Page 95 of Tactically Acquired

“Nope,” I answered, my gaze focused on the screen.

They slipped out without another word as I pulled up a chair and tried to see what Rae was doing. After she uploaded the files, I got my first glimpse into Audrey’s life. Her place was a real eye-opener.

“Holy crap. That’s how she lives?” Rae yawned. “It’s fucking depressing.”

“It’s a mansion,” I muttered.

“Well, in comparison to where we live, but not for a movie star.”

I turned the laptop toward me to get a better view. “Go ahead and get some shut-eye. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

“Sure. Because it’s not at all creepy to look at pictures of your would-be lover’s house without anyone else around.”

She shoved back from the table and left, but I was too busy taking in every detail of Audrey’s home. It was big, but Rae was right. It was smaller than you would expect for a star like her.

I started flipping through the slides, hoping to find anything that would give us a hint of who was after her. There were files attached with every piece of mail she received and everybody in her address book, but the pictures were what I was interested in, and I didn’t want to admit that it was because I was curious if they could tell me more about who she was.

She was clean, organized, and didn’t leave a thing out of place. Although, she lived with Spencer. That could be just asmuch on him. He did seem like he was a bit of a freak when it came to maintaining a routine. There was a super-sized TV on the wall, along with a huge computer screen in an office. It looked to be a shared office, so whose computer it was wasn’t clear. There weren’t any pictures aside from the two of them together, and in each one, they looked perfectly happy. It was just the two of them.

No one came between them.

Maybe that was the key to everything. Spencer cared for her deeply. Maybe a little too deeply that he couldn’t let go of his control. I leaned back in my seat and scrolled through the images again, thinking it over, remembering how he made her smoothie every morning, demanding she drink it. It was almost like she didn’t have a choice in the matter. And she didn’t argue.

I stopped on an image of the kitchen. There were two mugs sitting beside the coffee pot. They were nothing special, but they clearly went together. A pair, each with their names on them. Everything about them was inextricably linked.

And that wasn’t the only matching thing on their counters. There were his and her oven mitts hanging on the backsplash, though his were used way more than hers. Two decorative plates sat on top of the microwave…it was a little nauseating how much they did everything together. I zoomed in on the microwave at the little bumps on the start and stop buttons. I had no clue what they were, but they were color-coded, so it was probably some form of matchy-match thing they had going.

I decided I’d had enough and didn’t need to see any more. I wasn’t going to get the answers I needed in these pictures. Well…the answers to the case. It was perfectly clear to me that the reason Spencer was so protective of Audrey and what she did was because he was intertwined in every part of her life. Yes, he wanted her to have a life and fall in love, but how did a guy let go of a woman he had that much of a hold over?

That was definitely something I didn’t need to be involved in. Now or ever. I shut the computer and walked away.

I immediately reached for my gun as I was shaken awake. Thumper stood over me, holding his finger to his lips. I glanced over at Spencer, who was dead to the world, and slipped out of bed. After pulling on some clothes, I headed out to the living room where everyone was waiting.

That is, everyone aside from Spencer and Audrey.

“What’s going on?”

Rae shifted from one foot to the other. “We just found out that Audrey’s mom died.”

I swore my heart stopped in my fucking chest. That had to be some kind of cosmic joke. “No.”

She nodded. “I swear to God. Lock got the call an hour ago. He said they need her back to start making funeral arrangements.”

“In the middle of all this shit?” I asked, finding the timing just a little too coincidental.

“That’s what I thought,” she agreed. “But what are we going to tell her? She can’t go?”

“Yes,” Thumper answered immediately.

“Just don’t tell her,” IRIS cut in. “This is her life on the line. Better she’s alive and misses her mother’s funeral than dead.”

“Can we really make that call?” Rae asked everyone, but her gaze was on me.

“Fuck, you can’t leave this up to me,” I snapped.

“You seem to have a better handle on what she would want,” Thumper answered. “What do you think?”

Hell, I had no fucking clue. I couldn’t believe they were putting this on me. “There’s a reason I’m not the fucking team leader.”

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