"Why does he think that?" I asked, feeling the rage simmer down, finally letting me think more clearly. "Che, tell McCoy to call it off. Shit has changed," I said when he walked into the kitchen to grab a bottle of bleach from under the counter.
"How bad has it gotten?" Seeley asked, voice tense.
"Bad enough. Though they're guilty of putting a hole in you, so they weren't getting out of this anyway. Why does Arty think she was being stalked?"
"He went up to the room, saw her set up, and you know him with computers. So he asked if he could nose around. I didn't see why not. I mean, we were trying to find her. And I couldn't get in touch with you."
"It's fine, Seeley. You can apologize to Harmon when we find her. What did he find?"
"She has a virus."
"Okay..."
I knew the basic shit about computers, but when it got too complicated, I couldn't keep up. Sometimes when Arty got going, I zoned out.
"One that gave them control over the camera. Yeah, they, ah, you guys gave them an eye-full."
"I better not have given you an eye-full," I snapped. Not so much for me, but for Harmon, for the privacy that was taken from her.
"Arty turned it right off when he saw it was recorded there. But, yeah, whoever it is has been watching for a while."
"Well, who is it?" I demanded. "You had to have caught them on our video."
"Somewhat, yeah. It's... grainy. And whoever it is was wearing baggy clothes and a hat. They kept their heads down. Arty thinks he can narrow it down, track them down."
"How long?"
"I tried to ask that, and he started making a humming noise, "Seeley said, sounding a bit freaked, having the least experience with Arty compared to the rest of us. If you weren't prepared for Arty, he could freak you the hell out.
"Alright. Do you think hours or days?" I asked, feeling sick at the idea of her being in the hands of some lunatic for that long.
"I don't know. I don't think days."
"Okay," I said, looking around, seeing McCoy moving into the room, brows furrowed. "I'm heading back. See if I can motivate him."
"Okay," Seeley said, sounding relieved to have some help with the eccentric techie.
"What's going on?" McCoy asked.
"Two different issues," I told him. "Our drive-by assholes. And Harmon's stalker. Or so Arty says."
"Alright. So what's the plan?"
"I need you to stay here, make sure shit gets taken care of correctly. Make sure this shit doesn't link back to us in any way that can be proved."
"Got it," he agreed.
"Once you are satisfied, meet me back at the clubhouse. Hopefully by then, Arty will have another direction to send us in."
"Got it," he agreed, nodding. "McCoy," I called, making him turn back, brow raised.
"I appreciate you being on your game even when I'm off mine."
"That's what I'm here for," he said, shrugging, moving to head downstairs to help Remy end the rest of the guys we had rounded up.
With that, trusting my crew, I made my way out front, got on my bike, and headed back toward the clubhouse.
I made a stop along the way, loading up on a bag full of energy drinks, avoiding the side-eye from the cashier when I handed over cash with my makeshift bandaged hand.
"You need to clean that," Seeley demanded after I got back, handing Arty his drinks, watching over his shoulders, he switched through screens so fast that I felt nauseated.
"Yeah, I agreed, moving into the bathroom, pulling off the bandage, seeing a glint of glass that was still lodged in the fleshy bit between my thumb and pointer finger. "Burn this," I demanded, tossing the rag at Seeley.
By the time I cleaned up and got some butterfly bandages on my cuts, Seeley was back in the master bedroom, tossing the flashlight thing around in his hands.
"What are you thinking?"
"Just trying to remember something, anything about the attack at her house. All I have are holes."
"You have a fucking concussion, kid. No one expects you to remember what happened."
"I could have prevented all of this."
"You took a bullet and then a whack to the head over all this shit. No one is asking you for more than that. You've more than earned your badge through all this shit. We will get on that when things settle back down."
"Yeah?" he asked, brightening slightly. "It hasn't been the full two years you told me."
"Fuck formalities. Who is going to give a shit if you get in early? You can be in charge of all the whip-cracking when we get some new prospects someday."
"I don't know what-"
"Got you," Arty's voice interrupted, making my pulse jump.
"You got him?" I asked.
"Almost. I just need to trace this IP address," Arty said.
"Will that give you an address?"
"It will give me a close geolocation. Then we can narrow it down."
"How?"
"Against her closest fans," Arty said. "I have a list."
"She complained about some asshole named Patrick," I said. "Why no?" I asked when he started shaking his head.
"Patrick's real name is Jeff and he's a sixty-year-old retired librarian in Montana with a bad knee."
It was moments like this that I wondered how the hell he got the information he got as fast as he did.
I was sure it had a lot to do with not sleeping and enough caffeine to jumpstart an elephant.
"Okay," I agreed. "But you have a list?"
"Top ten most likely based on activity. Gotta narrow it down by location."
"Need anything from me?"
"To stop breathing down my neck," he suggested, making me let out a surprised laugh before I moved out of the room, heading downstairs, feeling completely fucking useless.
"What can I do?" Seeley asked.
