"You guys look like day old dog shit. I take it you didn't spend the weekend catching up on sleep after that last mission?" I looked up as the Dempsey twins, Zeke and Ezra, walked in and flopped their worn-out looking asses in chairs around the conference table for our weekly check-in.

"Fuck that, I'll sleep when I'm dead." Ezra smirked. "I spent the weekend with a pair of omegas from Loyola. Holy shit. Those frat boys almost drank me under the table, I was lucky to even get it up. But, you know me... I soldiered through; it's what I do."

"We don't need the details, Ez. The fact that you're wearing your sunglasses in the office tells us all we need to know," Zeke said as he reached for the coffee carafe in the center the table. "Besides, we don't want to make the baby bossboy here jealous. We all know he hasn't had a date since Obama left office."

"Dude. That's cold. Besides, you don't know. Maybe baby bossboy is hooking up on the sly, right, Noah? I mean, a guy can't be too careful in this age of Big Brother. Someone is always watching. It pays to keep things on the downlow, as I keep warning you guys," Jonah said, taking his seat.

Jonah, our team's resident tinfoil hat wearing techno-wizard, was a snarky, paranoid sweetheart of a guy. The problem was that I hadn't had enough coffee yet to keep up with his hyperspeed style of talking.

"Yo, pass me the coffee, Ez." I drained my cup and reached out for the carafe. Fuck, I hated Mondays. "Has anyone seen Boomer yet? I need him to sign off on the order he placed Friday. My dad was curious about whether we really needed another thirty cases of TNT and a shit ton of detonators."

Simon "Boomer" Chiarelli chose that moment to make his appearance. "Seriously? Can anyone ever really have too much explosives on hand? But sure, I can sign off on it. We were running low, and they're having a sale, so it was a no-brainer. Totes legit purchase, baby bossboy."

He set a large Tupperware on the table and held up a warning finger. "Mama Chiarelli sent these for you boys, but make sure you save some for Papa Perkins. Papa P loves Mama's rainbow cookies."

"Screw my damn papa, his ass can find his own. Now pass me one of those bad boys." I leaned forward with a grin. Mama Chiarelli made the best food—this was a universally known fact.

A hand came out of nowhere and smacked me upside the head. "Mind your tongue son, don't joke about your papa that way," my father's voice growled from behind me.

"Sorry, Dad. I... uh... didn't hear you guys come in." I looked up to see my two dads had come in the door behind me. Dad was glowering down at me while Papa's eyes were twinkling at my gaffe.

"Obviously," Papa laughed as he pushed Dad aside and bent to kiss my cheek. "Just for that, you can't have one until I've had two... or three."

"Am I late? Did I miss anything? I had to stop for gas. The prices went up again, can you believe that shit?" Levi bitched. He took a seat, immediately reaching into the Tupperware for a cookie. "I swear, bossman. You're gonna have to give me a raise just so I can afford to fill my car with more than a quarter of a tank at a time."

My dad raised a brow as he held out a chair for Papa. "Levi, if you're running at under half a tank, you don't deserve a raise. Any idiot knows you're burning more fuel when you let it get under half a tank. Fill it up, you'll get better mileage."

Papa poured himself some coffee and delicately placed a cookie on a napkin before turning a soft smile around the table at everyone. "Did you boys behave yourselves this weekend? Or do I need to get out the hangover cure? A little milk thistle, vitamin B complex, and magnesium will fix all that ails you. Oh, and a touch of vitamin C. I have some mixed up from the last party—it's in my office. I imagine you'll be needing some, Ezra? Or is this just your new Joe Cool look?"

Ezra blushed as he took off his sunglasses, squinting at the light in the room. "I'm good, Papa P. But, umm... yeah. Some of that cure might be a good idea if I have to do any serious work today."

Dad shook his head as he took his own seat and set a neat stack of folders on the table. "Serious work like... thinking? Let me guess, frat boys again?"

"Right on the money, Dad, as usual." I grinned as Ezra squirmed under Dad's knowing gaze. My dad ran a tight ship, but he was also the first to encourage us into making the most of our downtime.

"At least Ezra didn't spend his weekend here in the office playing with rim oil and cramming his rod down a long, tight metal shaft." Zeke grinned as he sniffed the air.

"Rem oil, not rim oil," Boomer corrected absently as he looked over the expense report my dad had slid over for him to sign.

"Rem, rim... potato, po-tah-to." Zeke shrugged. "My point is that our boy Noah would rather sit here in the office cleaning guns all weekend than go out and find a softer rim to lubricate."

