When she entered the kitchen, Xavier was typing and clicking with fury on a laptop on the kitchen counter.
“Which site was it?” he barked.
Rachel stood in the doorway, her arms at her sides. Her head was spinning.
“What?”
“Site, Rachel. Site where you found the video?”
She shook her head. “I...Josh found it...”
His eyes went back to the screen, and he moved his hands quickly over the keyboard.
There was a pause in his furious searching.
“Call Josh,” he said.
Rachel stared at him. He looked up from the computer screen and his eyes were nearly on fire.
“Call Josh,” he was almost growling, “and find out what site he went to.”
Rachel's mouth was hanging open. It was clear to her now that Xavier wasn't the one. He couldn't be. Her head was now reeling with trying to decide if she should tell him about the blackmail letter or not.
Maybe just see how this unfolded. That was probably the best course of action.
She dug her phone out of her purse and came back to the kitchen.
She opted for texting, which elicited a glower from Xavier. Her text was brief, asking only for the name of the website. She half-regretted sending it that way to him.
“I can't call him,” Rachel said helplessly, both for Xavier's benefit and her own. “I left the house...” she let her voice trail off. She didn't feel like explaining it all to Xavier. And she didn't feel like explaining it all to Josh: why she had left the way she had left, and what she was feeling now.
She felt, quite suddenly, exhausted.
She set the phone on the counter and stared at the screen, while Xavier continued his search on the computer in silence.
A text from Josh:
[Josh]: Are you okay? Where are you?
Rachel typed:
[Rachel]: Fine. Explain later. Plz. What was the site?
There was a painful pause while she waited for Josh's response. It seemed delayed, and she imagined Josh reading it in the house.
[Josh]: XXXbunny
Rachel read the name aloud, and Xavier finished the address off simultaneously. “I already found it,” he added softly.
There was an awkward silence while he stared at the screen. Rachel stayed where she was: the images had been burned into her mind forever and she really didn't want to see it again.
His brow furrowed in confusion. He folded his arms and leaned back on his stool.
“So,” he said quietly. “You were over here because...?”
He was angry, she could tell. She looked down at the counter. “I thought it was you,” she said meekly.
Xavier opened his mouth as though he intended to say something while he swept his hand toward the screen, palm up. His eyes were quite dark with what seemed like rage.
“What possible reason would I do that, Rachel?” His eyes snapped back to the screen. “Why would anyone do this?” He started shaking his head. He leaned forward on the stool again and started clicking away with the mouse. He seemed to have forgotten his irritation with Rachel's accusation, and he was now on the trail of something else.
“What's the point of releasing any of this? That's the question we need to be asking,” he said, his voice very low, and only for himself.
He was right, of course. The only problem was, he didn't have all the information.
“It starts with a few leaked videos, right? You have Rachel outtakes...” his voice trailed off as he scanned the comments. “And there's nobody who could really get their hands on that except someone at the station, right? Or Xavier...Xavier seems like the likely suspect...but why would Xavier do this?” He was talking like a detective in an old crime drama now. Thinking aloud.
“Then this bit about the jungle fever...” his mouth turned up in a grin that was neither amused nor angry, but some perfectly blended combination of the two. More scanning, more reading.
Rachel stood staring at him. She felt awkward. She twirled the phone, unsure what to do with her hands.
“But why?”
Xavier squinted. “What's the motive here?”
He leaned back on his stool again and pressed a thumb against his lips. His eyes flicked to Rachel's.
“It's someone at the station. It has to be. So now we have to figure out: Why?”
Rachel's own mind was scrambling.
For blackmail, of course. But who? Who would do that? Who would risk his career and a jail sentence over $20,000? And who would engage in such a long-term elaborate scheme?
“Does someone hate you? Some female counterpart? Melissa? Whose office is this, next to yours?”
“Harry has some stuff in there,” she said, vaguely. Both Rachel and Xavier shook their heads lightly. Harry not only wasn't the type, he had been on vacation that week.
“Another reporter? Maybe a jealous one?” Xavier suggested again.
It had potential. “It's possible,” Rachel said, her voice unconvinced.
“Girls do some crazy shit, Ray. And this is...why is there only part of the video, though, I wonder? No one even really believes it's us, if you read the comments...” Xavier's voice trailed off while Rachel's stomach twisted. “And that's the weird thing, isn't it?” he thought aloud. “That they only put up part of the video? I mean...” he lifted his eyes to the ceiling, and Rachel knew he was trying to remember what they had done. “There was a lot more than this,” he said. “Why only post this snippet?”
He looked to her now.
Rachel tried to look like she had no idea, but she knew right away that she was doing a terrible job. Xavier saw through it. His eyes grew sharp.
“What else do you know, Ray? There's something else.” He wagged a finger at her.
Rachel covered her face. “I can't.” She shook her head. Real tears were coming out her eyes now. Tears of hopelessness. Everything was falling apart so quickly. Now she just wanted out. She just wanted to take everything back, and have none of this ever have happened.
