Eliot sat on the couch in Nate's apartment, watching the Patriots lose to the Ravens on the super-wide-screen multi-television array that Hardison had installed when he'd bought the building. Nate had been thoroughly irritated when he'd found out about Hardison becoming his landlord, back when they'd all first moved to Boston, but it was a setup that had several perks for the team. One was their unlimited access to the bar downstairs, which even Nate appreciated. Another was the ridiculously complex technical upgrades Hardison had made to the building, changes that any sane landlord would have forbidden given the extreme remodeling he'd had to do in order to put those upgrades into place. The two best aspects, though, at least as far as Eliot was concerned, were the TV setup in Nate's place and the decision Hardison had made regarding the rest of the apartments in the building.
From the beginning, it had been obvious that they couldn't have random civilians living in the building they were using as their headquarters. It had been obvious to Eliot, anyway, and he'd strong-armed Hardison into agreeing with him. Eliot would've been satisfied with Hardison relocating the tenants and letting the seven other apartments in the building stay vacant, but Hardison had other ideas. He'd handed a key to each of his teammates without comment, dedicating an apartment to each member of the crew, and reserved the rest in case they ever had clients or colleagues who needed a safe place to stay. Parker and Sophie had elected to live elsewhere, Sophie citing a need for privacy and Parker declining for reasons unknown to the rest of them, but those two apartments remained 'theirs' even though they didn't use them. Hardison and Eliot had decided to take up residence in the building with Nate. Eliot suspected that Hardison had done it out of convenience, but Eliot had stayed because it was the easiest way to protect the team.
Living in the building also made it easy for Eliot to come downstairs and watch football on Nate's outrageously large television display. It was actually better than going to the games, since he didn't have to worry about the miserable New England weather or any potential assassins in the crowd. Not that anyone would dare to come after him now. Not after what he'd done to Jason Carter…
The front door opened and Hardison came in, his arms filled with snacks and more beer.
"Who's winning?" he called to Eliot, juggling the food and his keys as he pushed the door shut with one foot.
"Ravens are kicking our ass," he called back, taking a swig of beer as Hardison entered the room and dumped the entire assortment onto the coffee table. Eliot rustled through the jumble of bags, coming up with the pretzels. "Thanks."
"Don't thank me," Hardison grumbled, opening a beer for himself. "It's not like I volunteered to go downstairs in the middle of the game to get more snacks. I can't believe I keep losing to you at rock-paper-scissors. How is it humanly possible for you to win every single time? And don't give me that crap about me having a tell."
"You have a tell," Eliot informed him, popping a pretzel into his mouth, and Hardison shook his head in disgust.
"You know who has a tell? Your crazy girlfriend."
Eliot snorted. "If she overhears you calling her crazy, you're gonna have bigger things to worry about than losing at rock-paper-scissors."
"I'm serious. Every time anyone says the name 'Aimee', she gets this muscle twitch in her left eye. It doesn't even have to be about your Aimee. Someone in the bar was talking to a woman named Amy a couple of days ago, and I thought she was going to go over there and stab him in the neck."
"Don't call her 'my Aimee'," Eliot snapped, glancing around the apartment to make sure Tessa hadn't come in without him noticing. "You're gonna get me stabbed in the neck."
"She's still mad about you taking Aimee home, huh?"
"Mad doesn't even begin to cover it."
It wasn't exactly a lie, Eliot rationalized, taking another sip of his beer. 'Mad' wasn't the word he would use to describe how Tessa had reacted to him pretending to fly back to Kentucky with Aimee. Oh, she'd put on a good show of anger for the others, and had taken the opportunity to threaten Aimee with an exceptionally unpleasant death if the other woman ever so much as touched Eliot again, but the smile she'd given him as he'd left their apartment to go kill Jason Carter had been a mixture of pride and relief.
"I get that you love her, I really do, but I don't understand how you can handle that insane level of jealousy."
"You don't know anything about it, man."
"Uh, I know that your girlfriend is going to murder your ex in cold blood if she ever catches her talking to you again."
"You want to see jealousy?" Eliot leaned back against the couch cushions, pointing at the hacker with his beer bottle. "You wait and see what happens when some punk down in the bar starts flirting with Tessa. There are worse things in the world than murder, and I will do them all to anyone who tries to get between me and her."
"You - are you admitting to being jealous? Dude, that's so uncool."
Eliot snorted, dismissing Hardison's opinion. "You've never been in love. That's why you don't get it."
"Hey, I've loved plenty of women. You're just a caveman; that's your problem. I am an enlightened man of the twenty-first century, and I acknowledge that a woman has the right to flirt with whoever she wants. Just because she's in love with you doesn't mean you get to control who she talks to."
