“Willow’s drones will provide surveillance twenty-four hours a day, right?” he asked to make sure.
“Aye,” Darius answered. “One will be in the air at all times.”
Thank fuck.
“She has to teach me some shit next time we visit,” Ryan declared. “I wanna learn how to fly drones too. They have autopilot and everything these days. You didn’t see that outside of the military when I was in the service.”
“Please let me be there when you tell Angel you wanna pick up another hobby with gadgets,” Darius said. “Didn’t you just spend a grand on gaming goggles? Which I still don’t understand the concept of, by the way.”
Gray kept his mouth shut for this. It was too funny.
“Gaming goggles,” Ryan scoffed. “They’re VR headsets, and it’s a hobby I share with Abby. It’s our thing.”
“What the fuck is VR?” Darius retorted. By now, they’d reached the truck, and everyone dumped their gear along the sides of the cargo bed. Because they’d need the space in the middle for those who wouldn’t get a seat.
“It stands for virtual reality,” Reese provided. “They’re fun. You put them on and shoot zombies and shit.”
Darius leaned against the truck and scratched his eyebrow. “You need virtual reality to bond with your stepdaughter?”
“Oh, fuck off, bro. Not everyone wants to spend their weekends playing with rocks and building ant farms.”
Gray coughed to hide a laugh, and he kinda failed.
“What the hell is wrong with ant farms?” Darius bitched.
“All right, you two.” It was time for Gray to cut in before it escalated. “We can save the bickering for the next family reunion. Let’s get out of here. Elliott, you drive. Tariq, Dante, Niko, River, and Reese, squeeze your sweet asses into the truck. I’ll suffer with the Quinn toddlers in the back.”
Darius merely slid him an amused expression. Ryan still looked a little pissy.
“Thanks for taking one for the team.” River clapped Gray on the shoulder before climbing into the truck.
With the cargo bed cover pulled back, Gray helped Darius up and told him to lie down.
“Use this backpack as a pillow.” Gray arranged it as best as he could. “Ryan, get in.”
“So damn bossy sometimes,” Ryan muttered.
Gray puckered his lips at the man.
Despite the frazzled nerves that came with the knowledge of the compound being so accessible to whoever got too curious and wanted to investigate, it was a big relief to be back at the house.
The men took turns showering off the night in the bathrooms, and then food became the biggest priority. Except for Gray, whose main task was to get Darius into bed once they’d showered. As promised, he got two painkillers, and when Darius didn’t complain about being drugged, it spoke volumes about the pain he was in.
It felt nice to have a sliver of privacy too. Just last night, this room had been filled. Alicia had sat at that desk, with the computers running, acting like she was on their team. It was surreal.
“There we go.” Gray tucked Darius in and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Have they kicked in yet?” It’d been a few minutes since he’d taken the pills.
“I don’t think so.” Darius yawned and placed his hand under his head. It was a sexy sight, his inked bicep bulging just a bit, his chest exposed. More ink there. And scars.
Gray had always viewed tattoos as decorations of sorts. Or statements. But with Darius, it was a part of his mind. Tiny fragments of past operations and memories. Countless little digits making up longitude and latitude and dates—locations of where he’d been, where he’d worked, where he’d risked his life.
Darius was a numbers guy, in a way. It was how he crunched scenarios, by comparing statistics and history. Both were necessary, the human experience which allowed room for error and anomalies, and the digits that showed the past in black-and-white. Numbers also provided Darius with a language in which to jot down his memories without revealing them.
“You were amazing last night,” Darius murmured tiredly. “You don’t know how proud I am of how far you’ve come.”
Gray smiled and brushed his fingers over Darius’s chest the way he liked. “I can’t believe it’s over. It doesn’t feel like it.”
“It’ll take some time.” Darius hummed and closed his eyes.
Gray dropped his gaze to the tattoos again. One didn’t have to stand very far away from Darius in order for the ink to look like a messy blur of shadows and unreadable lines. Every now and then, Gray would kiss a line of digits and ask what they represented. And with perfect clarity, Darius remembered each one.
“What’s this one for?” Gray ghosted a finger over a tiny tattoo along his rib cage. It was the number nine tattooed in an Arabic-style font.
Darius cracked his eyes open and lifted his head, and he squinted at the ink. “Oh.” He dropped his head to the pillow again. “Tariq and I worked together in Saudi Arabia once. We were in the middle of nowhere, looking for a man. All we knew was that he was sixty years old, lived in a small white house that had the number nine painted on his door, and he loved American TV shows.” He yawned and closed his eyes once more. “Weirdest little son of a bitch I ever met. He greeted us with the biggest, toothless smile, had a million jokes about the US military, asked us if we knew any of the cast of Married with Children, and spoke freely about having murdered his own kids.”