“What is it?” Xavier's voice was firm, not consoling. He had moved next to her, standing on the other side of the counter.
Rachel shook her head, and he took her hands and peeled them from her face. “Tell me.”
She looked down at the floor. Xavier's voice was so commanding, so firm, that she knew at that moment there was no real way out of this.
“You can't...you have to promise not to go to...not to make a big deal, because, because...this person has the whole video....I'm so sorry I thought it was...it made sense at the time, I don't know, but I should have thought it was you.” She was babbling now, incoherent. She couldn't stop herself.
“Rachel,” Xavier said firmly. He tugged at her wrists to jerk her back to reality. “Slow down and tell me what it is - “
But he cut himself off, because he had it figured out.
“Oh. I see.” he said, and he rolled his tongue in his cheek and nodded his head. He dropped Rachel's hands. His whole body seemed to ripple with aggression, suddenly. He really did see, though how he had exactly figured it out, Rachel wasn't sure. “How much does this fool want?”
Rachel shook her head. “Twenty.”
“K?”
She nodded.
Xavier rolled his eyes.
After a pause he began to strut in the kitchen. He was angry. Rachel was convinced now, more than ever, that Xavier was definitely not the man who was blackmailing her. He continued: “I see his game, too. He thinks if I don't get blackmailed as well, you'll go to thinking it's me. Me doing it.”
Rachel wiped her eyes. That did make sense.
Although, it could also be some kind of complex chess play: it could still be Xavier, anticipating that Rachel would see through such a simplistic ploy to direct the blame at Xavier, and actually feel more confident that it wasn't him.
The possibilities were endless.
She put her hands to her head. “I don't know what to think.”
&nbs
p; Xavier moved back to her again and pulled her hands away from her face. “Rachel. Listen to me. You may not know what to think, but I'll tell you one thing and I'll tell you straight. And have I ever not been straight with you?”
She blinked. “No, I mean yes...I mean, no, yeah, you've always been straight with me...”
“I am not the person who's been doing this, okay? I have nothing to do with any of this.”
He was really worked up.
Rachel nodded her agreement, partly because she believed him, and partly out of fear.
Xavier folded his arms. “So where's the rest of it?”
“What?”
“The rest of the video?”
“It's...he has it.”
“How do you know?”
“He sent it.”
“The whole thing? Everything is on there?”
Rachel went backward in her mind through her angry haze. “It...no, it starts, it starts like this, the one he sent us. It starts there. Not...” she blushed a little. “Not in the hallway.”
Xavier pressed his lips together.
“Okay. Okay.” He looked at the ceiling again, and then let out a long sigh. “I want to see it. All the way through. We have to figure out where exactly this person was. How they got there. Did the camera move while it was filmed?”
Rachel shook her head at the question. “I don't know,” she said.
Xavier looked at her strangely, like she had three heads. Who would not notice a thing like that? His face was saying. She shrugged in response. “I'm not a cameraman,” she explained.
This lightened the mood a little. They both laughed.
“Let's go,” Xavier said, reaching behind him for his keys. “We have some research to do.”
Not knowing what else to do, Rachel followed him.
Rachel stood in the doorway. Her blood was boiling, and her stomach twisting. She was implicitly there to be a lookout for any stray employees who might be on this level at this hour: unlikely but, as always, not impossible. The adrenaline of the cloak-and-dagger work they were performing was making her a little ill. High, but also queasy.
She had crossed the room and turned on her computer, in a crazy attempt to get things over with as quickly as possible. Xavier had grabbed her hand as she was reaching to stick her USB key into the port. “No, Rachel no way, not on this computer.”
Of course. She was still reacting like a crazy person.
Xavier had brought his own laptop, and he positioned himself on Rachel's chair, with his back to the windows and the pegboard wall. This way, no one would (hopefully) see the video he was going to play if they wandered into this absurd scene.
Rachel found herself looking at Xavier's strong thighs. She watched his face as he watched the video: there was no doubt that it turned him on, even with all this hoopla. She tried to keep her eyes from going to his crotch, to size up how much it turned him on.
God, she was crazy. She was totally crazy. She could feel herself getting turned on, her slit getting slick with her excitement.
She swiped a piece of hair away from her face and tried to think about the immediate problem. Blackmail, the ruination of her career...but somehow the thoughts were exciting her. Leading her back to her craving for Xavier.
She looked from side to side, checking the hallway for passers-by.
Xavier set the laptop down on her desk: turned away from the doorway, like a pro. He crouched down on the ground, and looked under Melissa's small desk. He crawled under it, then crawled out and pushed past Rachel to go to Harry's semi-office.
“That's it,” he said, returning. He looked around the office. “That's where it was, and from the looks of it, there was somebody holding it.”
Rachel furrowed her brow to indicate she wanted to know why he thought that.
“It jiggles around. Not a lot, but definitely more than if it had been somehow propped up. Also, there's no real way to prop it pointed that way...I just can't figure out...” his voice trailed off. He rubbed his thumb on his eyebrow. “How did this person know? When to be here?”
Rachel leaned against the edge of the table.