"I don't control her," Eliot replied, his tone reflecting his scorn at Hardison's words. "She's a professional assassin. She can do whatever the hell she wants. But that doesn't mean I'm gonna stand there and watch some guy try to get her into bed."
"Oh, what, so you're gonna bust some poor guy's kneecaps just because he thinks your girlfriend is hot?"
"Yeah," Eliot nodded. "That's exactly what I'd do. For starters."
"Seriously? Well, here's a news flash for you, Eliot. Your girlfriend is hot. Okay? She's hot by anybody's standards, which means that if you're gonna go around breaking the knees of everyone who thinks she's hot, you're gonna have to cripple every guy in Boston."
Eliot contemplated that suggestion, thoughtful. "I can handle that," he decided finally, nodding. "Yeah. I'm fine with that."
"Man, you're ridiculous," Hardison informed him, shaking his head. "You know what? Even I think Tessa's hot. There, I said it. Are you gonna break my kneecaps now?"
"He won't," said a familiar voice from the doorway, and Hardison groaned as Tessa entered the room. "I might. I do appreciate the compliment, though."
"If you appreciate it, why would you break his kneecaps?" Parker asked from behind Tessa.
"Because he's just saying it in order to get under Eliot's skin," Tessa replied. "Eliot and I have gone through a lot in our relationship. I don't like it when people use that to make him angry."
"Why wouldn't Eliot break his kneecaps, then?" Parker persisted, and Eliot snorted.
"I'd only do that if I was jealous. There's no reason for me to be jealous of Hardison. Tessa would never sleep with him."
"You don't know that. I'm very smooth," Hardison protested, but Tessa shook her head.
"No, Eliot's right. Never going to happen."
"What are you doing back so soon?" Eliot asked, all of them ignoring Hardison's spluttering defense of his smoothness. "I thought you were going to be on this job for at least a week."
"I came across a complication."
"You need my help?" he asked, setting down his beer and starting to get to his feet, but she waved him down again.
"Actually, I came to ask for everyone's help. I want to hire your team."
"Just so we're clear." Nate's tone and expression were both inscrutable. "You want to hire us to run a con on a guy you're planning to kill?"
"I'm ambivalent about killing him," Tessa replied, tossing a flash drive to Hardison, who caught it and plugged it into his laptop. "The traffickers are using his warehouse, but I'm not convinced he knows what they're using it for, which means he's not worth my time. I'm interested in removing the people involved in the trafficking chain, not some idiot bystander."
"What are they trafficking?" Sophie asked, nodding to the picture of the warehouse that Hardison brought up on the screen. "Drugs? Guns?"
"Kids."
At the others' stunned looks, Eliot rolled his eyes. "Are you tellin' me she's been here for almost five months and you still don't know what she does?"
"No, we know," Parker replied helpfully. "Hardison told us when he did that presentation on her -"
"Parker," Sophie murmured, cringing at Eliot's expression.
"- that you weren't…invited…to." Belatedly, Parker realized what she'd done. "Oops."
"Oops?" Eliot echoed, turning his glare from Parker to Hardison. "What's she talkin' about?"
"Don't be silly," Tessa told him, saving Hardison from having to invent an answer that would satisfy the hitter. "Did you really think they would let me move in with you, giving me full access to your entire crew and the building you operate out of, without doing any research into who I am? I hope you've taught them better than that."
"You knew about this?"
She shrugged. "I walked in on the tail end of their information session. That was when Nate and I negotiated the terms of my relocation."
"When you what?"
"An independent contractor doesn't move in on an established crew's territory without setting some ground rules so that they can coexist peacefully. Don't give me that look, Eliot; you know that."
"You did this without me?"
"It had to be done, and when I first got here, you weren't ready to have this conversation. If you'd been there that night, you would have objected to the terms."
"What terms?"
"I keep Nate apprised of where I'm working so that we don't cross paths. I stay out of your way and your team stays out of mine. I don't work in Boston without running it past Nate first."
"Ah, speaking of that, I don't remember hearing about this job," Nate pointed out, gesturing to the picture of the warehouse, and Tessa raised an eyebrow at him.
"FYI, Nate, I'm planning to save a dozen kids in Boston from being sold into the sex trade. Consider yourself informed," she replied flatly, returning her attention to her lover. "Eliot, we had to try this in order to figure out if it could work. I know you; if you'd realized from the beginning that I was going to have to cooperate professionally with Nate Ford, you would've just assumed I couldn't do it. You would've called the whole thing off, and by now you and I would be long gone. I couldn't let you give up your team in order to keep me happy."
"Why wouldn't you be able to work with me?" Nate asked Tessa, and Eliot shook his head.
"It ain't you, Nate. It's her. She doesn't answer to anybody. Ever."
