Wyatt glares at Kyle. “My mom’s on disability. You know that. I can’t take the chance of this guy”—he jerks his chin at Alec—“screwing with her. Taking her money. Getting her kicked out of her apartment.”
With a pleading look at Alec, Wyatt asks, “You’ll leave her alone? If I tell you everything? She’s not involved in any of this. I swear.”
An unreadable expression moves across Alec’sface. After a few seconds, he replies, “I’ll leave her alone. But only if you keep talking. And don’t leave anything out.”
Despite the obvious anger in Alec’s eyes, I know he would never hurt an innocent woman.
But Wyatt doesn’t know that. So he tells Alec everything—how he hacked into the servers to access my account and used my credit card data to find my true identity. How he was able to search through the in-game chat archives to discover who I talked to the most and use that information to determine who they’d use as leverage to intimidate me. How he found out the exact car I drove, where I worked, even the grocery store I shop at; all from the account I naively assumed was safe.
“Why?” Alec asks once Wyatt finishes talking. “Why Hazel?”
Ronan steps forward. “And what about the missing women?” He spins his knife idly before tossing it into the air and catching it. “We know you had something to do with it. Don’t lie and tell us you didn’t.”
The three men flash worried glances at each other.
“Tell us!” Ronan roars. He lunges at Owen and holds the knife to his throat. “What. Did. You. Do. To. Those. Women?”
Ronan’s reaction is so unexpected, I let out a startled yelp.
Alec glances at me. His lips compress into a thin line. Though he doesn’t say anything, I can read the message in his eyes.
Are you okay? Do you need to leave?
I mouth back at him,I’m okay.
Sort of.
But I don’t want to leave. Not when we’re about to hear the rest of it.
And the truth.
It’s so much more horrifying than I ever imagined.
My game—my haven, my escape—was being used as a method of trafficking women.
“We got the idea when Kyle met up with a chick from the game,” Owen admits. “She flew all the way from Arkansas to Vermont to meet him. Just let him pick her up at the airport and take her to his apartment. She didn’t know Kyle, not really. Just what he told her in-game. He could have been a serial killer for all she knew.”
“Did you kill her?” Alec growls. “Decide to test out your theory on her?”
“No, I didn’t kill her,” Kyle snaps. “I hooked up with her, sent her home, and never talked to her again.”
If I believe him, which I’m not sure I do, that woman was incredibly lucky.
Because after that, their intentions grew much more sinister. Owen, Kyle, and Wyatt did someexploring on the dark web, where they discovered there was quite a market for twenty to thirty-something women. Women who could be trafficked for tens of thousands of dollars.
“Hundreds, sometimes,” Owen confesses. “We’d get photos of the women and post them on the website first. So we knew how much we could get for them. The really pretty ones, like her”—he glances at me—“are worth a couple hundred K. Easy.”
Alec looks like he’s about to explode. In a carefully controlled tone, he asks, “Then why were you trying to kill her? If you could make that much money?”
My stomach lands on the floor with a heavy clunk.
Murder or human trafficking.
Those were the two options facing me if not for Alec and his team.
That slinking voice in the back of my head muses,Maybe it’s penance. For what happened to Marissa. Maybe it’s what you deserve.
But all of Alec’s reassurances quickly follow. All his reminders that it wasn’t my fault. That the only one to blame was Jason. That I could never have known what he’d do.
