“Poor Imani,” he said. “This is…”
He didn’t know what it was.
“Wow.” He turned his hand over so he could lace fingers with Dewi. “This is alot.” With his free hand, he mimed an explosion. “Mind blown.” And…it was.
But it led him to another question. “If Mom was the daughter of two shifters, why didn’t she fight back? Why was that fucker able to kill her?”
“She very well might not have been a shifter,” Dewi gently said. “We don’t know.”
“And we never will,” he bitterly said.
“I’m sorry.”
He gave himself a moment to breathe. “It’s not your fault, Dewi. It’s just… Stuff I need to process.”
And considering what he’d been in the middle of doing when they’d asked if he had time, he really didn’t have the available brain cells to devote to…this.
Theonlyreason he’d stopped to talk with them was he didn’t want them thinking what he was doing was so important that he couldn’t take a break.
“I know this is a stupid question,” she said, “but is there anything I can do for you right now?”
He nodded. “Actually, yeah.” He squeezed her hand. “Let’s call it a day, take showers, dress up, and go out to eat somewhere nice.”
“What?”
Ken didn’t want to give in to the nagging fear trying to tug at him, because he dang sure didn’t want Dewi trying to dig in and figure it out. “I want a date night with my beautiful wife. A normal, boring dinner made by normal, boring people.”
One eyebrow arched and he loved when she did that. “Boring dinner?”
“You know what I mean. Not the food is boring. I mean no distractions. No psychotic shifters, no surprise-cousin shifters, and no secret-baby shifters. Just you and me. Let’s call it an early birthday dinner.”
“Hmm. Where’d you have in mind?”
“Anywhere you want. Birthday girl’s choice.”
“You don’t think it’s too early to have dinner?”
“We’ll beat the rush.”
She smiled. “Okay. Meet you in the shower?”
“You go ahead and get yours first. I need to wrap up something first. I need about twenty minutes.”
She kissed him and headed out of the office. Ken waited until he heard her on the stairs before leaving the office and returning to the pool house.
He opened his laptop and logged in.
There, in the window, was the live feed from the remote laptop, everything being saved to a file in the cloud. He pulled the first batch of data, saved it to another file, and then ran it through the script he’d created to organize it.
Which left him a text file of readable information, including…
He breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t enjoy doing stuff like this even though he knew it was necessary. More grey hat than black hat, in this case.
He pulled up his e-mail and copy/pasted the login url, username, and password into it, then sent it to Gillian.
Grabbing his work phone, he texted her.
Incoming e-mail. Let me know.
