Page 11 of Cold Ignition

"I like it," Victor said after a moment.

High praise.

Tane sighed, stepping inside the bus and whistling low. "Okay, I take it back, this is a home." He turned to look at Victor, his soulmate. “And something we should build for ourselves, baby.”

"Yeah, I think we should," Victor replied with a smile.

Keanu’s mouth twitched. He loved that his brothers were finding the ones meant for them. It made him happy. Lonely and jealous as fuck, but happy for them nonetheless.

Luca’s voice floated through the open door before he appeared. "We need to head upstairs, Kael has called a meeting," he announced.

He paused mid-step when he saw the bus interior, his eyes widening slightly. "Shit." He turned slowly in a full circle. "Okay, now I understand why you disappear into the garage for days at a time."

Keanu shrugged. "Needed something to do."

Luca leaned against the doorway, arms folded across his chest. "You build things when you think," he observed. "Well, whatever deep thoughts you're having, you can finish them later, because we just got a call from the Pathfinders."

Keanu’s instincts sharpened instantly. Calls out of the blue from them or Bravo were rarely good news.

"What kind of call?" he asked.

Tane grimaced. "The kind that gets Kael calling a meeting would be my guess."

"Specifically," Luca added, "they said they were asked for someone called..." He frowned, glancing down at the tablet that was never far from his hand. "Ahi."

Keanu felt something old and dangerous stir in the back of his mind. A name he hadn’t heard in years. And it belonged in a life he’d buried.

Chapter Three

The Black Tide operations room was starting to feel full, what with all the new members coming to live at their ohana.

Screens lined the walls. Maps, feeds, encrypted data streams—information flowing constantly across surfaces that had been designed to absorb and distribute it as quickly as the team needed. The room smelled faintly of coffee, machine oil, and the ocean air that drifted in through the ventilation system from the cliffs beyond the facility.

Tonight, it was unusually full.

Kael stood near the center table with his arms folded across his chest, broad shoulders relaxed, but his attention razor sharp. Years of command had taught him how to read a room before anyone spoke, and right now every set of eyes in it was fixed on the screen mounted at the far wall.

Bateman filled most of that screen.

The Pathfinder commander leaned back in his chair in his office at Obsidian Ridge, boots kicked up on a desk just out of frame, expression neutral in that deliberate way of his that suggested he was enjoying the tension just a little too much.

"So," Drew muttered from where he leaned against the table. "You gonna tell us why you dragged us all in here, or are we just admiring your rugged good looks today?"

Bateman snorted. "Careful, Rhodes, jealousy ain't attractive on you."

Keanu wasn’t in the mood for niceties. He needed to know what the hell was going on. "You said someone asked for Ahi"

Bateman nodded once. "Yep. Someone we all know reached out just now and said that they needed help from Ahi. So, Keanu, as that is you, I thought I’d call and let you know."

Keanu froze and could feel the steady, knowing gaze of Kael staring at him from the front of the room and knew that the rest of his team’s expressions showed nothing but confusion.

"How," Keanu asked slowly, "in the hell did you know I was Ahi?"

That question shifted the air in the room. All of them reacting in one way or another. All of them but one. Kael never moved.

Drew straightened slightly. "Hold up, who the hell is Ahi?"

Niko glanced toward Kael. "I assume this matters, there is a history, and you know all about it."