Page 27 of Rio (Redcars #3)

NINETEEN

Lyric

I slept like a baby, even though I woke aching in every joint.

My ribs pulsed with dull heat, and my knees—fuck, yeah, that was a mistake.

Dropping down had been reckless, but the way Rio had looked at me had made it worth every throb of pain.

That raw anger in him, all those muscles tense under my hands, surrendering in the moment… Intoxicating didn’t begin to cover it.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the way his pupils had blown wide, the way his hands had fisted and trembled when I took control. How he’d let me. How he’d wanted me to. I wasn’t used to that. Not in real life.

God, sex for me had always been fast and necessary, a way to prove I was still human when the world wanted to reduce me to numbers and passwords and contracts to find me. A little release between one life-threatening sprint and the next. No room for connection. Scarcely time to breathe.

And the idea that someone would let me take the lead? Be vulnerable under me? That was rare. Rarer than clean code on the Kessler AI build.

But Rio had just… let go. He didn’t need anything from me. He didn’t beg, didn’t command, didn’t play a part. He’d simply been there , open and raw and gasping under my touch, and something about that made my chest ache as if I’d been punched from the inside out.

The way he’d let me mark him. The way he’d sucked my finger clean as if he’d been waiting his whole life for that exact moment.

It wasn’t anything so soft. But it was more . And I had no fucking idea what to do with that.

The hot spray of the shower was like a reset switch.

My body protested every movement, from the twist of my torso to the flex of my knees, but I welcomed the pain—it made me feel grounded.

Real. I stood under the water longer than I should’ve, one hand braced against the tiles, the other rinsing shampoo from my hair.

My skin was hypersensitive, every drop that hit me a reminder of last night .

I hadn’t had a sex life in any meaningful way for years. Too much time spent running, hiding, keeping my head down. What little I’d had was frantic, disconnected, mostly forgettable. No one had ever let me lead for real. No one had ever let me take .

Not the way Rio had.

When the water finally cooled, I dried off and dressed in borrowed joggers and a hoodie that still smelled faintly of someone else—Robbie, maybe.

I padded barefoot over to the desk Jamie and I had set up by the back wall, flicked on the screen, and checked programs and protocols I’d started the night before.

There was one new message from Kessler, but it was a garbled mess as if he’d pocket-messaged me.

remembers y//ou. not m3. can’t shuttDown. it watches. watches. watches. stop it? Lok up. y0u shouldn’t have written th ? —

Still, there was enough in there to hold what could have been a sentence or two, so I took a screenshot and sent it to Jamie and Caleb.

Jamie: What does he mean he can’t shut it down?

Jamie: The system? LyricNight?

Lyric: Assume s o

Jamie: Watches? Him? You?

Lyric: Fuck knows.

Jamie: Lok Up? Does he mean locked up? Or look up?

I didn’t answer that time—I didn’t know what to say.

I shuddered at the thought of being watched and focused on getting everything running smoothly.

The crawl I’d initiated was eroding the sandboxed environment Jamie had provided, pinging and parsing for vulnerabilities in Kessler’s old architecture.

A couple of flagged strings caught my eye, but nothing too concerning yet—just a few malformed handshake requests, probably automated probes.

And no more weird-ass messages from Kessler, although the Cave encrypted messaging system was lighting up with images.

Caleb: Last known sighting

I opened each one, staring at Kessler, who six weeks ago, according to the date, had gone to dinner with friends.

He’d been papped, and he was pissed, backed up by a street cam that had caught him gesticulating wildly at a wall.

Maybe there was someone in the shadows there, but to me he was acting as if he was losing his shit.

He’d always been manic, forceful, edging on weird, but this was a new one.

I zoomed in to see if he was wearing ear pods, but it wasn’t obvious.

I’d often see what looked like people talking to themselves, so maybe this was Kessler have a discussion on a phone.

Something about the filming seemed off but I couldn’t pin down what it was—apart from the mania that Kessler was displaying.

Although, when I scrolled back through my screen captures there was a message from him timestamped for ten minutes before.

K: Yr hndle all ovR LN, locked inside. $$ is mn. Mne.

LN was LyricNight, that much was obvious, but the rest of the message made no sense. If he was implying I wanted the billions that came with his AI system, then he was dead wrong.

I wanted none of it.

I wanted LyricNight gone.

