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“ I t’ll be good for you two,” Foxx said with a small, hesitant smile. “Besides, we have some time to waste. Gavin is sure he’ll locate him before the end of the night.”

Apparently, Maverick emailing shit to Tony would help them finally narrow down his location.

“If you say so.” Harlow sighed as he pulled over and parked their car in one of the pick-up spots at the airport.

“Oceana sent me a text before we left. Tony is doing well.” Foxx pulled out his phone and showed the man a picture she had sent.

Harlow glanced over, snorting as he saw the photo. While hooked up to all sorts of monitors, and in a hospital bed, Tony was glaring into the camera with his arms crossed, a smiling Oceana right beside him.

“Yep, that tracks. He hates hospitals. Did they say if he has any blocks or anything?”

“The doctors are still doing tests, but while he is fine right now, they are thinking about putting a few stents in. The fact is, some of his arteries have narrowed, most likely due to prolonged stress…and well, his high blood pressure, which is again caused by?—”

“Stress?” Harlow scoffed.

“Yeah, he is getting a second opinion, but Oceana thinks it’s going to happen. Or rather, based on how she worded it, it seemed more like she was going to make sure it happened.”

The dhampir chuckled. “He’s found himself trapped by a mother hen. ”

Foxx giggled. “Seems like it. And she has parked her ass in his hospital room, fully intending to stay the whole time he’s there.”

Oceana had used Tony’s connections and a few threats in order to accomplish that. He wasn’t sure what it said about Tony’s wife that it had been over a day and she still hadn’t shown up at all… No, that wasn’t true, it actually told him that it was time for him to get her ass kicked to the curb so he could find the human someone who was worth marrying… Something to think about later…

At least, Tony wasn’t alone, and wouldn’t be for his entire stay.

Hm, though…Oceana and Tony seemed to have gotten closer while they’d been gone. Was the vampire interested in the human? Something to also think about later when they were back home. Something he’d have to keep an eye on before opening his mouth about it, because he didn’t actually know if any feelings were involved on either side. Foxx would rather not make shit awkward for the two, if it turned out to just be friendship between them.

Harlow smiled. “Good. She’ll stop the bastard from escaping, while making sure he does what he needs to do. And it’s not like this job is going to get less stressful. If it keeps the arteries from collapsing again then he should get it done.” The man’s smile slowly dropped. “It’s odd, realizing just how many years have passed. I thought I realized how long it had been. The aches and pains hadn’t exactly let me forget about it before the change happened, but Tony, ha…” Harlow chuckled. “The man looks older than when I first met him, for sure, but when I saw him on the video chat, it was like he’d aged more in this month and a half than he had in the last twenty years.”

Foxx always knew Tony was older for a human, but he had never considered the man old . Mainly as he didn’t look it, and he was in pretty good shape and kept active… But then stress could hurt someone much younger than him…

However this was more than just stress, right? It had to be. Foxx had been thinking over everything. The way the man had reacted to the news of Iggy being taken, how he had sounded each time he asked for updates, and then the heart attack after watching Iggy being attacked…

“Do you think he raised Iggy?”

Harlow frowned. “You think? ”

“On the video, Iggy said he’d been a child, not a teen, so maybe he’s someone Tony found during a hunt? How old is the man?”

In his mind, while every teen was a child, every child was not a teen.

“Ten years younger than me, I think? Around there.”

“When did you meet Tony, and when was the first time you saw Iggy?”

Harlow pursed his lips. “I met Tony when I was twenty-five, and the first time I met Iggy was four years after that.”

“Meaning he was around nineteen when you met him?”

“Likely, he was definitely young then, scrawny and shorter.”

“But he’d only be fourteen or fifteen when you met Tony… In my mind, it would make sense for the man to not bring a child around you, or really any hunters.”

“When we first met, I had just slaughtered a vampire that had tried to eat me. I was also less…people trained. When I saw him standing there, my first instinct was to put on a mask.”

“A mask?”

“Smiling normally, as if I wasn’t covered in blood.”

Foxx giggled. “Ah, yeah, no. The last thing he’d do is bring someone he considers his own child around a man he likely thought was insane.”

“Thought?” Harlow chuckled.

