Touch And Go - Aiden Bates Page 0,6

hated looking weak, but I was trembling and he’d no doubt notice, so my slight prep to duck and cover didn’t matter much. Such were the excuses I made for myself.

He let out a low growl. A threat, but he didn’t hit me. He reached to slam the laptop shut before he snatched it off the desk and stalked toward the door.

My relief was quickly followed by genuine concern. Whatever he’d gotten himself into was…bad. Illegal at best. Dangerous at worst. I spun my chair and stood. “Hey! Talk to me. You’re asking for trouble, Ben.”

He barked with laughter. “You wouldn’t know the first thing about it, Sebastian.”

Of course, I wouldn’t know anything about it. I was too dumb. Too naïve. Too young to understand. Same old war cries he’d been throwing at me since he was a teen, and I was still a scrawny runt, trying desperately to be his friend. Maybe back then, he was right—I hadn’t known much about sports, girls, or beer, because I was a dorky kid who didn’t take his nose out of my computer screen, and he was the big man on campus. But this—numbers and spreadsheets—was in my wheelhouse and I could read. Decipher. Snoop. This was different.

“I’m a fucking hacker, dude. Of course, I know about cybertheft, are you kidding me? My people practically invented it.” My people being the computer geniuses who bailed out accountants who got locked out of their programs. We were the gurus. The cutting edge Einsteins of today who could go undetected for years because we understood a language no one else did. And anyone who looked at his shit would know he was in over his head.

“You don’t know shit about my life.”

“Maybe not.” I bit my lip and tried not to show how sad that fact made me. “Can I help, though? You need better security around your digital footprint if you’re going to be wrangling cash out of accounts like that—” This once, I could do something for him. Something valuable that could keep him out of prison if he listened to me.

“Help? You?” His fresh bark of laughter earned him my glare and he looked me up and down, ending on a scowl. I’d been found lacking.

I clenched my jaw and swallowed thickly. “Yeah, me. Or am I so useless I can only unfreeze your piece-of-shit laptop?”

“Just shut the fuck up, all right?” He sniffed arrogantly and headed toward the door. “About all of it.”

The words flew out before I could stop them. “Or what?”

“Or what?” He spun, eyebrows raised, fists clenched.

“Yeah, or what? Have you thought about what’s going to happen if your secret gets out? How bad it’d be on you if someone finds out about this?”

“Don’t fucking threaten me, Seb.”

His voice was icy, and he stepped toward me. I should have backed down. Every instinct in my body told me to duck and cover. But my anger rose up and out of my mouth, and I snarled. “Or what?”

The laptop hit the floor. His boots squeaked against the floorboards as his heavy frame rushed back into the room. Fear weakened me, my knees gave out, and everything went black.

3

Derek

Home sweet-smelling home. I let myself into the Vanguard Tower after my shift and took a deep breath. My brothers and I had used a lot of bare cedarwood beams in the conversion of this old warehouse into a communal apartment building, and the wood made the whole place smell warm and welcoming, exactly what I needed after a long, bloody shift. It had taken a lot of work to build a hollowed-out warehouse into a set of six apartments, and I was grateful every single time I came home.

The old building at the docks of the southwest waterfront had been somewhat of a wreck when I’d inherited it from a grandfather I never knew I had. My mother had died in front of me when I was eight, from a home invasion gone really, really wrong and with no dad or other family, I went into the system and got shuffled between foster homes for the next ten years. Life had been tough back then, but I’d met my brothers–the foster crew who had helped revamp the warehouse we now affectionately called the Vanguard Tower, a nod to the fact that we all worked on the frontlines as first responders.

It was close to midday by the time I slipped the key in the lock of my apartment at the back