Page 5 of Duality (The Archers #1)

EVELYN

“ W ho got my lasagna? This is someone’s chicken parm,” I said, digging around in the takeout bag.

It had taken me longer than I would have liked to arrive at headquarters tonight for the meeting with my lieutenants.

Not only did I have to pick up food, I was also always super paranoid about the routes I took, often doubling back to make sure no one picked up on my trail.

The Archers had several safe houses and smaller headquarters throughout the city, but this building was our main command center.

“Here’s your lasagna,” Danny said, brushing his brown curly hair out of his eyes as he handed me the takeout container. “Izzy got the chicken parm.”

“No. I got the spaghetti and meatballs. Liam got the chicken parm.” Izzy, my lead investigator with the Archers, passed the chicken parm down to the Archers’ resident hacker.

Liam balanced the takeout box on his knees as he kept typing on the laptop in front of him. He was rarely away from his screens. If Izzy or Maya didn’t drag him away from his cave every two weeks or so, he would never leave it.

“Here’s your spaghetti and meatballs,” Maya said, handing Izzy a container.

“Who has the breadsticks?” Gracie asked, her brown eyes scanning the table intently. “Danny, hand those over before you eat them all.”

Finally, everyone had their food. For the next few minutes, the only sounds were chewing and the clacking of Liam’s keyboard.

Each one of the people sitting around this table were the founding members of the Archers, personally recruited at key points in our organization’s history.

I trusted them with my life and couldn’t imagine having built the Archers without them.

Danny was the first member. We grew up more like siblings than cousins, and he’d taken what happened to me in high school personally.

When I started my early vigilante work, he was right there at my side.

To an outsider, his upbeat personality and friendly face could be disarming, but on a mission, he was ruthless.

Grace joined next. She was a veteran, serving ten years in the military before being discharged.

Like many veterans, she ended up homeless, forgotten by the country she had sworn to serve.

Danny and I had bitten off more than we could chew one night and were taking a beating in an alley when Gracie had appeared like an avenging angel.

With impressive hand-to-hand combat skills, she made quick work of the rest of our attackers.

I offered her a job on the spot. She had been hesitant at first, but the Archers gave her the purpose she needed after the military.

She and Danny constantly picked at each other, sparks flying between them even if they hadn’t acted on it. Yet.

Technically, we met Maya next, but they didn’t join the Archers until later.

Maya was the child of one of the city’s police captains.

I had been undercover at a college party when I noticed the frat boy I was watching slip something in their drink.

I managed to get to them before anything happened and stayed with them till their father arrived.

When the frat boy’s case had been dropped due to “lack of evidence”, Danny and I had delivered a warning to the whole frat house about what we would do if we caught them drugging another person.

Somehow, Maya’s dad heard about it. I was sure that was the end of the Archers, but he’d looked the other way and helped cover up the evidence we left behind.

Ever since then, he gave us a call when a case looked like it was going to slip through the cracks.

Maya left the state and transferred schools.

They began their career as a journalist and returned home a few years ago.

They showed up on my doorstep demanding to join the Archers, and with their help and media connections, we began to shine a light on stories that would otherwise be covered up.

It was through Maya’s dad that Liam joined our ragtag vigilante group.

Liam was the youngest one of our group at 22 and began hacking when he was twelve years old.

A few years ago, he had been caught by the police department’s cybercrimes unit breaking into electronic case files and exposing them to the internet.

He should have done serious time, but Captain Patel called me, and I recruited him to the Archers.

Now he was our resident hacker, tech guru, or whatever else he was calling himself that day.

Isabella, or Izzy, as we called her, was the last member to join our group.

She was a former police detective with a stellar record until she uncovered corruption within her own department.

It was actually the Archers who had sent information to her department about a trafficking ring we had uncovered in their district a few states away.

Izzy was one of the detectives who received the information but was prevented from acting on it by her captain.

She quit the force and reached out to us instead.

Now she uses her investigative skills and understanding of law enforcement to help us instead.

Izzy clapped her hands. “All right, in the interest of Eve getting some sleep tonight, let’s get started. Grace, can you give an update?”

Grace nodded. “We’ve had four requests come through the tip line in the last few days. I’m doing some initial recon, but I could use some help.”

“Once I finish this article, I can help,” Maya said. “I’ve got one more round of edits and then I’m sending it off and publishing it on the web. It should get picked up pretty quickly.”

“This one is on the judge, right?” I asked around a mouthful of food. We had discovered a corrupt judge in the next city who gave lighter or heavier sentences depending on how much the accused lined his pockets.

“Yep.”

“Liam, are we ready to go when the story goes live?” Izzy asked, ticking off something on her paper.

“Yes, ma’am.” Liam grinned. “Ready to stop, drop, and roll into his bank accounts.”

“The money is going back to the families, right?” Maya asked.

“The families for the legal fees they’ll need to get the cases retried,” I reminded her.

Maya scribbled down a few notes in the notebook they were always carrying around. “Got it. I’ll make sure that’s in the article.”

“Perfect. Next item.” Izzy read down the list of cases we took on.

In the early years, everything had been by word of mouth, but now we were a bit more organized.

Liam had organized an anonymous tip line where people could submit tips or ask for help.

Danny still kept our network of informants strong in the streets, but we also took a digital approach as well.

Izzy kept track of the caseload, and Grace kept track of our resources.

“I need another computer,” Liam said, giving us a view of his half-chewed food.

“Ew! Finish chewing first.” Maya threw a scrunched-up napkin at him.

