He picked it up, engaged the screen and realized, with all things Evangeline, he hadn’t checked it since he hit her pad last night.
He had three missed calls from Aryas, one from Gerbil and two voicemails.
Shit.
He went to the voicemails.
Aryas’s was first.
“Call me as soon as, brother,” he demanded.
Gerbil’s was second.
“News, no biggie, I don’t think, but you’ll wanna know.”
Neo-Nazis could take over the world and Gerbil would describe it as “no biggie” because he lived in a bunker and had enough freeze-dried rations for him and five generations of his spawn (if he ever got around to making any) to wait out a nuclear strike. So his message could mean anything.
Since it was Aryas’s third call that was the last that came in, Branch started with him.
“Yo, thank fuck you called. I’m about to board a plane to Seattle and I got some worries I don’t want to take with me,” Aryas stated as greeting.
“Hit me,” Branch replied, staring at his countertops empty of anything but his toaster and mail, all of it fliers to “Occupant” because no one knew he existed.
Still, there was a shitload of it.
He didn’t need mail.
He needed a coffeemaker.
And a bagel.
“Word came in. I know you buzzed her but contacts of mine shared someone fitting the description of Evangeline was seen entering the last Pound. Won’t mean contact for you with her, but I gotta know if my girl is taking risks for reasons I gotta shut down. So gotta ask you to get on her.”
Damn.
“You with me?” Aryas asked when Branch didn’t answer.
“Someone’s reporting to you about her?” Branch asked, not liking that idea at all.
“Not a lot of petite, curly-haired Dommes who look like they got their outfit off a Dolce and Gabbana catwalk hit the Pound, brother. A boy of mine calls one of the Pound’s security an acquaintance. They were having a beer. Shit was shared. Tweaked my guy. Don’t even know if it was her. So yeah, in a roundabout way, if she’s doing something seriously stupid and it was her, someone’s reporting on Evangeline.”
That wasn’t a problem. At the Pound, she’d cause a stir even if she hadn’t given a skilled demonstration on how to wield a whip.
“She was there for me,” Branch told him.
“Say again?”
“Apparently, she didn’t agree with my decision not to go there with her. She found me. Shared that. I’ve spent the last two nights at her place.”
A sucking void of silence.
“It’s good, Aryas, and she’s fine,” Branch assured.
“Best five grand I ever spent.”
“Come again?”
“Nothing. Last two nights, you say?”
Branch had been in the army and he’d worked on a “government task force” that was mostly men.
Regardless, the women he’d worked with usually knew how to keep their mouths shut and listen.
The men ran their mouths like idiots and felt knowledge was power, no matter how inane that knowledge was.
And if it was gossip, they fell on it like vultures.
And that never changed.
“We’re not talking about this,” Branch warned, going to the pile of mail and sweeping the lot of it in the trash bin at the end of the counter, the bin half full and not that wide, this meaning some of it fell on the floor.
“You got plans of going back?” Aryas pushed.
“Again, we’re not talking about this.”
“You do.”
Fucking Aryas.
“So you finally got your head out of your ass,” the man noted when Branch again said nothing.
“Did I say we’re not talking about this?” Branch asked.
“How is she?” Aryas asked back, his tone losing the wiseass quality, concern hitting it.
Branch was not going to share his fuckup of that morning.
But he was going to share that Aryas had nothing to worry about.
“Back in the saddle like she never left it.”
“Which means you’re getting your shit jacked and good.”
Fucking Aryas.
“We’re done,” Branch stated.
“Wait,” Aryas said quickly. “While I got you, Nibs is out on paternity. Pedro’s lost a friend, cancer, bad shit. He has to drive to New Mexico. Tyler’s got some food poisoning that’s fucking his shit up, he’s been out two days and it looks like he’s not coming back for a few more. Which means Tina Marie letting Jake go on that mini-cruise with his girl was poor timing. The boys in the booth are scrambling to cover. It’d be good, tomorrow night, you could help out.”
It would not be good.
That meant a night away from Evangeline.
But Aryas was one of the only people in Phoenix he could call a friend.
And he paid in cash.
He also didn’t blink at Branch’s fees.
Not to mention, saving for a lifetime of living in a shack on some unknown beach in some unknown country far away meant Branch needed to take all the cash he could get. He was good with a shack but he also felt it important to eat something other than coconuts he could shake from his own trees once he got there.
“I’m there.”
“Thanks, brother. I’d say say hi to Leenie, but I figure you’ll tell me to go fuck myself.”
“You’d be right.”
There was laughter shaking his “Later, Branch.”
There was none shaking Branch’s “Later.”
He disconnected and waited to call Gerbil until after he’d pulled on some shorts and jeans and a comb through his hair that he really needed to find time to get cut (something, if Evangeline was in his life how she’d claimed him, he should ask her if she wanted—Dommes had a thing about hair, as evidenced with how Angie had used his that morning).
He heard a click, a pop and two more clicks before his untraceable call to Gerbil went through and the man answered with a deep baritone, “Wassup?”
Gerbil was not called Gerbil for any reason a man could be called Gerbil.
He was called Gerbil so people who’d never met him would think there was a reason to call him Gerbil, thus making them vastly underestimate him.
He was actually a six-foot-tall, ripped black man who, before he’d slipped off the grid, had more than once been asked to be on “Men of…” charity calendars.
One thing Branch had not done as a submissive was take a man.
One thing Branch never would do, seeing as the only stipulations to his play were single-partner, nonexhibition (unless he was at a Pound, but that was over) Femme-Domme play, would be take a man.
He liked his ass fucked solely if a woman was behind the cock.
Hell, it could even be he liked his ass fucked because there’d always be a woman behind the cock.
Still, he could say feeling no hits to his manhood that Gerbil was the handsomest man he’d ever seen.
He was also the genius who’d been recruited from the marines to be their tech and comm support for tactical missions before he got fed up with smelling the stench of the shit they did and disappeared off the face of the planet.
But he’d kept in touch with Branch, Rob and Lex.
So when Branch, injured and weaponless, needed an extraction out of a jungle after his own command had set him up to be taken out, and he miraculously came upon a working pay phone in a septic tank that sad country called a town, his first and only call was to Gerbil.
And when Gerbil found out what had happened to the team, he was all-in to assist Branch carrying out what needed to be done.
“What’s up is you called me,” Branch told him.
“Yeah. Right. Blips, man. About fifteen alerts,” Gerbil replied. “No, make that twenty.”
“I don’t speak geek or read minds, man, fill in the blanks,” Branch returned.
“’Course,” Gerbil said good-naturedly. “See, I got tags, you know, on all the files that have anything to do with anything I give a shit about, right?”
“I’m with you.”
And he was, but barely.
Gerbil, as usual, didn’t care.
He kept going.
“Which means I get alerts on any files that are accessed that I’ve taken an interest in. Which means I got tags on all the files that were buried, but not deleted, because Raines is a fucktard, but that’s beside the point and you already know that. I digress. In short, this meaning I got tags on all the files on all the missions Rifle Team took on. And twenty of them have been accessed.”