I needed to get the fuck out of here. The lies were hardly strong enough to hold water with how many holes were in them, much less justify my association with Frank as nothing more than an employee. The vibe between Frank’s driver and the Riot members who pulled him over was not exactlyfriendly. It felt like more of an uneasy truce. And Lorelai didn’t seem like a woman who honored those kinds of truces.
She eyed me up and down, the slow perusal of her sparking green eyes making me nervous. “You a shifter?”
I bristled at the question. It was poor taste to ask if someone was a shifter outright, or what their primal was. The audacity of this woman baffled me.
“That’s not your business, is it?”
“It is when I’m standing among the dead bodies of other shifters, and you’re the only one who stayed behind to fight back. Which, by the way, fuck you for keeping a switchblade when that was supposed to be checked at the door.” Lorelai scowled, narrowing her eyes at what I hoped was a blank expression on my face. She had shifted her helmet to grip the edge in one hand. “So, let me ask again for a third feckin' time. Who the fuck are you, and why shouldn’t I put a bullet in your head?”
My brow pulled low, and I scowled right back at her. My mouth opened to retort, when one of the other bartenders came up to her side and nudged her with his elbow. She turned to address him, but kept her eye on me until the last possible moment before facing him. “Cops are here,” he pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “I figured you’d want to talk with them. A detective is here, too.”
“Of course he is,” she grumbled. “Make sure Grant here finds the exit without gettin’ lost. We’ll be in touch.”
Lorelai turned on a heel and made her way to the front of the club, where a group of three uniformed men stood by the entrance with Taylor. The crime scene crew trickled in behind them with their cases and fanned out to start collecting evidence. Rattled by the whole experience, it wasn’t until I stepped through the emergency exit, shoes crunching against the loose gravel, that I realized something that chilled me to the bone.
Not once in that whole interaction did I mention my name. So, how the hell did Lorelai know it?
I could feel the walls closing in. Thanks to that shootout at the Masked Merrow and my own stupidity in staying behind, I had unwanted eyes on every move I made. I’m almost positive someone tailed the cab I took home last night. The roar of a bike flew past the car when I paid the driver and stepped out, and that’s when I realized my mistake. In my stupor, I didn’t even think to have the taxi drop me off somewhere else and take an alternate route back to the condo. The Riot wasn’t exactly being subtle about it, either. Even at the little cafe down the street from the condo, a man had his red helmet with the prominent mob logo sitting right on his table when I went in to order a muffin this morning, his coffee untouched as he stared me down. I cursed myself for not being more careful of my actual surroundings, as opposed to my digital footprint. I wasn’t used to being on surveillance in the real world. The whole rest of the day I spent hunkered in my office, jumping at every noise I could pick up from the hallway outside my front door, and frantically searching for any sliver of information I could find on how to contact Red Riot's boss. I'm positive security on the club would be even tighter now. There was no guarantee they would even let me in again, given my presence coinciding with the shooting.
There was something unsettling about that woman, Lorelai, that had my skin crawling, too, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. She was obviously a fox shifter, as far as I could tell from her scent. Usually, we lived in small family units and were extremely territorial, which gave me the feeling she was more connected to the Red Riot pack than I initially anticipated. It wasn’t like I’d met many people since I’d arrived in Vegas, beyond Frank and the members of Red Riot in the club. Mindlessly, I picked at the loose skin on my left thumb while considering the few facts I had.
Could I have found a whole community of fox shifters in Vegas? The prospect had me excited in a way I couldn’t fullyexplain. I had been on my own for so long that the solitude became normal for me. My parents had died when I was too young to find a community of fox shifters on my own, and I was brought up by a wolf pack that roamed the northwestern states until I learned my way around computers enough to fend for myself.
The only lead I had was the camgirl website. The one Frank had shown me earlier this week, with the woman who supposedly resided in Vegas. If she engaged in any kind of sex work in the city, the Riot was bound to know about it. I could possibly find her real identity if I was able to get into her profile from the back end. Surely there was banking and wire transfer information I could use to track her down.