"Get Booker on the phone and tell him I don't give a flying fuck what else he has on his schedule, that he is getting his ass over here tonight or tomorrow, and getting this place wired up."
"Word for word?" Seeley asked, lips twitching.
"Yeah, word for fucking word. Then after that, the fence people. After that, figure out what other shit we should be doing around here to make it a fortress. This shit is never fucking happening again," I told him, moving out into the backyard, pacing along the pavement around the pool, feeling completely useless as I waited for Arty to work his magic.
About half an hour later, I could hear the rumble of the bikes as the men came back, each of them going right inside to shower, tossing his clothes in the wash, then changing, and meeting me outside.
"It's done?" I asked McCoy when he moved to stand next to me as I stared down at the bottom of the pool.
"Yeah."
"You're sure?"
"Nothing for them to find to pin back to us. Once Seeley has a few, we can have him wash down the bikes, clean out the tire treads. Not that I'm worried about the cops looking that closely at this. With their connections, the cops are going to do a preliminary investigation, come up with nothing, and just let these cases go cold. No one is crying over a couple dead cartel members. Especially since the main one they're connected to just made the news a couple weeks ago for kidnapping a mayor's kids and cutting off their hands before finally killing them."
That was true. With all the crime going on in our area, no one was going to clock overtime trying to find the killers of shitheads. They probably figured whoever did them in did the world a service.
"Okay. Good."
"Hey," McCoy said, tone firm.
"Yeah?"
"You good?" he asked. "I get that you're in this. But you were bleeding all over a crime scene."
"If you're looking for an apology for something, McCoy, you are in the wrong profession."
"I don't want an apology. I want to keep my president. And my friend. I don't want to find Harmon, but have your ass carted off to jail for twenty-five-to-life. There are always risks, but you are taking unnecessary ones because you're too in this
."
"I am in this," I agreed. "But I got my head more together now. I thought we did this to her. Guilt was mixed with the worry, the anger."
"Wait... what did Arty find out?"
"That Harmon has a stalker, and that is who took her. Been spying on her through her own fucking camera."
"As if she doesn't put enough of herself out there for them," McCoy growled, being allergic to social media himself, always having been intensely private, so not understanding why someone would broadcast themselves out there for others to watch, to pick apart. "Is that better or worse?" he asked after a minute.
"I don't know. At least no one wants to hurt her because they want to get back at us. I guess the best we can hope for is some rabid fan who maybe just wants to be close to her or something."
"And when he learns she doesn't want to be close to him?" McCoy said, not trying to be full of doom and gloom, just practical.
"We have to get there before that happens," I said, shrugging. "She's not stupid. I think she'll be careful if she gets the feeling that someone doesn't immediately want to hurt her. So that can buy us some time."
"And when we get there, what is our move?"
"Depends on what we find," I said, shrugging. "He hurts her, I get to have some fun with him."
"And if he didn't hurt her?"
"I dunno. I guess that's up to her. She can have the cops deal with it, or she can have us handle it in a more permanent way."
"Huck," Seeley called through an upstairs window. "You're not going to believe this shit," he added, shaking his head.
That meant Arty had a name.
I just hoped to fuck he had an address too
I had to go get my girl.
Chapter Fourteen
Harmon
My stomach felt like it was sloshing around even though I wasn't moving. In fact, I was starting to worry I wasn't capable of moving at all. My legs felt locked, my knees almost painfully straight. And while my hand was raised in my plan to grab the door, I wasn't sure it would respond to a command to actually grab it, shove it into the face of whomever was approaching.
I think people, as a whole, like to create scenarios in their heads, tell themselves how they will act if or when something bad happened to them. Maybe especially us women who knew our risk of kidnapping and worse was much greater.
We sometimes sat after watching some awful true crime documentary or some survival-style show and say to ourselves "If that ever happens to me, I will do this" or that, convincing ourselves that our bravery will win out over our fear, that all those videos we'd watched about self-defense would come back to us instead of getting Etch-A-Sketch'd out of our heads, that our bodies would cooperate, that we would suddenly be stronger than we'd ever been before. Like those moms who could lift cars off of kids.
The thing was, we were mostly bullshitting ourselves, weren't we? Unless we had actual hand-to-hand training.
I had conjured up a lot of fantasies about being brave and strong and unstoppable. Especially thanks to some of the fantasy war scenes in the books I read, in the games I played.
But put to the test, I felt weaker than I ever had before. And I was scared. I was so fucking scared that my entire chest felt like it was shaking when I pulled in a breath.
But people fought through fear all the time right? If it was a matter of life-or-death? Sometimes fear made heroes and heroines out of ordinary men and women. I didn't need to take down a bank robber or stop a mugging. I just needed to save my own life.
The footsteps slowed and stopped, but still several feet away from the door. There was a clinking sound like they were putting something down on a dresser or something.
Then the strangest thing.
Humming.
Actual humming.
And the part that sent a chill through me?
I knew the song.
I knew the song because I heard it damn near every day of my life.
It was the theme music to my game.
My game.
Which only meant one thing, didn't it?