"Listen to me, Eliot," Tessa said, frustrated. "I would do anything for you. Anything. I've spent the last two years hiring hunters to kill any rival who posed a danger to you. I went to the middle of nowhere and risked my life to save your ex-girlfriend - who I hate, by the way - in order to keep you from getting hurt. I dumped a very lucrative contract job off on someone I barely trust in order to retrieve you from Julovich, and I blew up a meeting of the most powerful men in the underworld because they were planning to auction you off to be tortured. I even flew to Malaysia and went spelunking through a cave system-"
"- into a hidden underground prison," he finished for her, a reluctant smile tugging at his lips as he remembered that particular encounter. "To rescue me and Vance. And you hate caves."
"It's not the caves, it's the bats. Giant, disgusting flying rodents. With rabies." She shook her head, trying to redirect herself back to the conversation and away from the thought of enormous rabid bats. "Compared to some of the things I've already done for you, maintaining a civil relationship with Nate Ford really hasn't been that difficult. There was no reason you ever needed to know."
"I see what you're saying, but I still think you should've told Eliot about the deal," Hardison informed Tessa, hoping he wasn't about to get shot for interfering. "If I'd realized you hadn't told him, I would've said something a long time ago. The man's got a right to know what's going on."
"Thanks, Hardison," Eliot said, watching Tessa's expression. "But she's right. When I left her in Russia to come back to Boston, I wasn't sure she was gonna follow me. Until she actually showed up, there was a part of me that thought she would just disappear again."
"That's my fault," Tessa murmured as he slid his arms around her. "I screwed up, Eliot. I should never have disappeared on you in the first place, and I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry too. If I hadn't -" He cut himself off, realizing that he was about to reveal more than he wanted to about their history to his teammates, and turned back to face Hardison rather than continuing down that road with Tessa again. "Forget it. The point is that when she first got here, I was worried she'd be unhappy and decide to leave. If I'd known she was agreeing to report in to Nate, I would've assumed it could never work and that would've been the end of her moving to Boston."
"But you wouldn't have gone back to Russia with her." Parker's words started out as a statement, but turned into a question when she saw the look on Eliot's face. "Would you?"
"I lost her once," Eliot said flatly. "I won't lose her again. If she goes, I go."
"I'm not going anywhere," Tessa insisted, giving his hand a squeeze. "And neither are you, so don't scare Parker like that."
"You know, I don't mean to interrupt the drama unfolding over there, but there is still the matter of the job that you wanted us to do," Sophie pointed out from the couch, doing her best to distract all of them from any discussion of Eliot leaving.
"Yes, there is," Tessa agreed, taking the opening that Sophie had given her. "And unfortunately, it's time limited, so I need you to make a decision now about whether you're willing to take it."
"We'll help you," Parker said quickly, looking to Hardison for support. "Of course we'll help you. That's what friends are for, right? And we're all friends. Friends who wouldn't leave the team and move to Russia."
"Let's hear about it before we agree to anything, Parker," Nate cautioned her. "Tessa? Would you like to fill us in?"
Hardison offered her his remote, which she took, flipping to the next picture on the drive.
"This is Brad Donnelly. He's a real estate mogul who owns a number of classic crime warehouses all over Boston."
"Crime warehouses? Seriously?" Hardison repeated, and Eliot nodded.
"Shady locations, no security, lax supervision by property management. Perfect for underworld activity."
"And you're telling me one of those warehouses is full of kids being sold into prostitution?" Hardison shook his head. "That's something that happens in - in the Ukraine, or Serbia, or something. Not in Boston."
"You've gotta be kidding me, Hardison," Eliot muttered. "Even you can't be that clueless."
"No, plenty of people believe that," Tessa pointed out. "And to some extent, it's true. The US has more law enforcement and less graft and bribery of officials than most places, so most of the sex trafficking that goes on in this country is small scale."
"Pimps and drug dealers," Eliot said, his tone telling them exactly what he thought of that. "They get their hands on a couple of local girls, either through threats and violence or by getting them hooked on drugs and then forcing them into prostitution to pay for their habit."
"Human trafficking is a thirty billion dollar industry," Tessa informed them. "It's the second biggest black market in the world. That kind of money inspires people to take risks."
"Where did they get the kids in the warehouse?" That was Parker, sounding unusually subdued. "Did they bring them in from another country?"
Tessa shook her head. "They're street kids from right here in Boston. Runaways, mostly. Right now they have twelve of them in the warehouse. From the surveillance I've managed to collect, it sounds like they're planning to move them soon, so if I want to get them out it needs to be now. The warehouse where the traffickers are keeping the kids is one of Donnelly's. I've been trying to work backward, going up the chain from the guys who are snatching the kids off the street, but I've only gotten as far as the middle management. If I'm going to figure out who's actually running the operation, I need to find out who's renting the warehouse from Donnelly. I can't make any moves to kill the traffickers or rescue the kids until I know who the ringleader is."
