“Anyway, thank you so much.”
With that, she was gone, racing back over to the table where her friends were now all babbling excitedly, crowding together to look at the girl’s coveted selfie with the Adam Mulvaney.
With the girl now gone, it was like somebody had flipped a switch and Adam’s superficial charm disappeared, replaced by that piercing look he seemed to save just for Noah.
“Does that happen a lot?” Noah asked.
Adam seemed to ponder the question. “Nah. Most of the people uptown don’t give a fuck about a hack model with a trust fund.”
“Why did you tell her I’m your boyfriend?”
Adam frowned. “Because telling her that you’re the son of one of my murder victims and we’re together because I happened to get off with you this morning sounded like a mouthful.”
Noah shook his head. “You could have just said friend?”
Adam’s brows furrowed. “But then she might think you’re available.”
Noah’s brain stumbled. “But I’m not? Available?”
“No.”
“Do I get a say in this?” Noah asked, not even mad, just feeling like he’d definitely slipped into an alternate universe.
Adam tilted his head. “Yeah. Did you not want to be my boyfriend?”
Noah laughed at the genuine confusion in Adam’s tone, like the notion was preposterous. Maybe it was.
“I hate to keep harping on this one point because it's starting to feel a little mean to keep bringing it up, but we don’t know each other.”
“You know me,” Adam insisted.
“But you don’t know me,” Noah countered, voice a harsh whisper.
“I don’t need to know everything about you to know that you’re what I want.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It will eventually,” Adam promised. “But if this is too much for you…if I’m too much for you, I get it. I’m…a lot.”
“Why would you want to be in a relationship if you can’t love somebody?”
Once more, Adam pondered the question. “What does that word even mean? Lots of people throw the word love around without actually treating the people they supposedly love like they are loved. I don’t have the same signals firing in my brain that you do. I have to rely on instinct. My instincts tell me you’re the one. What do yours tell you?”
That you’re going to rip my heart out some day, maybe literally. “My instincts have really never done anything for me. If you give me two choices, I make the wrong one every time.”
Adam leaned in. “Instinctively, what do you think you should do?”
“Run fast and far away from you,” Noah said without thought.
Adam grinned like he’d just somehow put Noah in check mate. “Then, by your own logic, you should do the opposite. And stay. With me.”
“This is crazy.”
“All the best things are.”
Adam was well versed in being where he didn’t belong. He’d been breaking into people’s houses almost since he was old enough to cross the street unassisted. Noah clearly had not. He sat beside Adam in the car, staring at Gary’s front door like he expected a SWAT team waited on the other side.
Noah’s worried face made Adam want to forget all about the plan. He was sure he could think of something else for the two of them to do, something that didn’t involve triggering Noah’s worst memories. But he knew that wasn’t going to happen.
Adam sighed, looking out across the well-manicured lawn of Gary’s ranch style home. The guy was paranoid, but he wasn’t very bright. He had surveillance at every corner of his house. Hell, even his doorbell had a camera, but they were all on his wi-fi. His easily hackable wi-fi. It had only taken Calliope minutes to take control of his feeds and loop them so he’d never know they were there. She’d also run a background check, looked at his bank accounts, and attempted to access his laptop.
That was where they’d run into an issue. Gary had NSA-level encryption software, making his system unhackable from the outside. So, not that stupid, Adam supposed. Still, he had more than one computer, so all they could do was clone whichever computer Gary had left behind and hope there was something incriminating behind that encryption software.
“You ready?” Adam asked.
Noah worried his bottom lip between his teeth. “What if we get caught?”
“We won’t get caught. The cameras are looped, the alarm is deactivated. We have the key to his front door. Just look like we belong here and nobody is going to bat an eye. We’re just friends watering his plants.”
“So, we just go in and ransack his house? Won’t he know we’ve been there?”
“No, we go in and you carefully look through his stuff for anything related to his…extracurricular activities. I’m going to clone his hard drive and give it to Calliope so she can take her time cracking it. Chances are Gary has been doing this so long he thinks he’s untouchable. That’s what happens with all these guys. Eventually, they get lazy, and that’s how they get caught.”
Noah swallowed audibly, giving a nervous nod. “Yeah, okay.”
“Hey, you good?” Adam asked, gripping Noah’s chin and tipping it upwards, examining his face. Most people were easy to read, but Noah’s face either said nothing or everything, just like Noah himself. Adam merely wanted to give him what he needed.
“Yeah. Part of me is just afraid of what I’ll find in there.”
Adam leaned into Noah’s space, wrapping a hand around the back of his neck and tugging him in close. “Listen, there’s a good chance that while we’re in there, we’ll find something you can’t unsee. So, look but don’t absorb. Got it? Turn your brain off. Take pictures of whatever you think is important, but don’t look at any one thing for too long. Don’t let anything in.”
“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Let’s do this.” Noah pulled the handle, swinging the passenger door wide.
Adam snagged his arm before he could leave. “I can go alone if you want me to?”