“We have to find out who this is,” she said desperately. “I can't have that video go on the internet. I just can't.” She swiped at a tear. Then she sighed. “Or we could just pay.”
Xavier shook his head. “No fucking way. No fucking way I'm going to pay. Nah. I'm going to find out who this was, and that's who's gonna pay.”
Rachel shuddered. She reached out a hand and placed it on Xavier's arm. “Listen,” she said. “No matter what, you aren't going to the cops, right? I can't have this scandal get out. Please. No one would ever take me seriously again.”
Xavier didn't say anything, but she was sure he knew she was right.
“Please, Xavier,” she repeated. “This is my problem...don't do anything that...please don't do anything without...I don't know. Don't screw this up by getting mad.”
Xavier pressed his lips together. Rachel was seeing the things she was attracted to in his personality from a different perspective for the first time. Xavier's alpha stubbornness, his acute masculinity – now they were a liability for her, a prospective problem. She felt overwhelmed. She placed a hand on his arm. “Please.”
Xavier did nothing for a moment, but then he covered her hand with his. “We'll find a different solution. You're not going to pay for some blackmail,” was all he said.
I NVESTIGATION
People often forgot that Rachel Elliot was an investigative reporter, and an excellent one. It was easy to forget, because while she was a consummate professional even with her fluffy, human interest stories, it was difficult to see the gleam of her professional skills through the silliness of the stories she was assigned.
And now, Rachel Elliot had no journalistic scruples. This was really the principle thing that divided a spy from a journalist: both would go to essentially any lengths to find out what they wanted to know.
Before she even arrived home the evening she and Xavier had watched the video in the office, it had become abundantly clear to Rachel that things were swinging wildly out of her control. On the one hand, she had someone threatening to post a lewd video on the internet. She had her attraction to Xavier, and her addiction to her husband watching her. These forces gripped her so tightly she couldn't think straight. Then she had Xavier's determination to find the blackmailer. Something seemed to have snapped inside of him, and Rachel didn't like it. It made him, quite suddenly, more unpredictable than she had thought it was possible for him to be.
Everything was up in the air: her marriage, her career, her savings, her own desires.
She needed to get things under control.
And if there was one thing she'd learned a long time ago, it was that information was power. It had been why she became a journalist in the first place, even if that idealistic girl was long gone.
It was all so much seedier than noble, and it wasn't like she was out changing the world, but she knew if she was going to change her own life, she'd have to find out who was blackmailing her, For sure. And she was going to get that information first, before Xavier, before Josh.
What she would do after that, she had no idea. But she would be better able to direct this train wreck if she just knew who was driving it.
Or at least, this is what she settled on. It gave her clarity. It distracted her from her other problems. So she chased it like a hound.
It really didn't take long for the picture to paint itself. Rachel wore her shortest and tightest skirts, and her highest heels, and charmed her way into archives and security. She felt a little bad, as she brought the poor kid at the security desk a coffee, and flirted with him – he was putty in her hands – but she was on a one-track mission.
The night she and Xavier had been filmed, only three other employees had been present in the upper floors, according to the card entry record (this had been a particularly smarmy moment in her research, when she had leaned close to poo
r Richard, the kid, so that he could down her cami to her full breasts, while she purred: “So you know, like...who is coming and going? All the time? You could just pull it up, for say like...any day? Like September 19th?”) And he had done it. The poor kid had acted like he was scripted into a terrible movie, and proudly showed her how to pull up any night, like say, September 19th. She had then continued the cliched and terrible movie script, by pouring coffee on herself, and sending poor gullible Richard for paper towels, no doubt hoping she would take her blouse off and let him wipe the coffee off himself. While he was gone, she had snapped the screen with her phone.
Too easy.
Arthur, Xavier, Rachel, Khalid, Ronald the janitor (who had come in at 11:52 pm, and could therefore be eliminated), and Lucy.
Not Xavier, and not Rachel.
Khalid, who could really use $20,000, was also not a likely suspect. He had only worked at the station for a month the night the video was taken, and she really had a hard time believing the devoutly Muslim Iraqi immigrant would go risking his job to film her. But she followed up on him anyway.
He wasn't immune to her charms, Khalid, but he did his best not be interested in Rachel when she sat on his desk and tried to talk to him. Some things became very clear in her conversation with Khalid, and with the rest of his IT crew: he had no idea who Rachel Elliot was, or about her fanclubs, and he didn't care. He was a keep-your-head down kind of guy. He stayed late to sort stuff out all the time. Rachel quietly crossed him off her list: not impossible, but unlikely.
Lucy was the archives manager, which made her very much a potential suspect. She had access to the videos that were leaked to the internet, and she was there that night. But after chatting with her – a 63-year old devout Catholic who wore a small cross around her neck and offered Rachel a doughnut and pictures of her grandchildren – it was fairly obvious Lucy was unlikely to be the suspect.
Ronald had entered the building too late.
That left Arthur.
Or someone very sneaky, who had perhaps bypassed security by sneaking in behind another person.
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