I minimized the window, set a tracer script in motion, and leaned back in the chair with a sigh. The shower hadn’t calmed the static in my head.

Jamie had taken over a second desk that he and Enzo had heaved up, his laptops and portable drives arranged in a semi-circle.

We didn’t talk much when he was there. Didn’t have to.

Everything about our language was built in keystrokes and compressed logic.

He didn’t seem to spend a lot of time downstairs with Enzo, Rio, and Robbie, but there was a lot more to Redcars than I first thought.

Including the fact they actually were a garage and had cars in every day, and a project they worked on together.

I knew that, because Robbie had spent most of yesterday sitting next to the bed in Rio’s chair and telling me everything.

No one had stopped me from leaving the room, technically, but no one had encouraged me to explore either. It was clear—upstairs was safe. Downstairs? That was a maybe.

Enzo was on edge. He tried to hide it, but the tension crackled.

If anyone found out Robbie was here… well, I’d heard enough to piece together Kessler’s part in what had happened to Robbie.

Heard the low murmurs, the way Enzo went still every time Robbie’s name came up in a sentence that didn’t end with safe .

If someone came looking, Enzo would kill, simple as that because Robbie was his entire world. And I didn’t blame him.

I set another crawl running on one of the machines—low-key, quiet, enough to comb for backend leaks in the sandbox copy Jamie had mounted. I was restless. Out of the loop. Unused to being on the edges of operations I used to run from the center.

Someone knocked on my door, and I jerked toward the sound, heart skipping at the ridiculous hope it might be Rio.

Rio doesn’t knock, idiot.

“Come in,” I called. The door creaked open, and Robbie poked his head around it. Of course, it was Robbie—he was the only one polite enough to knock.

“Hi,” he said, his voice carrying that same nervous note.

“You can come in, you know—unless Enzo’s about to lose his shit on me for breathing near you.”

Robbie gave me a tremulous smile. “Nah. He knows I’m up here. It was his idea.”

Enzo trusted me with Robbie. That was… novel.

Robbie finally stepped into the room, holding two mugs in one hand and a small plate of cookies in the other. He nudged the door shut with his back, the soft click of it closing not lost on me. Deliberate. As though he was shutting out the rest of the world.

Robbie hesitated a second, then asked, “Can we talk?”

“That sounds ominous,” I said, keeping my tone light .

Robbie shrugged and moved deeper into the room. He set one of the mugs on the small table beside the bed, then added the plate of cookies—snickerdoodles. “I know you enjoyed these last time I made them,” he said, almost shy. “And the coffee has cream and sugar. Just how you like it.”

“Not that I’m suspicious of your motives, but you can have anything for a cookie,” I joked.

But Robbie only managed the smallest of smiles. He was flustered, awkward, as if he didn’t know what to do now that my coffee and cookies had been delivered. After a pause, he set his mug on a scarred coffee table in the seating area and stared at the sofa.

“Sit down,” I said, and he did, perching on the edge as if he was expecting to be scolded.

I grabbed my mug and a cookie and took the chair facing him.

I took a bite, closed my eyes, and hummed in exaggerated appreciation. “Crisp edge, perfect sugar-to-cinnamon ratio, soft center. A textbook example of the underrated snickerdoodle. Bold. Confident. A cookie that knows what it’s about.”

Robbie gave a huff of laughter, the tension in his shoulders easing a little. That was the goal.

This felt more serious than cookies and caffeine. And Robbie? He wasn’t hiding the nerves well .

“Can we talk about something?” he blurted out, the words rapid fire as if they’d been held back too long. I froze, cookie halfway to my mouth, all sense of comfort vanishing in an instant.

“Sure,” I said, and replaced the cookie on the plate. “What about?”

Robbie bowed his head, fingers twisting in his lap. “E-Edward Lassiter?”

I frowned. “What about him?” He was dead, so he was off my list of things to worry about. My focus was on taking down that AI system, not on the others, whom I’d watched, given that all of them, bar Kessler, had been dealt with—apparently by Killian and something he called a Cave.

“W-What do you know about him?” Robbie asked, voice trembling, his face pale and drawn as if he’d just seen a ghost.

“Um, okay.” I went through everything I could recall. “He was on my watch list when his name came up in connection with Kessler. ADA, involved in trafficking, wrapped up with gangs, using his position to influence trials. Got on the bad side of a drug deal gone wrong and ended up crispy.”