"If you tip your hand too early, the ringleader will realize someone is onto him and he'll disappear," Sophie realized.
"Right, and then he'll just start over, doing the same thing in another city. What I need you to do is figure out who rented that warehouse, fast, so that I can get in there and shut down the operation without losing him."
"You don't need the whole team for that," Hardison said, grabbing his laptop and getting to work. "Hell, you don't really even need me for that. All you need is a halfway decent hacker to get into Donnelly's system and trace the payments back to the source. Jinx could do it. She's usually your go-to hacker, isn't she?"
"She doesn't work these jobs."
"What, she doesn't want to get her hands dirty?" Hardison guessed, already breaking through Donnelly's firewall and into the payment records to find the information Tessa wanted.
"I don't let her." Tessa's tone brooked no argument.
"Think about it, Hardison," Eliot contributed from his seat next to Parker. "Jinx is a teenage girl. These guys abduct teenage girls and sell them as sex slaves. The kid doesn't need to be anywhere near this."
There wasn't much he could say to that, so Hardison kept his mouth shut until he found what Tessa had been looking for. "Here it is. That particular warehouse was rented by Contera Ltd., which is a shell company, which leads back to three other shell companies…but if you dig far enough, you find this guy. Peter Marlow."
"Peter Marlow," Tessa repeated, studying the picture Hardison was displaying on the screen. "Great. Thanks."
"Hang on. Don't you want to know who he is?"
"Not necessary. I can kill him with a name and a picture."
"That's very disturbing," Hardison informed her as he pulled up the results that had popped out of his identification software, which was tied into every law enforcement agency, banking institution, and social media network in the world. "For those of us who don't have some sort of creepy bad guy GPS in our heads, here's his information. Marlow is…damn. He's a criminal defense lawyer, employed by a firm in Boston. Further proof that it really is the sleaziest profession. Here's his driver's license, complete with home address, and here's all of his bank account information." He scanned the bank documents, whistling through his teeth. "When you said human trafficking was a lucrative business, you weren't kidding. He's got over three million dollars hidden in an account in the Caymans."
"Feel free to steal it," Tessa told him dryly. "In a couple of hours, he's not going to be around to miss it."
"Seriously?" Hardison asked, sounding surprised. "Aren't you going to steal it? I mean, you're the one doing all the heavy lifting on this job. That money is your payout."
"I'm not good enough with technology to do it myself," she admitted. "When I have time, I hire a hacker to go in and transfer the target's money to me in exchange for a percentage, but on rush jobs like these, I usually end up doing them pro bono."
"Wait a minute." Hardison was staring at her in disbelief, the pieces finally falling into place for him. "You - you're always knocking our jobs, talking about how we're a bunch of Girl Scouts doing neighborhood watch stuff, but this whole time you've been rescuing little kids from bad guys for free? Oh, that is the most hypocritical thing I have ever heard -"
"Hardison," Nate muttered in warning, and suddenly the hacker remembered who he was talking to.
"- from a woman who kills people for a living. You know what? It's none of my business. I'm just gonna stay out of it. As a matter of fact, I'm gonna steal that guy's money and just go ahead and transfer it to your account. As a show of support, you know? Because I support what you're doing, and I also support you not stabbing me in the neck."
"That's very generous," Tessa replied, amused. "Thank you. If you'll all excuse me, I'm going to go take care of Marlow and his employees."
"You need any help?" Eliot asked, but Tessa shook her head.
"One ringleader, two procurers out on the streets, one dirty cop covering their tracks, and three guards at the warehouse. It should only take me about two hours to shut it all down. If you don't mind, I'll make an anonymous call to your friend with the Massachusetts State Police and let him know where the kids are."
"I'm sure Detective Bonnano would be glad to help," Nate replied. "Of course, if you're going to kill a bunch of people and then call him, I'd prefer it if you didn't tell him that we were involved."
"Don't worry; I'll keep your pristine reputation intact."
"Was that all you wanted from us?"
Tessa shrugged. "All I really needed was Marlow's name. I did think you might be interested in looking into Donnelly. This isn't the only warehouse of his that's being used for distasteful purposes, and while I don't know for certain whether he's aware of what's going on in this particular warehouse, I do know that he makes regular visits to several of the others that are being used to store stolen goods. One of them isn't officially rented to anyone, so either he's dealing under the table with someone or he's the one in charge of the thieves."
"He does sound like our kind of guy," Hardison agreed. "Rich and evil."
"We'll look into him," Nate decided. "Thanks for the tip, Tessa."
"No problem." She gave Eliot a quick kiss as she headed for the door. "If you find out he was aware of the sex trafficking, let me know. Make sure you clean him out first, though. It'd be a shame if all of that perfectly good money got caught up in probate court."