He rolled his eyes but finished chewing. “I need another computer. And another hacker, if we can afford it.”

“What for?” Grace asked.

Grace was in charge of most of our logistics, including the supplies we needed for missions.

Liam already had eight computers in his main station, and we employed five additional hackers.

We couldn’t afford to pay them what they were worth to us, but we paid them a decent wage for their skill.

They all had personal stakes in our mission, so that helped.

“I’ve got an algorithm going to help collect information, and I need someone to babysit it.

That person could also fix some small things in our software that I don’t have time for.

Hell, they could also research if we needed.

We’re getting kind of backlogged.” In addition to being our resident hacker, Liam managed a team of five other techies that helped pull research in about our cases.

Everything from background checks to deep dives.

The information he and his team collected might be the most valuable thing the Archers had.

I looked at Izzy. She shrugged and nodded. “The request volume has almost doubled since the start of this year.”

“Fuck. Do we know why?” I asked.

“It’s probably due to the fact we had some big busts at the start of the year,” Izzy said.

“Shake the tree and watch the apples fall,” Grace murmured.

Maya nodded. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. We peeled back one layer, but there’s always another waiting.”

I groaned and ran a hand over my face. It was a never-ending battle.

We really needed to be more proactive instead of reactive in fighting corruption in the city, but we just didn’t have the resources.

This wasn’t really a cash business, although we did okay “borrowing” from the rich assholes we busted.

“Can we afford it?” Danny asked Izzy, eyeing me with a worried look on his face, his brow furrowed.

“We can, but we’ll need to review the operational budget soon.” She directed her answer at me.

“If I ever get out of the office before 8 p.m., I’m all yours.”

“Your handsome bosses keeping you late?” Maya teased, and the table laughed when I buried my face in my hands.

My lieutenants were convinced that the Stone brothers had a thing for me. Danny, more than anyone else, as he often showed up at the office at lunch to “take me out.” I was pretty sure the brothers thought he was my boyfriend, though, from how much they glared at him when he was around.

“Y’all really need to let this go,” I complained good naturedly.

They enjoyed teasing me, but they all knew I would never take it there.

The information we got from SDS was too valuable for me to risk it on a fling with my boss.

Or bosses. When I originally started at SDS, I thought the brothers were just like all the other rich and wealthy of the city, but I quickly learned they were good men.

They truly did care about their employees and clients, and they did a lot of philanthropy work as well.

Sometimes I got twitchy about compromising their systems, but the information we gleaned from their network had helped in so many missions over the last six years that I tried my hardest to bury down the guilt. Emphasis on the word try .

“Any more visits from the charming Adrian?” Danny teased. “I swear he nearly burned me last week with his glare.”

I bit my lip in a half grin at the memory.

I was pretty sure Adrian had guessed that Danny was also a part of the Archers, but he clearly hadn’t made it past Liam’s security if he hadn’t figured out that we were cousins.

Last week, Danny had slung an arm over my shoulders, and Adrian had pinned him with a glare that had me weak in the knees.

I liked overprotective dominant men. Sue me.

I encountered so few of them, given the nature of our work.

It sucked that the four I had found in the city were also incredibly off limits.

“Look at that smile,” Maya stage-whispered to Grace. “Someone has a crush.”

“Anyways,” I stressed the word, ignoring their playful teasing. “Enough about me and my nonexistent love life.”

“Sure,” Danny ribbed, but I ignored him.

“Speaking of SDS… Liam, what’s the update on Geoff Young and Citadel?”

“I confirmed that Geoff Young and his associates did attend a meeting at Citadel yesterday afternoon. Citadel is a closed circuit, though, so I have no way of hacking into their system to figure out how it went. But the fact they had a meeting was suspicious.”

“I agree,” Izzy said. “I think we need to look into his company further.”

I sighed and nodded. “Okay, open a case on it. I’ll see what else I can learn.”

“I’ll keep monitoring the dark web and see if either Citadel or Young Enterprises pops up anywhere,” Liam said

“Thank you,” I told him. “Good work, everyone. Let’s do this again in two nights?”

“Let’s do it again this weekend,” Izzy corrected. “You need to get some sleep.”

“Now you sound like Adrian,” I grumbled, standing to throw away my trash.

Izzy grinned. “Good. My money’s on him.”

Before we went down this path again, I grabbed my keys. “All right, I’m out.”

Danny rose to his feet. “I’ll drive back with you. I need to check in with some people in that area, anyways.”

I shrugged. “Suit yourself. Good night, everyone.”

My lieutenants called out their goodbyes as Danny and I exited into the chilly night air.

“Are you going back to your house or apartment tonight?” he asked.

“My apartment,” I said, a yawn splitting my cheeks. “It’s closer to the office.”

When I started the job at SDS, I rented an apartment close to the office. It wasn’t in the greatest part of town, just a few blocks from the abandoned train station and rail yard, but it was safe. Plus, I couldn’t afford to be that far away with how late I got in each night.

I looked down at my watch. Fuck, it was already one in the morning. Adrian was definitely going to fuss at me.

“Come on. I’ll drive, and you can sleep on the way,” Danny said, tucking me into his side as we approached my car.

I just nodded and rested my head against him.

Ever since high school, Danny insisted on walking or escorting me everywhere.

It was his own reaction to the trauma of that night.

I didn’t mind it, though. With the work the Archers did, there were always threats.

One of these days, the past and our enemies would catch up with me, but tonight, they could all fuck off. I needed some sleep.