“Right, who was proven to him to be insane. And if he’d had Iggy with him much longer than that…and had no choice, at one point, to bring him around other hunters, one of them being Maverick, it would make sense for him to be even more wary to bring him around people he just met. Especially if, based on the shit Maverick said on the video, he was already dealing with someone showing obsessive behavior towards his child.”

Harlow slowly tilted his head, the man’s brow pulling. “I just…can’t think of any moments that would have clued me in on their relationship. I mean, there could be things I missed, or am just not remembering. I wasn’t the best at noticing shit back then, especially about other people relationship-wise. I'm still not, but…”

“I mean, it’s not like they’d be loud about it. I imagine their connection could have easily been used against Tony. And, I mean, since Iggy was transferred here, we haven’t seen the two interact, that I can recall.”

“It could definitely be used against Tony… Considering Maverick is obviously trying to. Though there does seem to be more to whatever that is. This does explain why he paired Iggy up with me the few times he did, and why I’m pretty sure Iggy never went on an assignment alone… The man’s a horrible shot…he's okay at fighting, but great with knives.”

Foxx frowned. “Why would he pair him with you? Wouldn’t he be worried you’d kill him?”

Harlow scoffed. “The thought did cross my mind, but I’ve never actually killed another hunter, unless I had a valid reason to. He was annoying, but he never did anything on purpose that I found worth killing over, besides recently that is, with him hitting on you and all. But he wasn’t bad as a partner, when he didn’t fuck up. Like I said, he's great with knives.”

“Tony trusted you to protect him.”

“He probably did. Thinking over the people he was paired with before, they are definitely hunters who I wouldn’t have second guessed at my back. To add on, during the rare times I was partnered, like the others, I never left a partner behind when shit hit the fan. Well, aside from Maverick.”

“I wonder why Gavin didn’t find the connection between them, or at least know about it. Yet, I’m sure he didn’t, as he didn’t appear to know whenever we talked about it. Unless he purposely hid it?”

“Doubt it. But I can explain why he wouldn’t find anything. Tony found a lot of children over the years, of all species. And since what we were doing was outright illegal, it made it harder to actually go through the full legal process that’s involved with adoption. I’m not sure how old Iggy was when Tony found him, but depending on what happened, followed by him somehow keeping him, it's likely no paperwork was ever filed.”

“How did Iggy deal with…all that paperwork-wise when he came of age? As wouldn’t he just be a missing child, with many questions on where the bloody hell he’d been?”

“That I don’t know,” Harlow said before groaning. “Ugh, fuck! Does this mean I have to collect Iggy?! ”

“I mean…” Foxx giggled. He wasn't sure how Iggy or Tony would feel about it, but he supposed it didn’t matter as Harlow’s brain was going to collect who it was going to collect.

The dhampir’s nose wrinkled. “Tony would be upset if something happened to him.”

He snorted. “Obviously.”

“Fucking dammit.” The man groaned again, before his eyes flicked towards the airport doors. “Santiago’s here.”

Foxx looked in the same direction, smiling slightly as he spotted the tall werewolf approaching. The man was the most casual he’d ever seen him, in his sweats, with a duffle bag over his shoulder. Everyone near seemed to do double takes as they looked up at the man. “I bet he had a hell of a time avoiding notice back in the old days.”

The dhampir grunted. “No doubt.”

Foxx looked back when the wolf got in, the man instantly making the back seat seem small. “Have a nice flight?”

“Rarely is a flight nice at my height, unless I’m on a private jet, or on a plane with actual first class seating. Which, at least here, is hard to come by nowadays.”

He giggled at that. “Yeah, can’t say I have that problem.”

Harlow scoffed. “No, instead you just struggle to reach the overhead bins.”

“I do not!” Foxx huffed.

Santiago chuckled almost hesitantly. “So, did any updates happen while I was in the air? I notice the dragon is not with you two. Where are we heading?”

“Gavin is back at the hotel tracking Maverick. He is sure he’ll find him, if not by the end of the night then by morning. We hadn’t had any recent contact from the man, and that email was just what Gavin needed, according to him, to pinpoint exactly where he’s at,” Harlow explained.

“So, while he does that, we are going to train,” Foxx chimed happily.

“Train?” the werewolf asked with a raised brow.