Across the Vanishing Sky (Starlight Grove, #1)(20)

He slid the soda over the worn but gleaming wood. “You turning into me?”

It was a fair question. Given the end of my tenure with the FBI and the couple of cases I’d helped my ex-profiler friend, Anson, with in Sparrow Falls, the demons had been rustled up, to say the least. “You know booze isn’t my answer.”

Wylder’s mouth twisted in a lopsided grin. “Nope, you prefer vengeance via keystrokes.”

I chuckled and took a sip of the crisp Coke. “I’ll never know why you kept the place.”

Wylder leaned against the back of the bar, running a towel between his fingers. “Sometimes, you have to face it. Just to prove you can. That it didn’t get the best of you.”

He’d done that and more. Gotten sober. Worked a program. Even mentored others going through the program now.

I met my brother’s gaze, not looking away. “Proud of you.”

He didn’t hold my focus for long, always uncomfortable with any sort of praise. “So,” Wylder began, finally settling into what he wanted to know. “What is it about Miss Braedyn Winslow that has your knickers in a twist?”

Braedyn.

I could’ve looked up her name. The moment I got into her phone, I could’ve looked up every damn thing about her. But I’d stopped myself.

The one profile I’d found was already too tempting. I’d lain awake for hours last night, scrolling photo after photo, memorizing every detail. And I couldn’t deny that her putting me in my place was starting to feel like a game I didn’t want to stop playing. Only, that was the last thing I needed.

“She doesn’t.” The two words came out gruffer than my normal voice.

Wylder simply arched a brow. “You aren’t typically a grumpy bastard who scowls at everything that moves. Brae just bring it out of you or something?”

I scrubbed a hand over my face. Shit. My inner asshole kept rearing its ugly head. “Rough day when I met her. Blaze messed up the rental keys. I ended up in her cabin. I thought she was breaking in—”

“And you were naked?” Wylder asked, amusement in his words.

I glared at my brother. “I had on a towel. I was getting out of the shower. Then her dog lunged at me and—”

“You gave her one hell of a show?”

“It wasn’t my finest hour.”

“Dex, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not exactly doing a great job of remedying that.”

Everything he said was so very Wylder. He was the peacekeeper, the one always trying to soothe others’ hurts and wounds.

“Got a few submissions for us to look through,” I said, taking a sharp right into new territory.

Wylder’s eyes narrowed on me. “I know what you’re doing.”

I shrugged. “Let me do it anyway.”

“For now,” Wylder grumbled, always wanting to excise the wound.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and navigated to the app I’d created to hold all the website submissions for missing persons cases. Three had come in over the last week alone, and given that people only found us through word of mouth, that meant something.

“Missing woman outside Coeur d’Alene. Disappeared while hiking. Teen boy in Dayton, Ohio. Parents think he might have run away, but they’re not sure.”

A muscle along Wylder’s jaw twitched. “I hate the kid ones.”

I didn’t have to agree audibly for Wylder to know I felt the same way. “Father of two went out for drinks one night and never came home. That one’s in Houston.”

“Last two you might be able to give some insight on the tech side alone,” Wylder said.

He wasn’t wrong. With a handful of careful hacks, I could tell whether that father of two was truly gone or if he’d just decided to bail on his family. The teen might be harder, depending on whether he had a debit or credit card or a phone he was still using.

It was just a hell of a lot riskier now. My old boss had warned me that I would no longer have their protections if I chose to leave the FBI. She wasn’t an idiot. She knew what I did on the side, what had become a compulsion—not just for me but also for my brothers.

“I’ll do some preliminaries before I present.” That was how it always went. I ran initial searches and verified data, then brought it to my brothers, and we decided as a group. If one person had concerns, we didn’t take the case. We all had a role to play, and if someone was uncertain, we couldn’t work as a unit.

Wylder rubbed at a mark he spotted on the bar. “Not like you don’t have time on your hands. When are you going to get a job?”

I flipped him off. “I’ve got time. Savings.” I’d worked more than a few side gigs while putting in my decade at the FBI. It had given me a decent-sized nest egg. And I could pick up more consults anytime I wanted to.

Some might suggest I dip into the wealth our father had left behind from his import/export business, but none of us had touched it for any reason but to fund our work. It had become our unspoken vow.

The work was how we dealt with everything. How we came to terms with all the horrors our father inflicted, things so dark and twisted it seemed impossible that we’d missed the signs. But we had. Until it was too late.

Now, we tried to right the wrongs in small ways. To find those who had gone missing. For families that didn’t have answers. Just like the torment our father had inflicted on so many. But when you were a serial killer, you didn’t care about the hurt you caused. Worse, you liked it.