Page 108 of Cohesion

“Hey, man,” Peyton answered.

“Just checking in. You find your target yet?”

“Not yet.” And it grated on him something fierce. He was never going to be good at investigations. He was more action oriented. Get in, get out, leave bodies behind. “Yours?”

“Seb’s kid brother, Eli?”

“He’s twenty,” Peyton said. If he remembered correctly. They weren’t details he’d focused on.

“Whatever. He threw a vase at Danny’s head, had some super-suggestive things he could do with certain parts of his anatomy, and threatened to call the police. Guess his sister didn’t get the message to him in time.”

“Your own fault for being on time for once,” Peyton said, laughing at the image. “How big is he?”

“Your brother?” Aidan said slowly. “Still a giant tank. I make him eat all his veggies, but I don’t think he’s grown since you last saw him.”

“No, the ki—Eli.”

“Man, he issmall. He reminds me of that time—do you remember our second deployment out together, they assigned us a local to take us around the town, and we thought they’d sent us a kid, and Tyler chucked a massive hissy fit? I thought he was getting court-martialled after he slung those insults at that lieutenant colonel.”

They’d been pretty creative, though, and if theyhadbeen given a kid to take into war zones, it was well within his rights to throw at them. To give the LT credit, he’d waited patiently for Tyler to finish before he’d explained that the guy that they’d sent was thirty-five, and he wasn’t responsible for how a person aged or their skin-care regime. He was easily one of the most laid back and easy-going officer they’d been under the command off. Peyton had a lot of respect for him.

“Terry. Damn, I haven’t thought about him in years. Hope he’s doing alright.” Peyton remembered it all vividly, for both goodand bad reasons. He’d almost died that deployment and had the scar across his hip to prove it. And he’d made a friend for life.

“He’s that small.”

No wonder Danny had scared the shit out of him. Their Dad was a solid guy and Danny and Kellan were the only ones who’d ended up built like him. The rest of them? They were swimmers, not wrestlers.

“And you needed two of you to watch him?”

“He’s a firecracker. Felix is with the brothers—Jayden and Gabriel—which I’m jealous about; did you know that he was a UFC fighter?”

“Yeah.” A bit of a mindfuck that Sebastian was all but related to him, based on his relationship with whoever this Jayden was. They’d never gotten a chance to do the whole family thing. It was still too new. And now if they couldn’t get him back, they’d never get the chance to have all the awkward family dinners and introductions.

Not on his watch. Sebastian wasn’t allowed to go anywhere without having to live through that with them.

Peyton would even deal with introducing him and Jericho to his mother—even though she would embarrass the fuck out of him and fuss over them—just to know that Sebastian was safe and back with them. Some people were worth suffering for.

“Tyler’s got the mum. And I sent the rookie to the sister.”

“By himself?”

“He’s got the right skills. Reminds me a bit of you when you first enlisted.”

“There’s a compliment in there somewhere, I’m sure,” Peyton said dryly.

“If you need any of us there, for anything, you call us. We can throw all our charges into a room with two of us so that the rest can be there.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Peyton said. He worried what a situation would look like if he needed to call them all in. The kind of fucked-up scenario that would require a commando fire team. He didn’t plan on letting it get that far.

Peyton froze when a familiar sound rang out at the same time as buzzing came from the kitchen counter. “That’s Quinn’s phone. I have to go.”

“Keep me posted.”

Peyton was out of his seat and snatching it up before Aidan had hung up.

An unknown number.Pleasepleaseplease. “Hello?”

“Um, is this Detective Quinn Hughes?”

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