REESE

chapter thirty two.

Reese POV:

"You have got to be kidding me."

I pulled my tired eyes away from the laptop screen in front of me just as an angry voice boomed from the conference room doorway. I looked up to see my father, Stephen, Carver, Alex, Gavino, Max, and Rocco all look up from their own screens and halt their conversations just as Natalie Rutherford stormed into the packed conference room and turned her sharp glare onto her husband.

"Natali-"

"No." The English Donna raised her hand, effectively cutting her husband off. She then turned her stern expression towards the English security technicians who were sitting in their seats rigidly, watching the tense interaction between their leaders take place before them.

"Everyone is dismissed." Natalie commanded.

The simple command was enough for every technician to instantly stand up and start making their way to exit the room.

"No." I turned my gaze over to Stephen who was looking at his technicians irritably. "Sit back down and resume your work."

The weary technicians once again made their way to their seats.

A sharp inhale came from the English Donna. "I will not repeat myself again." Her cold voice focused on Stephen as the tension grew thick in the air. "Everyone is dismissed."

The now scared technicians slowly stood up once again. The room was utterly silent as Stephen and Natalie's intense, hostile glares slammed into one another. It was only when the doors slowly clicked shut, indicating that all the security technicians had left, Stephen moved to speak. He looked at his wife in equal amounts of anger and incredulity.

"Natalie." He gritted out. "We need them to work."

The Donna scoffed. "They have been working, you have kept them in the same room, looking at the same files, and at the same screens for over forty-eight bloody hours. Don't tell me you need them to work, I know exactly what you need and don't need them to do, Stephen."

I looked over at my dad and the Di Genovas to see them awkwardly standing in place. Carver was watching his parents argue with a stoic, unchanging expression on his face, but I could see the tightness in his shoulders. No one wanted to interrupt the impending argument by moving, but we also didn't want to intrude on a couples quarrel.

"What do you want me to do, Nat?" Stephen sighed tiredly. "It's not like we are forcing them to work while we all go on fucking vacation." He gestured to all of us standing around him. "All of us have been here, working. We haven't left the room either, everyone is pulling their own weight."

Stephen was right. It had been a long forty-eight hours since Morrison's interrogation. Forty-eight hours of rerouting all of our weapons and narcotics shipments and transports, forty-eight hours of emptying out every warehouse in the United States, England and Italy that Morrison knew the location to, and forty-eight hours of tracking every single movement the French mafia family had made since we had last seen them at the Ball. The Baudelaires were dead men walking, we just needed to pinpoint their location.

War was coming, it was just a matter of how soon, and who would make the first move.

"That's exactly the problem." Natalie retorted. She then turned her gaze onto the rest of us. "Have any of you looked in the mirror? Red eyes, tired faces, crinkled clothes, you all look like hell." She shook her head. "You haven't slept in two days, you haven't gone outside, when was the last time any of you ate?"

Her question was met with silence. Natalie scoffed at the silent response and turned her attention towards Carver and I. Her gaze turned even more angry as she took in our unruly states. "I am not even going to ask why you two have blood splattered all over your clothes but Carver, Reese, I swear to God if you two don't go home and go to sleep I will personally make it so that the both of you won't see the light of day for the next month." She warned harshly. "I may not be able to control the grown men in the room but what I can do is control the both of you. Frankly, I couldn't give half a shit about your titles. You may be the heirs, but at the end of the day you are eighteen and nineteen years old. You are still kids to me."