I’d been shocked as hell when Nolan casually threw the g-word out in front of Antonella, and sober me was still freaking out about it. No, I hadn’t kissed him again. I’d googled “how to move a relationship forward,” bought several self-help ebooks, and even asked anonymously on Reddit, but now I was even more confused than I had been before. One part of me wished he’d just take over and show me what to do, but the other part was grateful he’d given me the space to breathe.
“I need to review the risk register ahead of next month’s board meeting,” I said. A tedious job, but we had to stay on top of any threats and vulnerabilities that could impact our clients’ businesses or our own infrastructure. The Choir was busy shooting at things this month, so they didn’t need as much cyber support as usual. “Stay if you want.”
“I’ll get a plate. Wine?”
“Sure, why not?”
It would make this report more interesting, and I was almost finished with it in any case. And the Choir wasn’t the only thing that had gone quiet this week; the most exciting thing the security cameras had captured was two raccoons throwing down over an ear of corn outside the winery. Nobody knew where they’d found the corn.
If Chase were here, he’d have come up with a “fun” activity for us to do, probably outside, definitely unpleasant, possibly involving nature or hills or wild animals. But he was busy finding his zen in Tokyo, which meant I was free to journey around the internet rather than some bug-infested hellscape. Yesterday, I’d finally managed to access the databases of a particularly pesky defence contractor, so I deserved the wine to celebrate. And chocolate. And Nolan.
But I didn’t get any of it.
Between Nolan going to fetch wine and returning with a bottle, a message from GutterMuse dropped into my inbox. Well, not mine, exactly. It belonged to a sick fool who went by the name five_star_fuck online, but he’d been in FBI custody for the past three months, so now it belonged to me.
You are invited
1 Kepcoin
The message didn’t specify what I was invited to, but it didn’t have to. A timer ticked down from sixty minutes, and I knew if I failed to pay, a line of psychos was waiting to take my place.
Tick, tick, tick.
Bile rose in my throat.
Women had started going missing over four years ago. A twenty-year-old student in Virginia. A nineteen-year-old model in Florida. A twenty-four-year-old personal shopper in Maine. A twenty-two-year-old nail technician in Colorado. The FBI hadn’t even been involved back then, not until the eighteen-year-old daughter of a prominent Italian businessman vanished on a trip to Grand Teton National Park. Maybe she’d just gotten lost in the wilderness? At first, local cops figured that’s precisely what had happened, but then searchers found a single jewelled leather flip-flop lying on the trail, and a couple camping nearby reported hearing a scream.
Then the evidence of their fates began showing up.
Hidden deep on the dark web, first grim tableaus of rape and death, then videos. Snuff movies and torture porn changed hands for thousands on darknet markets like Amber Road, and GutterMuse produced the best. The bloodiest, the cruellest, the most sensational.
I dialled Willard “call me Will” Branning. At age fifty-four, Senior Special Agent Branning was a veteran of the FBI’s Violent Crimes Section, and also the poor schmuck who’d been tasked with leading Operation Onion after the authorities began connecting the dots. He swore the name had been picked at random when the case was merely a kidnap investigation, but the name had taken on a new meaning as more layers of horror were uncovered.
“Branning.” He sounded half asleep.
“It’s your favourite informant. There’s another one.”
“Goldarnit.” Oh, now he was awake. No matter how bad things got, Branning never cursed, and I knew he didn’t like it when I did, but I also didn’t care. “You got a picture?”
“Nothing but an invite.”
“You accepted?”
“Not yet.”
“You gonna?”
“Duh.”
“Giving those varmints money sticks in my craw.”
Understatement. “If it helps, I stole the Kepcoins from a drug dealer, so it’s not as if it costs us anything.”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, missy.”
“Less of the ‘missy.’”
He ignored the complaint. “But it still goes to a criminal.”