Papa curled his lip and shot Zeke a reproving look. "Okay, dial it down a notch, sweetie. Parents don't need to think about that type of thing, even if their children are old enough to have already been thinking of giving us grandchildren long ago."

"Yeah, I don't see that happening, Papa P. Not unless we can pry baby bossman out of here once in awhile and take him out to where he could actually, I dunno... meet people?" Ezra was looking slightly more human as he started on his second cup of coffee.

"I get out," I groused. "But we've had back to back missions lately, and the guns needed cleaning. As team leader, it was my job to either do it or delegate it. I decided to let you boys go out and play while the adult alpha stayed behind to get shit done."

"Keep telling yourself that, dear." Papa patted my hand. "But next time, maybe open a window? Honestly, Noah! You could have asphyxiated yourself on these fumes. If it's this bad now, I can only imagine how bad it was while you were working."

"Nah, I spilled the oil when I was putting everything away. I cleaned it up, but I left the rags in the wastebasket. I meant to take it out before I left, but I must have forgotten. That's what the smell is," I explained. Plus, with our shifter noses, every smell was a hundred times more intense.

"Likely story." Ezra winked. "I bet you did that to cover up the smell of your spunk. Don't lie. You were totally jerking it while you were here alone with all those guns. You know handling that much hardware turned you on."

Papa turned to me with a teasing glint in his eye and started humming Another Saturday Night and I Ain’t Got Nobody. Naturally Dad had to pick up on it. I groaned when he started singing along under his breath.

After he’d toyed with me enough, Dad cleared his throat with a barely contained smile as he passed folders out to each of us. "Okay, boys. Let's get down to business. A call came in this morning about a kidnapping. He's the son of a prominent senator, and the feebs are already all over the case, which means we need to work double time to find him first."

"Obviously since we've been called in, this is because he's a shifter?" I asked as I looked at the picture of a pretty little party boy. "Omega, I'm guessing?"

"Aren't all the pretty ones?" Jonah sighed, already tapping away on his tablet. "So what's the deal, bossman? We don't want the feds to know he's a shifter, sure. That would kill the good senator's career given how kindly the general public takes to us filthy shifter types. But do the kidnappers even know that part?"

"They do." Dad pointedly turned to the second page in the file and tapped it. "Preston Tierney, age twenty-two. He's a known party boy, and pretty much appears to do whatever he pleases. He slipped his security detail and was last seen entering one of those wild full-moon parties on a yacht that set sail just after midnight. Nobody wants to admit to having been on board, naturally. The best friend, a Tio Ramirez, has been screaming foul since early Saturday morning when he couldn't find the victim."

"Did the little shit maybe just get too high, or drunk, and fall overboard?" Ezra asked bluntly, then shrugged at our gaping expressions. "What? It happens."

"That was the going theory, until his father got a ransom call at oh-five hundred this morning." Dad turned another page, his grimace telling me before I read my own copy that things were bad. "The kidnappers have set the ransom at five million in bitcoin within forty-eight hours. But here's the kicker, if the bitcoin doesn't hit their account by that time, they will release a photo every hour to the media. There are a series of scandalous photos from the victim's phone, which they were kind enough to text the senator as proof, if you'll look on the next page."

"Holy shit, Dad!" I exclaimed. "The pic of him snorting coke off another omega's ass is bad enough, but there were several of him mid-shift, and a couple fully shifted. That would ruin the senator if it got out."

"And now you know why we've been called in, son." Dad nodded gravely. "We need to protect the senator's secret by finding the kid and the phone before the feebs do. Even our plants in the Bureau won't be able to stop the level of shit-storm that would bring from raining down if they were to find out. I haven’t shown you the best part—there’s a video.”

Papa tapped a button on his tablet, and turned it for us all to see. There was a clear video of the omega in question being held in a cage and shifting. The kid looked all kinds of fucked up when he looked right at the camera. We all winced when he touched the bars of the cage and jerked back. Fuck… was that shit electrified or silver coated? Either way, these assholes meant business.

"Just finding the phone might not be enough, sir. We'll need to trace this shit and find the people behind it. I guarantee you they'll have made copies. This is too big for them not to have done that. I mean, this is blackmail. They have the senator by the balls, I don't see them walking away after the five million." Jonah's fingers were tapping rapidly on his screen as he spoke. "I'll get my guy on this, sir. We'll do what we can on the tech end while the team handles the hostage retrieval."

"Sounds like a plan." My chair scraped against the tile floor as I stood. "But first, we have to find where they've taken him."