Maniac - Necessary Evils #7 - Ch. 16 (Patreon)

As always, unbeta'd and unedited. Hope you enjoy. 

Aiden

Aiden and Thomas entered the parlor to the knowing stares of Calliope, Cricket and Lola. They sat curled up on the sofa, wine in hand, chatting like they’d known each other all their lives. Well, Calliope and Lola had wine in hand, Cricket was drinking mineral water. Weird. Not that she was a drinker, but Aiden had seen her drink at more than one wedding.

He filed that information away for later. He envied how women could just bond so easily. Maybe not all women but definitely these women. None of them had ever met a stranger. Something about them just seemed to put people at ease. Nobody had ever said that about him or any of the Mulvaney’s.

Aiden liked maybe three people he didn’t share a last name with and they were all present in that room. What would Aiden do without Lola? Tommy wanted him to come home…permanently. That meant closing up shop on his PI business, but it also meant giving up Lola.

“Where’ve you two been?” Cricket asked, giving them a thorough once over.

“Car trouble,” they both said in unison.

Shit.

Calliope snorted. “Something need to be lubed?”

“Calliope,” Thomas said, her name more a warning than a plea.

“Thomas,” she mocked in the same stern voice.

Aiden tried to hide his smirk as Thomas easily gave in, shoulders dropping. Aiden didn’t know why Thomas even bothered. Calliope was the only person Aiden knew who had no fear of Thomas. Maybe it was their years of friendship? Maybe Calliope had just vowed never to fear anyone. Either was a very real possibility.

“Where’s everybody else?” Aiden asked, breaking the staring contest between the two.

Cricket sighed. “Team A is in the conference room going over the stuff in the boxes Lola found, Team B is playing Mario Kart and Team C is on babysitting duty, which just means they’re also playing Mario Kart but with two toddlers in their laps.”

Thomas and Aiden exchanged glances, before Aiden said, “What?”

Lola shrugged. “There’s too many of them. We can’t keep naming them all. So we just separated them into teams. It’s just easier that way.”

“Who’s Team A?” Aiden asked.

“August, Lucas, Mac, Archer, Jericho, Atticus, and the twins,” Cricket said, listing them off on her fingers.

“Team B?” Thomas asked, amused.

“Adam, Noah, Felix, Zane, Arsen and Seven,” Calliope listed.

“And before you ask, Team C is Lake, Cree, Nico, Levi, Arlo and Dimitri,” Lola said.

“You got August and Lucas to agree to leave the girls with a group of Gen Z gamers…on purpose?” Aiden asked.

“As opposed to the vigilante killers who are their parents and uncles?” Calliope asked.

She had a point. The girls were safe, especially with the feelings faction guarding them. Jericho’s boys were the best of both worlds, truly. They could kill when they needed to but somehow managed to keep all their humanity intact. Maybe that was just the resilience of their age. Or maybe that’s what life was like when you had faith that what you were doing was justified.

“They’re waiting for you in the war room,” Cricket said, waving her hand vaguely in the direction of said room.

Thomas frowned at Calliope. “Are you coming?”

Calliope looked at Lola and Cricket. “Yeah, I’ll be along shortly.”

Thomas eyed her wine glass. “Sober?”

Calliope’s brows went up, her expression…frosty. Oof. Thomas needed to tread lightly. They couldn’t afford to lose Calliope. She was literally the backbone of the entire operation. Without her, they’d be crippled indefinitely. Also, she scared Aiden just a little. He could probably beat her in a fist fight, but she could tank his credit score in two strokes of a keyboard. Hell, she could make him disappear like a black ops agent if she wanted, making it so Aiden never existed at all. Yeah, no thank you.

“Drunk or sober, I can still get the job done,” Calliope said, “Besides, who are you to lecture me about responsible drinking? You’re half in the bag whenever you and this one—” she pointed her thumb at Aiden— “ have another fight. Which is often.”

“She’s got you there,” Cricket murmured.

“I-” Thomas started, looking comically offended.

Aiden chuckled, grabbing Thomas’s forearm. “Come on. Let’s go downstairs before you piss off your only friend.”

Thomas gave him a huffy look. “I have other friends.”

“Do you?” Aiden asked, tilting his head.

“Do you?” Thomas asked, tone mocking.

Aiden really didn’t. He didn’t trust people. Hadn’t really trusted Lola when they’d met but then somewhere along the way she’d just sort of snuck in. He didn’t know when it happened. Maybe it was all those nights she spent listening to him drunkenly whine about Thomas. She’d more than proven herself as a friend. Aiden wasn’t sure she would say the same of him, but he hoped so.

“Just Lola. And you only have Calliope. So be nice.” Aiden bumped their shoulders together, tone teasing as he said, “You just got laid, you should be relaxed.”

“I am relaxed,” Thomas muttered as Aiden opened the door to the war room.

