Page 37 of Unraveling Connections

I am going to need more snacks to get through the rest of this.

Hopping up, I grab my travel mug; I may as well make a fresh coffee while I’m down there. As I walk through the house it's quiet apart from the odd rumble of one of the guy’s voices and various TVs playing throughout the house. I can also hear snoring coming from somewhere, but I’m going to assume that it is Shadow and not one of the guys.

When I get to the kitchen, I quickly refill my cup before I grab another cookie and then head to our giant walk-in pantryto rummage around and find myself some more snacks. Once I have got everything I could possibly want, my arms filled with snacks and my coffee, my phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s most likely one of the guys, and my arms are so full of stuff that if I try and shift any of it to grab my phone out of my pocket, I’m going to drop everything on the floor.

So instead, I yell, “Who messaged?”

“Me, Princess!” Atlas yells back pretty much immediately, and I hear the guy’s chuckle from various places in the house as I head in his direction.

I'm reasonably confident that he was working in the office slash library that’s in the hallway before the garage. My first stumbling block is the door that leads to the hallway, and I just stand there staring at it for a moment.

“Need a hand?” Riot asks from behind me.

Looking back at him, I can see the amusement sparking in his eyes as his lips twitch with a smile.

Since he looks so amused at the predicament I am in, I briefly consider being stubborn and insisting that I can do it myself but honestly, that is only going to end badly for me.

“Yes, please,” I admit.

Riot grins and opens the door for me, smacking my ass as I walk past him and making me smile.

“I thought you were going to get stubborn with it for a second. I had a vision of you trying to open the door with your toes again.” Riot says as he follows me through the door.

I huff loudly, glad he can’t see the smile on my face, as I reply jokingly, “You don’t know me.”

“Uh huh, sure I don’t, Sunshine.”

I decide to leave that argument where it is, and I add indignantly, “And actually, if you remember correctly, I did manage to open the door using my toes.”

Riot chuckles, “You did, and it was disturbingly impressive.”

I pull a face, “You know what, I’ll take that.”

“Hey, you got us snacks,” Jensen grins.

I pause, look down at all of the food I have managed to carry, admit to myself that I probably can’t eat all of it myself, and then sigh, “Yeah, I suppose I can share.”

There is a beat of silence before everyone bursts out laughing.

“You really weren’t going to share with us?” Atlas chuckles, his eyebrows raised.

I dump all the food on the coffee table so that everyone can help themselves, and then shrug. “Well, I was heading back upstairs with it all. I think I could have probably made a pretty good dent in it.”

Rafe chuckles, “I have no doubt about that. I will make some dinner as soon as Atlas has told us what he has found.” He looks at Atlas, “You have found something, right? Because I have found literally nothing, not even a whiff of a glitch.”

“Me neither,” Jensen chimes in before Atlas can say anything. “And I really did pay attention.”

“Yeah, I have found something,” he explains, although that is all the information he gives us as he simply turns the laptop around, presses play and then waits.

We watch, and for a moment, I think that he’s uploaded the wrong piece of video for us to watch; it’s just a view of one of the many hallways in Luc’s parent's house, but then I see it in the bottom corner of the screen, not glitch but a dark figure.

“When was this?” Cash asks.

“When the cameras went down the first time.” Atlas replies, and then adds for clarification, “When HQ noticed that they were off and assumed it was us.”

“You can’t see much,” Cash says as he leans closer and squints at the screen, “but that is definitely a person.”

“One second,” Peter says as he pulls the laptop over to himself and starts tapping away.

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