Whoever had taken me was a follower, a sub, a fan, maybe even.
Maybe that was why I was in a closet with a bottle of medicine for my migraine after they caused a seizure since they knew that happened to me after that one live stream where I'd had one.
That worked in my favor, didn't it?
If they watched me, surely they liked me. Likely too much.
That happened all the time. Some random woman got popular for one reason or another. And someone took an interest. And maybe she smiled at him once or said his name, and he thought that meant something, created some giant fantasy world in his head where he believed they were meant to be together.
It wasn't exactly a giant leap from that sort of delusional to kidnapping.
He probably wouldn't even think of it as kidnapping. He would think he was saving me or following through with some promise he thought he'd made to me.
The problem was, if you didn't know who they were and what you meant to them, they got pissed, right?
And I had done myself a disservice by mostly ignoring the loons I sometimes got in the comments section. Sure, a few of them stood out, but most of them were just background noise to me. I didn't want to give them too much thought because I was pretty sure I would have even more trouble sleeping at night if I let their twisted comments take up residence in my head.
Besides, in my mind, trying to deal with that problem was like a hydra. Take one out, several more took their place. It was a useless battle.
Except now, knowing them would have come in handy. I mean, sure, most of them didn't use their real pictures in their avatars, but even just little tidbits of information might have worked in my favor.
But I had nothing.
Unless, of course, it was Patrick.
But wasn't it true that the ones to watch out for were rarely the loudest ones?
I had no idea.
All I knew was I heard muffled humming.
Then a light flicked on over my head.
Before I could even think about reacting, the door was open, and someone was moving inside.
Not Patrick, certainly.
Everything about Patrick spoke of old school, old mindsets, patriarchal bullshit that always rubbed me the wrong way.
This guy?
This guy was young.
Maybe even younger than I was.
He was tall and lanky, just the right side of skinny with unremarkable dishwater brown hair, and eyes that matched. His face wasn't overly memorable, either, with a weak chin and round face, his narrow nose, and straight brows.
He looked like any other faceless gamer guy you came across online.
He wore a pair of worn jeans and a tank top with the wheel from the first book on it, at least confirming my suspicions about who it was, why I was taken.
But I was no closer to knowing why he wanted me.
While a large part of me wanted to be strong, wanted to be the heroine, the other part knew what was most important was being smart.
And sometimes smart women played stupid and weak to get men to do what they wanted.
Stupid and weak weren't my strong suits, but everyone could pull it off if they tried.
Before he could see me, I silently slid down, pulling the blanket around myself, pressing my hands into my eyes like the headache was still crashing through my skull.
"Ow ow ow ow," I whimpered, going for as pathetic as I could, which wasn't too hard given the situation.
"Did you take the medicine?" he asked in a voice as bland as his face.
"What happened?" I cried. "Where am I? Who are you?" I went on, still pressing my hands to my eyes, hoping he took that for the reason I didn't know who he was.
"Hey, hey, it's okay. You had a seizure. I... I saved you," he told me. "It's me, Kit."
Kit?
Kit didn't ring a bell.
Except.
No.
No way.
M
y head shot up, my hands falling, taking a good, long look at him again.
I didn't know a Kit.
But I did know a Kit Kat. Who talked back.
KitKatTalksBack.
The first friend I had met in the gamer world. My first real viewer, fan, friend.
Who was supposed to be female.
Right?
Or had I just assumed that?
I racked my brain for anytime they told me their sex, or even alluded to it, but I came up with nothing.
I just thought it was a girl.
I spoke to him like I spoke to girlfriends.
I shared ridiculously intimate stuff I would only tell girlfriends because guys wouldn't be able to handle it.
Like how heavy my period was one month.
And a tip I'd found out to prevent razor burn when shaving your vag.
I'd talked about my exes, about who was a two-pump-chump and who could get me to the apex. And how.
I'd discussed favorite vibrators when I was between men.
Oh, God.
God.
That was just... humiliating.
I never would have told him any of that if I knew he wasn't a girl.
"What's the matter?" he asked, jaw getting tight. "Not what you were expecting?" he asked, tone a bit rougher, offended, maybe?
"I, ah, I thought you'd be older," I said, hoping it was the best cover. "You have always been so, ah, wise." Wise was good, right? Or was it offensive to tell a young person you thought they'd be older?
"I had to grow up fast," he said, nodding. "How's your head?"
"It hurts," I lied, making my eyes smaller.
"Did you take the pills?"
"I did. Twice. Sometimes, they're not strong enough. I usually need sleep. Sometimes coffee," I said, giving him a weak smile. "But thank you for thinking of it."
"I remember that one seizure. It was scary to watch. It wasn't as scary in person."
Yeah, because he'd been expecting it. Because he'd caused it.
"I'm sore all over," I said, uncomfortable when he kept staring at me, seeing the crazy in his eyes, not wanting to know what he was thinking about.
"I was trying to carry you out of danger. I, ah, you fell. Maybe more salads in the future," he said, giving me a weak smile like he'd told a joke.
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