Team A were exactly as Cricket said, hunched over paperwork strewn over the conference table. August was still scanning the papers in the thick manila envelope, Lucas was running his hands over the papers, reading as much as he was trying to get impressions. Asa and Avi sat on the conference table, passing papers between them. Mac and Archer sat at the conference table, but segregated from the others, using their phones to look up whatever information was on the notes in front of them, while Jericho and Atticus studied what looked like autopsy photos.

They all looked up from their tasks upon their entrance. “Took you two long enough,” August said.

“Car trouble,” Aiden said.

Asa snorted. “Yeah, those brand new luxury vehicles can be tricky.”

“Where’s Calliope?” Atticus asked, looking behind them like she might be hiding.

“Upstairs, drinking with Cricket and Lola,” Aiden said.

Lucas glanced up sharply. “Cricket’s drinking?”

Aiden frowned. “No, she’s watching them drink.”

“Why do you care if Cricket is drinking? She’s your baby mama not your daughter,” Jericho said.

“Because she’s pregnant,” August said, not looking up from his task. “Alcohol increases the risk of birth defects, developmental delays, low birth weight, miscarriage and even stillbirth.”

Aiden’s eyes went wide. He glanced at Thomas who started to smile. God, this man really loved babies. Did that mean he actually wanted babies of his own? Would that be weird? They were both much older than most new parents. Also, their grandkids would be older than their aunts and uncles. That would be bizarre. But the idea of a baby with Thomas’s blue eyes made Aiden a little breathless. Christ, he was so far gone.

“You could have just stopped with she’s pregnant, babe,” Lucas said, still running his hands over pages in the file.

“Congrats,” Mac said, before returning to his phone.

“Yeah, mozel tov and all that,” Archer agreed, raising his water bottle in a mock salute.

It would never not be weird to Aiden to see a sober acting Archer. After years of finding him sleeping in bathtubs and alleyways, it was damn near impossible to believe it was all fake. In the news, they spun it as him sobering up for the love of his life, which to an extent was the truth. He hadn’t sobered up, but he had stopped living a double life. Working at that school provided enough plausible deniability to keep their more unseemly activities at bay.

“You guys are having another baby?” Avi asked. “Why didn’t we know that?”

August finally looked up, frowning. “Are we supposed to tell you whenever we’re attempting to conceive a child?”

“No but you could tell us when you’ve managed to do it,” Atticus said stiffly. “Don’t you think there’s enough kids running around?”

Lucas gave Atticus a superior look. “You don’t get to talk. You have six children.”

“Mine are all old enough to drink,” Atticus said, earning a surprised look from his husband. When Atticus noticed he said, “What?”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you acknowledge that they’re your kids as much as mine.”

“I mean, technically they’re neither of yours,” Avi said.

“Regardless,” Lucas said. “You don’t get to lecture us. You took the easy way out and just unofficially adopted fully grown humans.”

Atticus scoffed. “If you think corralling those kids is easy you’ve never tried to herd cats before.”

“You think that’s bad?” Archer said. “Try over a hundred homicidal twenty-somethings with access to military grade weapons and the department of defense discretionary budget.”

Aiden couldn’t imagine attempting to wrangle that many psychopaths in one place, much less keep it organized enough to carry out kills that, if done wrong, could start international incidents, even wars. The fact that Thomas thought Mac and Archer were prime for the job spoke to how little Aiden knew either of them.

Lucas, however, was unimpressed. “You can talk to me when you have two eighteen-month-olds simultaneously projectile vomiting on you or finger painting with their own poop,” Lucas said.

Avi pulled a face. “Ew. Why the hell are you having another one?”

Lucas and August exchanged a look that made Aiden feel like he was intruding, then August sighed, “You just won’t get it until you have one.”

“Which if Felix has his way might be sooner rather than later,” Jericho said.

“Yeah, laugh it up, grease monkey. You’re the one who’s going to end up a grandfather in his thirties,” Asa said. “All your kids are old enough to breed and half of them are not super picky about gender so…may the odds be ever in your favor.”

Jericho flicked him off.

“Enough,” Thomas said. “Congratulations on the baby, Lucas.”

“Why just Lucas,” August said, frowning.

“Because he’s the only one who cares about formalities,” Thomas said, his tone soothing.

“True,” August said. He pointed to the manilla folder in front of him. “I’ve been going through Shane’s medical records. Seems his parents knew he was prone to violence from a young age. He’d already hit the McDonald triad before he was ten. He killed some neighborhood pets, set fire to the pool house. Attacked a housekeeper with a screwdriver.”

Thomas dropped into a chair, rubbing a hand over his face. “How did nobody know about this?”

“You know how,” Asa said. “The same way nobody knows about us. Money. His mom is an heiress. She just kept paying off his victims.”

“He wasn’t like that in school,” Thomas said, almost like he needed to believe it. “He was popular, likable, most people thought he was good-natured.”

“Come on, dad. How many times have we heard that about Ted Bundy? That’s part of their cover. Hell, it's part of ours,” Archer asked.

