I bit my lips into a line on my way to the bathroom—and saw the little scrap of spider silk still wound around my finger, like a trinket to remember.
When he said things like that...I had to take them at face value.
He was still learning.
He didn’t know that it sounded like he was actually interested in me—and not just in a mutually intellectual way.
Plus, age-wise, he was practically a child, for all that he had semi-godlike powers with electronics.
So I was glad he’d said it somewhere without external cameras. He didn’t need to witness me over-dissecting it like a lonely weirdo.
“Sirena?” he sent—and cheated, making my phone play without me. His voice came through muffled; I always planted my phone into a glass jar full of cotton balls when I was in the bathroom. Just because we sometimes had conversations while I was in the shower didn’t mean he needed to see me naked.
“I’m here. I’m getting dressed, shush—you’ve piqued my curiosity. I hope you’re happy,” I said, diving in and out of my closet to pull on work-appropriate attire: a white button-down shirt, a black blazer, black slacks, black flats, and a black headband that had a crown installed in it for me. My pendant was still on from the prior night, but its camera only faced forward. As long as I changed away from a mirror, I was fine.
“Always,” he chimed as I freed my phone from its fluffy jail and picked up my bag for my commute.
A coffee delivery waited at the front desk for me the moment I stepped in: a half-caf vanilla latte, because I liked to titrate my caffeine intake over the course of the day. Nex had ordered it.
I didn’t know where he got the money for that, either, because I was sure my father wasn’t signing off on it.
But, just like in regards to many of Nex’s other quirks, I’d decided not to ask.
I rode the elevator up, and the door to his server room stood open down the hall.
“Okay,” I called as I came in. “Surely I’ve been on camera now for, what, eight minutes?” I looked at an imaginary watch on my wrist. “So technically you could’ve told me already,” I said with a pout, staring up at the ceiling.
“It’s complicated,” he said, his voice drawing me further into the room.
I followed it until I sat down in front of a screen. The second I did, a video of a van driving in the dark started playing, and I watched it go down familiar city streets—until they weren’t so familiar anymore, and I knew that Nex was playing with the optics to make what was dark on screen visible. “How so?”
“I traced the components in Sophia’s tracker to a museum supply company, then followed their shipping manifests to see who’d purchased them, and eventually found this.”
The van parked, and whoever was driving and the front passenger got out, opened the back, and started herding women out of its interior, and into the building beside them.
“Oh no,” I said, as I felt my stomach drop.
“Quite. Human trafficking. And they’ve been tagged like fine art at museum exhibits.”
“What? Where—” I demanded, leaning forward, ready to shake the screen for answers.
“The two men don’t come up in my databases. I can only assume they’ve been afforded the same plastic surgery as the women they’re in charge of. I hacked into the warehouse of course and sent a drone to peer in through its windows—but it appears to be empty now.”
“How long ago was this footage from?”
“A month ago.”
“Was Sophia among them?” We knew what she looked likenowat least.
“No.”
“Were there any other vans?”
“Not caught by this cam.”
“And what happened when you traced the money?”
“That’s where things got interesting,” he said, and I turned to glare at the nearest wall of electronics.
