A killer walking among us.
The authorities realising that Alexa Stone and Alexandria Rockwell were one and the same person.
The day before Child Protective Services came to take me away, I broke down in his arms, a first for me. Not the breaking-down part—I’d done that plenty of times before, always alone, and always quietly. But he’d never hugged me that way, and I’d never kissed him. Oh, I’d thought about doing it. Dreamed about it. But not once had those dreams ended with him pushing me away and telling me it couldn’t possibly work.
In the end, it was Dawson Masters who’d come through. My first night in a foster home, I’d called him in the early hours, begged him to pick me up. I think he knew I’d run anyway, and he figured driving me to the bus station was better than letting me walk there in the dark. Except I hadn’t taken a bus cross-country as everyone assumed. No, I’d headed to the airport, chartered a private jet, and flown to Italy on a passport I’d bought from a guy on the dark web. My roommates knew I was making a little money by then, but they had no idea quite how big my bank balance had grown. Except for Jez. Jez saw too much, heard too much, and knew too much, which was how she’d found me yet again, this time in Paris.
“I’m not going to the US.”
“So you’re going to let Nolan down?”
“I’ll mail him a new laptop.”
“It isn’t the hardware that’s the issue. The issue is that he had a decade’s worth of accounting records and his entire CRM database on the hard drive.”
“So can’t he just restore from the backup?”
Jez looked at me, and I looked at Jez.
“Tell me Nolan has a backup.”
Silence. Of course Nolan didn’t have a backup. Nolan was kind, patient, great with his hands, and shit with computers.
“Okay, fine. Tell him I’ll send the laptop plus a technician to transfer the data.”
That damn smirk came back. “Won’t work.”
“Why not? Did he accidentally run it through a wood chipper?”
I mean, anything was possible with Nolan. He’d managed to drop his phone into a blender once.
“No, he accidentally clicked on a phishing link, and ransomware disappeared the data before he panicked and pulled the battery.”
I groaned out loud.
“What type of ransomware? Are we talking about encryption or just a locker?”
“That’s what you’re going to find out.”
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
“I’ll send a cybersecurity expert from Astela.”
“Oh yeah?” Jez leaned in closer, and her grin widened. “What if they fuck it up?”
“They won’t. Jay and I only hire the best.”
But they weren’t infallible. If we were talking about a Fortune 500 company instead of Nolan, I wouldn’t hesitate to send a member of the team, but what if he’d stumbled across one of the new ransomware variants? Some of those were nasty. Or worse, what if a colleague got curious about why they’d been banished to a remote vineyard to fix a single laptop instead of their usual corporate gigs? I said “the team” as if they knew me, but they didn’t, not really, and that was the way I wanted it to stay. Yes, I was Astela’s majority shareholder, and yes, I had the final say in any significant decisions, but I rarely interacted with the staff in person. Most people outside of the board and my close-knit tech team assumed Alex Scoria was a man. On the rare occasions I went into the office, I was Lexi Craggs, a mid-level developer who mostly worked from home.
“You keep telling me you’re the best,” Jez said. “And you’re also a control freak, so…”
That part was probably true, although it had taken me half a lifetime and a long, liquor-fuelled conversation with a Thai therapist to work that out. Okay, a bartender. He was a Thai bartender. But he had a psychology degree, allegedly, and he told me I craved power over everything around me to make up for the helplessness I’d felt as a child. And he might have had more insights, but I’d puked in an ice bucket and then Chase carried me back to our hotel suite, so I never got to hear them.
“You can’t make me go to California.”
“Actually, I can.”
