Jace (River Pack Wolves 2)(7)

He snarled, but she just ignored that… because something gnawed at her about what he said. The skype setups at the MWR were how Noah normally phoned home, but Piper wasn’t “home” in Seattle any more than absolutely necessary—and when she was abroad, it was never anywhere she could openly skype with a U.S. Army grunt in some public internet cafe. That was the whole reason she had set up their back-channel comm system in the first place—so she could keep tabs on her kid brother while he was off fighting the bad guys in the worst parts of the world. Their calls had started out weekly, but serving your country generally involved long stretches of extreme boredom punctuated by brief moments of sheer terror. Soon the check-ins were daily, and sometimes they text-chatted for over an hour. And he never missed a check-in unless he was in the middle of a firefight.

If the MWR was actually down… she would have heard about it. If nothing else, Noah would have reported the moaning and complaining of his fellow grunts.

“Wait… you’re counterintelligence?” Jace asked, bringing her out of her rabbit-hole of thought about that little mystery. He was surprised, but there was more respect in his voice than she ever got from Daniel. Or their father.

She gave Jace a tight smile. “Defense Civilian Intelligence Specialist, working for the Army abroad,” she clarified quickly, remembering Jace said he was Army, too. Or she supposed ex-Army now with the River brothers’ security business. She did do a little research before she decided to break in. “Which means I’m boot dust to some.” Piper threw a glare at Daniel, then turned back to Jace, who was keeping a pretty good poker face about the whole thing. “Mostly I just do collective CI—the kind of counterintelligence that collects intel on the bad guy spies. I’m not in offensive operations.” Which meant she wasn’t out there actively engaging enemy agents to turn them or playing double agent and feeding them false intel. Of course, if she were, she certainly wouldn’t say so. And there were times when that line got pretty fuzzy.

“I guess that explains why you didn’t use the doorbell.” Jace’s smirk said he was more amused than offended by that now. She supposed that was good. And that flirty smile of his was doing things to her nether parts that she really needed to ignore. Focus, Piper.

Daniel snorted—his derision was a lot more familiar. “You just broke in, didn’t you? Nice.” He shook his head like she was a delinquent teen he didn’t know what to do with. “Look, big sister—why don’t you just use your fancy spy skills to figure out the big conspiracy about where Noah’s been reassigned and let the rest of us sleep?”

“He’s not just on an op somewhere!” Piper shot back. “He would have told me.” Plus this MWR thing was ramping up her nerves. Why would Noah say that… unless he expected to go dark for some reason? And why not tell her? Warn her, at least. So she didn’t panic. Like she was. Right now.

Daniel gave her his best impression of their father—all authority and derision toward the little girl who was such a disappointment to him. “Maybe he found something better to do than chat with his sister. Or they confiscated his phone. Or maybe, just maybe, he dropped that extremely expensive satellite phone you gave him in the latrine.”

His smirk and his words were just making her stomach wind tighter and tighter. All that was possible… but she didn’t believe any of it.

“Right,” she huffed. “Has to be a phone down the crapper. Because nothing else ever goes sideways in Afghanistan.” Her glare darkened, and if she didn’t know Daniel could easily take her in a fight, she was tempted to shift and give him a face full of claws for not showing more concern about his little brother. Because something could be very wrong, and as far as she could tell, he cared more about giving her crap than he did about Noah’s safety. Daniel was more a junior version of their dad each time she saw him. It had been a year since the last time—obviously nowhere near long enough.

Daniel just held her glare, not backing down.

“You know what?” Piper hissed. “You’re right. This was obviously a mistake.” She turned on her heel and got halfway to the door before a hand stopped her with a gentle tug on her elbow. Daniel knew better than to touch her, so she reeled in her instinct to whirl with a handful of claws out.

It was Jace. “Hang on,” he said, glancing back at Daniel. “If Noah’s missing, I meant what I said about finding him. We went after Cassie and brought her back. We’ll do the same for him.”