“No,” he interrupted again, his entire body tense. He placed his hand on the folder. “Every new contact puts me and my family at more risk.”
Shit. “Okay, okay. I understand.” Emma nodded and smiled, trying to ease his agitation. It looked like she was going to Switzerland. It was on these rare occasions that she appreciated having learned German from her grandparents. Usually she just wished her Spanish was better. “I’ll find a way to be there.”
Apparently mollified, he agreed to contact her the next day. She handed over a prepaid phone programmed with the number of the burner she’d be using. After he left the diner, she paid the bill and tapped out a message to her team on the way to her car.
Checking in before and after a meetup was their nonnegotiable safety rule.
Thanks to heavy traffic on the 110, even with her FasTrak pass she didn’t reach Hermosa Beach’s tiny downtown district by the water for nearly an hour. She parked behind a two-story brick building sandwiched between a Mexican diner and a tattoo parlor.
On the street-facing side, the building displayed a mural by a local artist with “Night Heron Used Books” in script font above a black-crowned night heron perched on a pier made of paperbacks. Only a small plaque near the door alerted the public that this was also home to The Parker Foundation, a legitimate nonprofit that funded organizations working to support and protect women.
The Foundation was also the perfect cover for a team that stepped in when the justice system failed—as it so often did when money and power were involved.
Inside, the now-closed bookstore was cozy and charming with exposed brick walls and wooden trusses. Under dim light, hidden from the large front windows by tall shelves, Emma strode past plush chairs, potted plants, and colorful stacks of books, inhaling the pleasant scent of paper and binding glue that always soothed her nerves.
The slap of her flats against the polished concrete floors echoed as she entered a narrow hallway and beelined for the unisex one-hole restroom, where she removed her wig, fluffed her hair, and relieved herself.
Back in the hall, she stopped before a shelf of markdowns and damaged books at the end of the hall, dropped her cell phones into what looked like a mail slot, pressed her palm against a benign-looking wall panel, and swung the shelf toward her on well-oiled hinges. Sensing movement, a light flickered on as she closed the shelf-door behind her and ascended a set of stairs to a vault-like room that had been built for absolute privacy.
Electronic signals couldn’t penetrate or escape. No one could eavesdrop from outside the building or transmit wirelessly from inside the room, even if they were somehow able to bug it.
When she entered the white-walled room, a woman and two men were already sitting around an oval table with a triangular phone at its center. The air in the windowless cube smelled like warm corn tortillas. Emma’s stomach growled, and she realized it was after eight and she hadn’t eaten since lunch.
“Hey.” Her closest friend on the team, Natalie, smiled broadly. “Dallas brought food, but not enough to share.” The blonde pouted playfully and nudged the white guy in his mid-twenties who was busy stuffing the last third of a fried taco into his mouth.
Color washed his cheeks as he flipped sandy-colored hair out of his eyes and frowned. “I didn’t know you’d want any.”
“For future reference, I always want food.” Nat took in his serious expression and laughed. “God, Dal, relax. I’m teasing. Not about food, mind you, but about you needing to share.”
He nodded stiffly and wiped his mouth and fingers with a paper napkin before tossing the remnants of his hasty dinner in the trash can.
“Any idea when Gretchen will be here?” Emma asked the room as she slid into the open seat between Nat and the team’s forensic accountant, Nolan.
The Asian man looked sharp as always in a slim-cut black suit, his white shirt open at the collar. He could’ve stepped right out of a billboard for men’s cologne or something. “Should be any minute. Do you know what you’ve got?”
“Not yet. I came straight here.” Emma said. “Unfortunately, Viktor’s text pulled me away from a Fisswert Games engineer.”
“Ash and Hailey are still working their angle at Fisswert,” Nolan said. “Your guy bite?”
“Yes.” Emma frowned. “And every time we do this, I feel bad about it.” She looked down at her pale hands on the dark wood tabletop. Given that most of them were part of The Parker Foundation because their privacy had been horribly invaded, it was ironic and unfortunate that they often had to use the same intrusive techniques to bring down these assholes.
Dallas nodded. “Me too, but I’ll delete the spyware as soon as we have what we need on his boss. It’ll be gone even sooner if he updates his phone’s OS.”
Nat slung an arm over Emma’s shoulder. “At least you know we’ll take care with his data. And it’ll be worth it to bring down Stuart Rader. That man is vile,” she said of the Fisswert Games CEO.
“I know.” The monster apparently had a rampant appetite for underage girls, but so far he’d evaded any legal or professional repercussions. He was discreet—and good at making witnesses disappear—but Emma’s team would dog him as long as it took. “We’ll get him.”
Gretchen Hawthorne strode into the room, her face unreadable as she locked the vault door. She was a tall, striking Black woman with gray-streaked curls pulled back from her face into a pouf, and a brisk demeanor that hid a kind heart and tenacious intellect.
Three years ago, everyone on the team—except Nolan—had bonded through shared trauma and a gnawing sense of disorientation after triumphing over Remy Blaze, founder of a revenge-porn site. Or maybetriumphingwasn’t the right word. How could it truly be a win when naked images of them, and thousands of others, taken without their permission, would forever be on the Internet, linked to their names, accessible to anyone who went looking?
Remyhadbeen punished, stripped of his freedom, his ill-gotten wealth, and most importantly, his platform. But his victims had faced a crisis of how to move forward. After years of humiliation, fighting to be taken seriously, and legal maneuvering, some of them losing their families and jobs in the process, what did “getting back to normal” look like?
Gretchen—who’d created a safe space here at her bookstore for the Los Angeles contingent to gather while working tirelessly to destroy Blaze’s empire—had a plan.
Her core idea was a nonprofit funded by a portion of their settlement money that would support organizations helping victims of abuse, trafficking, exploitation, and other underfunded causes geared largely toward women and marginalized communities. It would be named in honor of her daughter Parker, who’d been attacked and killed by one of Remy Blaze’s depraved fans.
But Gretchen wanted more than the foundation. Over the course of an evening, while they all sank deeper into the cozy armchairs at the center of the shop, she slowly fed them the rest of her vision, easing them into it while her wife topped up their drinks. She needn’t have bothered with the gentle approach. Every one of them was on board, no hesitation.
