Unhinged (Necessary Evils #1)(17)

Coffees ordered, Adam snagged Noah’s hand. “You have freckles on your fingers, too,” he mused.

“You’re obsessed with freckles,” Noah teased.

Adam flicked pale blue eyes upwards, snagging Noah’s gaze. “No. Just yours.”

If he didn’t stop saying things like that, Noah was going to do something stupid like fall in love with a murderer.

Cindi returned with two mugs, and Noah watched as Adam dumped enough sugar into his coffee to stand a spoon in. “That can’t be healthy,” Noah said, smiling when Adam took a sip and sighed deeply.

Noah drank his black. Mostly because he usually couldn’t afford anything but powdered creamers, which gave him the creeps. All those lumps just floating around, waiting to be dissolved in boiling liquid. No, thank you.

Once they had their food—cinnamon roll pancakes for Noah and a Belgian waffle buried in syrup and powdered sugar for Adam—the real conversation began. The one they’d put on hold in the trailer until they could get some sustenance.

They could talk freely. The restaurant provided the perfect amount of white noise to keep their conversation private. Still, he kept his voice low, leaning in just a bit to talk in-between mouthfuls.

“Okay, what’s step one?” Adam asked.

Noah was tempted to play dumb just to put off the inevitable for a while. But this was why they were there. To solve a mystery. “I stole Gary’s backpack and made copies of all his keys. He gets to the club at seven each night and doesn’t leave until ten or eleven in the morning. I swapped shifts with another dishwasher so we have the whole night to look through all of his shit.”

“You want to break into his house and look for…” Adam prompted.

“If he’s got the same…tastes…in porn as my father, then there’s a chance, maybe, he kept souvenirs of his time with my dad and these other men. If I can find those tapes, I can possibly find them.”

Adam nodded. “Makes sense. I can have my people deep dive into his internet history, bank statements, background?”

Noah gave him a flat stare. “You have people?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t everybody?” he asked, tone teasing.

Noah still didn’t quite understand who Adam worked for. It had taken years just to identify Adam in the first place. If his father hadn’t been so paranoid, he might not have even had a place to start. He hadn’t known about Adam working for a group of people until the night he confronted him and he’d made the phone call that had shattered Noah’s fragile existence. Would Adam tell him the truth?

“What is this group you work for?” He dropped his voice. “Who hires a—what?—sixteen year old to kill people? That’s how old you were when you did my dad, right?”

Adam nodded, looking impressed, Noah wasn’t sure why. “I wasn’t hired. I don’t get paid. Community service, remember? I’m a mandatory volunteer.”

Noah scoffed. “You can’t make it mandatory for somebody to volunteer their time.”

“Tell that to my father,” Adam muttered.

The pieces began falling into place for Noah. In the trailer, Adam had said ‘we were raised for this.’ It had sounded like some Batman level vigilante bullshit last night when he was half asleep and fully high. But maybe Adam was serious.

“Wait…your dad? Thomas Mulvaney is a…murderer?” Noah whispered.

Adam snorted a laugh; then took a long drink of his coffee before saying, “Please, my father would never get his hands dirty like that. No, my father trained us to be murderers.”

Noah sat on that sentence for a minute. “Us? Like…your brothers?”

Adam shrugged, seemingly unbothered by the conversation, like they were discussing traffic. “I mean, you can’t fault his logic. My brothers and I are uniquely qualified to do what we do. And honestly, we turned out better than the doctors could have hoped, given our initial diagnoses.”

A finger of unease ran along his spine. “Which was what?”

Adam smiled softly, shaking his head. “I told you, I’m a psychopath.”

Noah choked on the bite of pancake he’d just forked into his mouth, sparking a coughing fit that drew far more attention than he wanted.

When it was over and the others went back to their eggs and toast, Noah managed, “Yeah, but when people say that, it's a joke or exaggeration.”

Adam raised his hand to get Cindi’s attention before pointing to his cup with a sweet smile Noah found laughable considering the conversation.

When he looked at Noah again, he shrugged. “When I say it, I mean I had a team of board certified psychiatrists who determined I lacked the emotional capacity to feel love, regret, guilt, remorse. Psychopath or sociopath is relative, I suppose. They don’t know if I was born this way or if my trauma created my eternally broken psyche. The outcome is similar either way.”

Noah’s brain snagged on the unable to love part, trying to ignore the stabbing pain that shot through him. It figured Noah would be attracted to a man who couldn’t love him by design. He really was hopeless. He tried to push the thought away. “So, are all your brothers like you?”

“Psychopaths, you mean?” Adam asked. “Yeah, that’s why he chose us.”

A thought suddenly occurred to Noah. “Am I going to get merced for knowing this information?”