Page 12 of Monochrome (ORCA #4)

CHAPTER

TWELVE

NERO

“Nero, give me your phone. I need to call Felix.”

I passed it over to Eli without question, and he pulled up my contacts, tapping my mate’s name as I drove us to where Julius had said they’d gone off the road.

Felix answered on the first ring.

“Hey, babe. Is Jules okay?”

“Felix, it’s Eli. I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything, Eli. Name it.”

“I need you to pull any traffic camera footage you can from today.” Eli gave him the highway and mile marker that Julius had given us.

“I also need you to see if you can find any archived footage from the night Tessa Li died.”

“What?” I jerked the wheel a little but righted the car quickly.

“I’m already working on traffic camera footage. Are you thinking the accidents are connected?”

Eli sighed, and I didn’t like the way it sounded, the hair on the back of my neck standing up as I considered the implication.

“I pulled Tessa Li’s case file and the accident report when we found the connection to Grove Core. The case was closed and ruled an accident, but it’s been nagging at me, and now that we know someone is trying to frame Ethan for embezzlement, I can’t shake the feeling that something was missed.”

Eli ran a hand over his face, and I knew what he was thinking.

He was more or less running an unsanctioned and borderline illegal—since he was asking my mate, a known hacker, for help—investigation in an area where he technically had no jurisdiction.

Eli was a cold case detective, and while Tessa’s case could be considered cold, he had also told us it had officially been closed by the department, and there had been no petition to reopen it.

If anyone found out what Eli was doing, he would get his ass handed to him on a silver fucking platter.

Then again, he had promised Marcus he would try to see things in shades of gray when he’d come back to Seattle and they’d gotten their second chance.

Eli knew who my mate was and what our family did, and I knew if Marcus asked, Eli would give up his career for him.

For all of us.

But I also knew Eli hadn’t expected to have to wade ankle-deep into our family drama right away.

Felix made a thoughtful noise on the other end of the line.

“Okay. Let me see what I can dig up. The footage from Tessa’s accident is going to be much harder to find since a lot of traffic camera footage isn’t stored for that long.”

“Great. If anyone can find it, I know you can. Is Marcus still there?”

“Yeah, hold on. I’ll put him on the phone.”

We waited while Felix told Marcus that Eli wanted to talk to him and passed the phone to my cousin.

“Hey, Eli. What’s going on?”

“I need you to pull any transactions from any of the shell accounts made around the time Tessa Li died. Maybe start a few days before and a few days after, and spin out from there. Then I need you to see if any similar transactions were made today or earlier this week.”

“I see where you’re going with this. I’m on it. Love you. Be safe out there.”

“Love you too.” I took my eyes off the road just long enough to see Eli’s cheeks go a little pink.

“Tell Nero I love him,” Felix shouted in the background.

“If you guys are being all mushy and cute, I get to be mushy and cute too.”

Despite the situation we were rushing into, I couldn’t keep a smile from spreading across my face.

Felix was the light in my life I hadn’t realized I’d been missing, and knowing he loved me had turned my world from black and white into shades of blinding technicolor.

“I heard you. Love you too, Lucky.” Eli ended the call, and the car went silent as I worked through what Eli had just asked Felix and Marcus to do.

Clenching and unclenching my fists on the steering wheel, I felt a scowl replace my smile as I processed where Eli was going with all this.

“You don’t think this was a random accident, do you?”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know what to think. I feel like we’ve been following breadcrumbs and chasing ghosts since the very beginning of this.”

“Felix and Marcus are going to do some digging, but I have a feeling I know what they’re going to find.”

My knuckles went white around the steering wheel, and I heard the leather creak under my grip.

“Someone got paid to kill Tessa Li and make it look like an accident, and that same person is now trying to take out her brother.”

“Got it in one.”

“But why?”

Eli shook his head.

“That right there is the million-dollar question.”