Page 20 of Casual Felonies (Wildlings #1)

RAMI

“Baba! Dad! What a surprise!” I say with fake enthusiasm and not one wit of surprise. “We were about to go up for a swim, then put some meat on the grill. Do you wanna join us?”

The others, genuinely surprised to see my scheming fathers, readily agree that they should join us for dinner.

“I believe you know where your swim trunks are in the spare room. Do be aware of the fact that the guy who cleans our place is here.” I lean in and push the tiny button camera into Baba’s hand, whispering, “Try not to Eiffel Tower him while you’re back there.”

Dad watches the cousins as they crowd into the elevator.

I wave. “I’ll be up in a bit with the parentals!”

The second the doors close, I turn to face my fathers, my mouth in a tight line.

Baba rubs his forehead. “I take it you aren’t having a secret tryst with Preston Whitaker. Nor is he paying you in fentanyl.”

“Ya think?” I ask, my hands on my hips. “What the fuck did we do to deserve listening and video devices installed everywhere? ”

“What do you mean everywhere?” Dad asks.

“I found seventeen devices with Dex’s app.”

Dexter is one of my friend-cousins from Seguin, and he’s like some kind of mad scientist inventor. He’s not the most socially adept human on the planet, but we all love him to death, even if he makes the rest of us look like D- students on a good day.

Hell, he doesn’t even specialize in that kind of scanning technology.

His dad is a world-famous punk rocker, with the digital stalkers that come standard with that level of recognition.

Hotel rooms are especially tricky, so Dex invented an advanced scanning app that picks up every known device, not to mention a few unknowns.

That one app alone made him richer than his fathers.

“Shit,” Dad says. “I forgot about Dex.”

“How?” I ask, incredulous. “He works in the same building as you.”

“Yeah, but he likes, uh…field work…better than office work.”

This is true—I try to avoid talking to Dex about his real job. Blech .

Dad turns to Baba. “Seventeen? Really? I thought you were only putting them in the elevator.”

Baba thins his lips. “I didn’t put them in any of the kids’ rooms or in the bathroom.”

“Yeah,” I say, letting my annoyance show. “Just in the elevator, foyer, living room, kitchen, and all over the rooftop. It’s a good thing we have a no fucking in open spaces policy.”

Baba rubs the back of his head. “I really do appreciate that rule.”

Just then, the elevators open again to reveal Silas, Cupcake, Dex, and Najim, who step into the foyer.

“Naji!” I say a little too loudly. I rush over and give him a quick hug. “Salam alaykum, cousin.”

Najim is one of my favorite humans on the planet, and I make sure he knows he’s always welcome.

Like Silas, he’s one of the cousins who came from a dangerous situation.

We don’t know all of his details, either, just that he’s Baba’s nephew on the Noorani side and had never passed for straight.

Iraq may have progressed with LGBTQIA+ rights, but the Nooranis never will.

Which reminds me that Truett, whom I haven’t stalked in over a week, called Baba Omar Noorani Bash, like it was supposed to mean something.

“Wa ?alaykumu s-salam,” he replies, his accent rich like Baba’s. “Dex told me he was headed this way and let me ride in with him. I hope that’s okay.”

“Of course,” I say, giving Dex a hug next. “Thanks for bringing him. I haven’t seen either of you in forever.”

Both Dex and Naji work with Dad’s company in Wimberley and live out in the company-provided dorms, which are nicer than any dorms I’ve ever seen.

Come to think of it, would Dex and Naji know whatever it is I’m missing about my fathers?

Finally, I pat Silas on the arm. “Nice seeing you, cousin. Everyone’s gone upstairs, and I’m just waiting down here while my dads get changed. Go on up. We’ll be there in a bit.”

He stares at Dad and Baba, who have moved to the living room. Cupcake huffs out a low, judgy woof toward my fathers as Silas leans in. “Is it okay that I’m here tonight?”

“Put it to you this way, cousin,” I say, giving Cup an affectionate scritch behind his ears, “I am way happier to see you than I am to see those two. And if they don’t like that you’re here, they can get the fuck out.

Sissy, Oak, Mav, and I bought this place with our own money, and you are always welcome. ”

That earns me another soft woof .

“You, too,” I reassure Cup, following that with another ear scritch .

Sy gives me his dark smile, then he and Cup join Dex and Naji in the elevator. “See y’all in a few.”

When the doors close, I turn to my fathers. “I don’t wanna hear it. Silas is an important part of our family and has been a damn sight more trustworthy than you two.”

Baba thins his lips. “I… I agree. We don’t get to have a say in who your friends are. We were afraid of Silas when he was younger, but not so much now.”

Dad rolls his eyes. “Yeah, sure. It’s totally fine to have a bio-engineered psychopath just hanging out with our children.”

