Nikolai (Kansas City Reapers)

Maddy nodded, her brow furrowing. “Yes. I think so. I’m almost certain. Yes, this is the man I saw.”

Quinn patted her on the back kindly and started cleaning up the scattered folders. “Thank you so much for your cooperation, Maddy. Your help has been absolutely invaluable.” She gave a small smile in return.

A few minutes later, I stood with Quinn by the front door as he prepared to leave.

“Thanks again, Niko. I don’t know what I’d do without you guys. Keep that girl safe, do you hear me? She’s the number one VIP in this case now. I’ve got to get back to the station to tell Chief McCarthy the good news. I’ll be in touch, okay?”

After a round of goodbyes, Quinn headed back to the station, leaving the five of us alone in the house once more. What I had thought would take only a few short hours had turned into an all-day event, and the sky was already beginning to turn from blue to pink to purple hues as I watched Quinn’s car pull down the drive, the gate locking behind them.

Closing the door and locking it, I could hear the rest ofthe house chattering away in the kitchen. Might as well join them.

“You are out of your God-damned mind if you think the Intel i9 is better than the Ryzen 9. You’re completely mad, Jax.” Maddy was in the middle of what seemed to be a heated debate with Jax, though I didn’t miss the way his eyes lit up at the chance to discuss nerdy tech stuff with someone.

“You know about computer stuff, Maddy?” I asked, peeking my head into the main part of the kitchen where Sully was bustling around the stove, apron and oven mitts at the ready, as usual.

“I do, actually,” she said with a smirk. “I have my MBA in Marketing.”

“Well, marketing and computers are related, but that doesn’t mean you know anything aboutseriouscomputer stuff,” Jax said with a slightly pompous chuckle.

“True enough, but it helps when you were a complete nerd in high school.”

“I find that very hard to believe,” I muttered under my breath. Based on the daggers she threw at me with a look, she’d most definitely heard me.

“Well, I was a total geek in high school, believe me or not. But my senior year, I got lucky.”

“A lot of people get lucky their senior year!” Sully called out from the kitchen, prompting a laugh from everyone. Even Maddy chuckled along with us.

“Anyway. I’d helped one of the popular girls with her homework for an entire semester at the end of Junior year, and instead of my normal fees, I told her that my charge this time was that she had to give me a completemakeover. So over the summer, she worked her magic, helping me get a totally new wardrobe, new hair, new makeup; the works. Well, it paid off, because we ended up becoming friends in the process, and voilà! I started my Senior year as one of the popular girls. It didn’t stop my love of geeky things, though.”

“Gaming, hardware, or hacking?” Jax asked, once again intrigued.

“Hacking,obviously.” That little smirk, along with that glimmer in her eye, was all I needed to see to know she was just as much trouble then as she was now. You could take the geek out of the girl, but apparently, the troublemaker was here to stay.

“Nice!” Jax said, whistling low in genuine respect. That was not an easy feat to manage, but somehow Maddy did.

“What can I say?” She shrugged lightly, sitting down at the table as Sully brought the food he’d been preparing out of the kitchen for everyone. “Once I got to college, the pull of popularity mellowed out a bit, and I switched my major by the end of the first semester, choosing a career in Marketing Technology, because that would kind of grant me the best of both worlds: tech and popularity. I enjoyed having friends. I’d spent much of my early days without any.”

I felt a pull to her, a kinship, in that admission. But I kept my mouth shut.

“Well, it’s going to be so nice to have a fellow geek around here to talk computer shit with.” Jax was positively bouncing in his seat with excitement. “So, let’s talk processors. Do you–”

“And that’s where I’m gonna cut y’all off,” Deacon grumbled. “This conversation’s making my head hurt.”

“Aw, tough guy can’t keep up?” Maddy teased. That smirk fell right off her pretty little face as Deacon leveled her with a look. I knew that look. One did not fuck withthatlook from Deacon.

As we tucked into yet another delicious dinner courtesy of Sully, Maddy changed the subject.

“So, what about you guys? I know you were all in the military or something, but now you’re here in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere. Are you still active duty, or…?” she trailed off, allowing us space to answer.

“We’re not active duty anymore, though some of us have been known to still do the occasional mission here or there when called upon,” Deacon answered, finally perking up at a topic he actually cared about.

“Like the other one of you guys… Carson, or whatever.”

“Carrick. Yeah, kind of like that,” Sully answered. “We all met while we were deployed and became close friends. Brothers, really. But we all got out of the service at different times, and for different reasons.”

“Once we were all out, we wanted to find a place where we could get some peace and quiet, and find our way back to civilian life,” Jax added.

“What does that mean?” she asked, finishing the last bites of food on her plate before leaning back comfortably in her chair to listen.

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