It took a ridiculously long time—and several programs—to finally hack into the back end of Vixen’s camgirl site. And when I finally made it in, I immediately regretted it.
“Shit, shit, shit!” I chanted, clicking through several windows and trying to adjust the coding fast enough to block the programs bombarding my system. I was trying desperately to cover my entry without getting hacked in return. A sweat broke across my forehead, eyes unblinking as they flitted across the three screens running counter programs. I was the fox being hunted by the hound, bouncing through the multiple VPNs, hiding my location like I was darting from bush to bush in a forest. The brush of teeth was almost closing around my nape when the firewall I triggered finally slammed between us. The next few seconds were tense, my breath caught in my throat as I ran the comprehensive scan for any sign my system was infiltrated. It was a tense few minutes, to say the least. When the window popped up showing everything was secured, my body melted into the office chair in relief. “Shit,” I muttered again, running my hands through my wavy hair and making it even messier.
I was in.
The system hidden behind the veil of the camming business was… elaborate. More sophisticated than I had expected, but not inherently destructive. Combing through the lines of code, it looked like anyone who registered on the site was put into a catalog that was automatically run through several website trackers. Again, nothing that raised any alarms. That was until I checked what the sites were… Then my blood ran cold.
They were tracking hits ondark websites. Even Andrea’s landing page for his black market auctions was in that incriminating list, along with a couple of others I recognized on sight as prominent servers for illegal porn. The kind that catered to very… dark tastes. How did the site owner even have knowledge on all these websites if they weren’t deep in the dark web themselves? There was no way a single person was tracking this much user activity outside the site.
This was… diabolical.
Whoever designed this backend was able to see if anyone logged into the other websites, and used the IP addresses not hidden with VPNs to pinpoint where the site was being accessed from and when. They would have already had enough information between the user’s name and email address—hopefully fake, if these people had common sense registering for a site like this—to be able to send emails under the guise of the cam services and easily plant trojan viruses. Just this list of bad actors in the hands of the FBI would be incriminating for anyone on it.
Someone could use this as blackmail.
The whole website was a fucking trap just waiting for dark web users to stumble in. The website’s name,Preyto Play, suddenly made a lot more sense. Skimming through the immense amount of data, one name in particular happened to catch my eye. And it made me want to throw the laptop against the wall.
“Fucking Frank!”
It was a no-brainer to assume, with his association with Andrea and the Lupi Salvaggi, that Frank DeNiro would also be up to his ass in the dark web. What I wasn’t expecting was for him to not even use a basic VPN to hide the fact that he was logging in from Vegas. Part of me wanted to wash my hands of the perverted dumbass. The other part of me wondered if Andrea was subtly trying to have me killed by Frank’s reckless actions. How that old bastard managed to stay alive the three years since he’d moved here seemed like more of a miracle with every day I had to interact with Frank. And now I had to figure out how to get the idiot’s information scrubbed from this database without getting caught myself.
It could already be too late for that.
Heart pounding like a drum in my chest, I tried to back out of the website without triggering any alarms. Sweat was pouring down my temples by the time I managed to navigate my way to safety, and I slammed the laptop shut. Yanking the cords connecting it to the screens without care, I dropped it into my backpack on the floor with a solidthudthat I’d be concerned about any other time my fake-boss’s life wasn’t being threatened.
I almost made it out the door without my gun and holster. “Shit!” Doubling back to the coat closet in the entryway, I yanked it open and pulled on the shoulder holster with jerking movements and a black jacket to hide the weapon, rushing back out the door with barely enough time to bend and snag the backpack up from where I’d dropped it.
It may already be too late for Frank, but I had to at least make an effort to save him if I didn’t want to be hunted down by Andrea. I only hoped I was early enough to not find his corpse.
Hostage
Lore