Baba raises his eyebrows. I am definitely not supposed to know about the bio-engineered stuff, which means Dad has about thirty seconds to stop talking before he gets himself into some real trouble.

In a rare moment of wisdom, Dad shuts his mouth.

“So,” I say, clapping my hands together. “Do we agree that all surveillance devices not approved by the Wildlings are no longer allowed in our spaces?”

“You do understand that calling yourselves the Wildlings while asking us to pull back important safety measures is a bit of a hard pill to swallow, yes?” Baba asks, his voice gentle.

I know what he’s doing. It’s the same voice he uses with Dad when he gets a wild hair up his ass.

“And you do understand that I, regardless of what the rest of the Wildlings do, will revoke your access to this building if I find so much as a lightbulb out of place, yes?”

Baba curses under his breath, then makes his way over to the beer fridge and removes another button camera. “Yes. This is the last one. There were eighteen total devices.”

“So casual with your felonies,” I say, shamelessly parroting Truett’s words.

Dad and Baba exchange a look. Yeah. I’m gonna need to find out what True knows about those two .

“Have you told your sister?” Baba asks, genuine concern in his eyes.

“I think you know the answer to that.”

If I’d told Maya, she would’ve given them way worse than a talking to, and at a much higher volume.

I sigh. “Alright. Get changed and let’s go have some fun.”

Both kiss my temple as they make their way back to the guest room.

I seriously don’t know what the hell to do with those two.

Parents, amiright?

Dad redeems himself slightly by making his famous steaks, and the rest of the evening reminds me how grateful I am—usually—to have them as my fathers.

I suppose I could complain about having the “fun” dads, but I kinda like that ours was the house that everyone came to, where all the sleepovers were held, where cousins came to confess to our fathers before telling their own parents what they’d done.

But I still can’t get over the fact that they bugged our place. Extensively. Sure, they’ve always been protective, but that has always been couched under the umbrella of wealth. When poor folks work more than one job and still can’t put enough food on the table, rich folks get targeted.

Somehow, though, when they explained that to us as kids, they never seemed to think the problem was the poor people, but rather the poverty created when the wealthy get greedy.

Our family’s estate is worth more money than we can spend in three generations, according to Baba, and like hell are we going to pull the ladder up behind us.

But bring an uncle with you if you’re going into the city.

For my entire life, that made sense. Now, however, I’m beginning to wonder if my fathers have been trying to disguise astrophysics in the guise of a simple equation. Maybe two plus two doesn’t equal four. Maybe it equals the sum of the universe.

There was a time in my late teens, when I was well into my master’s program, when I became so overwhelmed that I considered quitting.

Too ashamed to admit it to my dads, I went to my Aunt Hedy, and she helped me realize the overwhelm was really self-judgment.

I didn’t understand the course assignments at the level I usually did, and I couldn’t brute force it like I had my pre-reqs.

She helped me understand the power of sticking with it, of pulling a subject apart and putting it back together again. She showed me that when learning something involves great difficulty, the act of learning it anyway gives that person a spine.

Grit , she said.

If I hadn’t learned that lesson, then maybe I wouldn’t be so eager to chase the knowledge that seems just out of reach. If Sy had never encouraged me to check out my dads, I might not have seen the inconsistencies in the stories they’d always told us.

I’m reminded of the time Aunt Parker showed me how to take a picture with a real camera.

I was fascinated by the way twisting the lens altered the field of view.

You could make the entire frame blurry or sharp, or switch up between a foreground focus and a background focus.

Maya still has a picture I took of her when we were twelve.

I managed to get her perfectly in focus while fuzzing out the background to a palette of soothing colors.

In reality, it’d been the dead of winter, and I thought the dead trees in the background were yucky.

If I adjusted what I knew to be true of our fathers, what kinds of unpleasantness would I find in their backgrounds?

I think back to the drawer full of sex toys in Dad’s office.

I thoroughly examined every nook and cranny of that office, save for that drawer.

What would I have found if I hadn’t been so put off by the discovery?

Eighteen surveillance devices in our penthouse.

There’s also the problem of Silas. He pointed out that I have a blind spot, but he gave me no actual information.

I could push him for more, but it took months of extending invitations to him before he felt comfortable enough to spend time with us, and several months more to join us with any regularity.

He’s too important to us, and I don’t want to scare him off.

Besides, the person I really want to talk to is Truett. He’s the only one who’s been willing to tell me the truth, even if it is humiliating to hear. Would he be willing to help me sharpen my field of vision?

Or will he reject me all over again?

One thing’s for sure: he knows something about my dads that I don’t. I feel exceptionally foolish about the way everything went down, but there’s a thrumming in my chest that tells me I need to see him again. To demand answers.

To not give up until he helps me bring this picture into focus.