“He just wasn’t violent like that,” Thomas said, sounding lost.

“Wasn’t he?” Aiden asked, placing his hands on Thomas’s shoulders.

It was crazy how Thomas could still be so deeply ensnared by Shane. He had to know, on some level, that everything he and Shane had shared had been a tactic, a ploy to get Thomas to trust him, to let him abuse him freely. Nobody should know that better than him, but he was blind to it. Maybe it was the only way he could cope, but it was still frustrating. Aiden didn’t want him thinking about anybody but him.

“It didn’t seem like it at the time,” Thomas said. “He was manipulative, sure. But…”

Aiden squeezed his shoulders. “But what? He was a narcissist and a rapist. Just because you loved him, doesn’t make him any less of those things. It just made it easier for him to manipulate you.”

Thomas scrubbed his hands over his face. “This is getting us nowhere. None of this is helpful.”

“Holly is a dead end,” Atticus said. “We can at least scratch her vengeful love child off our list.”

“Why’s that?” August asked.

Atticus held up a stack of papers. “I requested a copy of her autopsy report. Luckily, they did one. The coroner notes she never had children.”

“Wouldn’t the coroner just be going off of her medical records? Maybe she lied?” Asa asked.

Atticus shook his head. “There’s osteological markers that show a woman has or hasn’t had kids. She hasn’t. There’s no secret love child stalking Thomas for revenge. I suppose she could have had someone close to her that sought revenge but it still doesn’t make sense why they’d go after you instead of Shane unless Holly lied. Which is hard to believe. Would she protect her rapist?”

“I did,” Thomas said quietly.

Aiden squeezed his shoulders once more. He wished there was some way to quell his fears but the only ways he could think of required them being alone.

“Maybe this has nothing to do with Shane at all,” Thomas said suddenly. “Maybe Shane was just a means to an end. Maybe this person has just had it out for me from the beginning. Someone who is pissed we killed a partner? Someone looking for people to kill with to replace that partner? It would explain the online activity.”

“Well we need Calliope if we’re going to chase the rabbit down that black hole,” Jericho said, just as the door opened. “There’s no way we can run those leads down without her.”

“Ask and ye shall receive,” Calliope said, breezing in, wine glass still in hand. “Despite my relaxed, vacation-like demeanor, I’ve been on top of our little band of psychopathic misfits. I tagged all of the names and have lots of little bots scrubbing the web, both dark and light. Whoever they are, I will find them. Fear not.”

“So we’re giving up on the Shane angle entirely?” Atticus asked.

“Not entirely,” Thomas said. “Maybe I just pay them and see what happens? Maybe it all goes away.”

“No. We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” Asa said.

“Yeah, we’re not giving this dick our inheritance money,” Avi said. “Besides, he’ll just come back for more or release the story anyway.”

“We could release it first,” Lucas said. “Let Zane write it. Get ahead of it and put our own spin on it.”

“You’re forgetting something,” Calliope said. “If this AlwaysChristmas guy and the blackmailer are one in the same, they don’t just have you dead to rights on that family secret. They know you kill people. All of you. What if they can prove that too?”

“So what do we do? Go back to the beginning?” Mac asked.

Thomas closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. “Let's just call it a night. Come back to it in the morning with fresh eyes.”

The others looked like they wanted to protest but Calliope gave them a subtle shake of her head. Once all of them had filed out but her, she sat on the table beside Thomas’s chair. “How you holding up, buttercup? You don’t look so good.”

“I’m fine,” Thomas said, warily.

“Anybody with eyes knows you’re clearly not fine. But are you okay? Can you handle this?” Calliope asked.

That was a good question. All the strain couldn’t be good for him. He had too much heart. He’d never worried about his physical health before. Thomas was always the fittest one in the family. He went to the gym nearly every single day, ate clean, and didn't smoke. Hell, his only vice was liquor and even that was only after a fight with Aiden.

But Aiden would be lying if he said he couldn’t see the strain was taking a toll on him. Aiden needed to take better care of him. And maybe for once Thomas would actually let him.

Calliope gave Aiden a hard look that seemed to convey that she expected him to take care of this…of him. “Why don’t you guys go take a shower…or a bath? Yours is probably big enough for ten people.”

“What are you going to be doing?” Thomas asked.

Calliope shrugged. “Well, first I’m going to work my magic on those keys and see if I can’t dig up some more information on our Mulvaney counter-strike serial killers. Then, if I’m lucky, I might get to do Lola.”

Thomas coughed in surprise. “Calliope.”

Calliope laughed. “What? You asked.”

“And on that note…” Aiden said, letting his words trail off as he tugged Thomas to his feet.

“Good luck,” Aiden said in lieu of a farewell.

“When you look like me, honey. You don’t need luck,” Calliope said.

“I meant with the computers, but I admire your confidence,” Aiden said, shaking his head.

“Night, boys.”