Page 50 of Happily Ever After

“Okay,” Maude said. “And I’ll do the same.”

“Talk to you soon.” With that, Cece was out the door.

Maude stood there, mind going a thousand miles an hour. She glanced at the time again. She had enough to spare.

She moved to her desk with purpose, crossing the living room and opening her laptop. The screen came to life as she slipped into the chair, already mentally making a list of what could wait and what couldn’t.

This couldn’t.

She opened a new document first. Just a blank page with no title yet. A place to make some notes and a spot to put things when they started to line up.

Then she opened a browser. She logged into a handful of accounts she rarely used anymore—the ones she kept for a certain kind of research. For moments exactly like this. Public records. Archived pages. Old filings most people didn’t know how to find, let alone think to look for.

Maude typed Darcy’s full name into the search bar and paused.

“Let’s see who you really are,” she murmured.

She didn’t expect anything instantly. That wasn’t how these things worked, and she’d previously done some of these searches.

What she was looking for now was repetition. Gaps. Sudden endings. Organizations that no longer existed. Websites that had gone dark without explanation.

Patterns.

There was a lot to be learned from patterns. You just had to know where to look and how to find them.

She queued searches to run in the background, links opening in new tabs, each one a thread she’d come back to later. She made a few quick notes in the document—dates, names, places to revisit—then saved it under a neutral filename that wouldn’t draw attention.

Not that anyone would be looking, but if she was going to play hacker, she was going to do it right.

Outside, a car passed. Somewhere nearby, a voice called out in greeting and was quickly answered by another. Ordinary sounds. Ordinary morning.

At least until Cece had dropped by.

Maude closed the laptop and stood, grabbing her volunteer badge and slipping it into her bag. This was the groundwork. The real work would start when she got home. It might be a long night, but maybe she’d run a few Nightforge raids while she was up.

“See you later, Pixel.”

She had a feeling there would be all sorts of interesting information waiting on her by the time she got back.

She turned off the light, locked the door behind her, and headed for the hospital—calm, composed, already feeling several steps ahead.

Darcy Lane should have left the Bees alone.

Now, there was a good chance she was going to get stung.

Chapter Twenty-One

Paige didn’t turn the radio on during the drive home. She had too much on her mind to pay attention to music.

She pulled into her driveway still keyed up, the image of Darcy’s hard stare and malevolent expression replaying over and over in her head. How dare that woman threaten them? Who did she think she was?

Paige fumed. The threat had been carefully worded, obviously made vague enough so that Darcy could deny it later, if need be. But Darcy had made one thing clear.

She wasn’t done with Paige or the Queen Bees.

Once inside, Paige toed off her sneakers by the door and stood there, hands on her hips, letting the frustration crest and break instead of shoving it down. That never worked for her anymore. She’d learned it was far better to actually feel things than to pretend those feelings didn’t exist.

She showered quickly, the hot water beating against her shoulders, washing away sweat but not the tightness in her mood. By the time she changed into a clean pair of jeans and a soft, drapey top, dried her hair and fixed her makeup, her anger had cooled into something sharper.