by JA Huss
“One hour?”
“Mmmm-hmmm,” she says, trying not to smile because she knows she’s gonna get her way.
Well, maybe I can use this to my advantage. “OK,” I say. “Stop clapping like a three-year old.”
But she is clapping. That tiny little clap she’s been doing whenever she gets her way for as long as I can remember. The one where she keeps her palms pressed together and only claps her fingers.
“On one condition.”
She eyes me suspiciously. “What?”
“You have to take the day off classes tomorrow and spend it with me.”
I expect her to readily agree. We are sisters, right? She never gets to spend time with me and she’s always begging for more.
But she’s even more suspicious now. “Why? I think I have a test tomorrow. I can’t miss a test.”
“I don’t care,” I say, shaking my head to let her know I’m firm on this. “I want to spend your eighteenth birthday with you. All day. In fact, I think you should sleep over tonight.”
“Kat,” she says, dragging out my one-syllable nickname.
“I have a great surprise for you, OK? It will be worth it. I promise.”
“Well, I can’t promise. Not until I go to class and see what’s happening.”
“Then I can’t go to your brunch.”
She taps her foot on the floor, like she’s really thinking hard about her choices. Teenagers, is all I keep thinking. Finally, after almost a minute of this, she says, “Fine. It’s a deal. I might have to go to one class though. I can’t help it. And I can’t stay the night. I have a thing tonight.”
“What kind of thing? Not a boy.”
“No.” She sighs. “Not a boy. It’s just girl stuff, that’s all. But I’ll come by in the morning and we’ll spend the entire day together. My first day of my new adult life will belong to you. OK?”
She smiles that sweet, innocent smile I’ve missed so much over these past four years. And I melt. Just like I used to when we were small. It suddenly makes this whole day better.
“OK,” I say. “We have a deal. And personally, I think I got the better end of it. But I’m not going to gloat.”
“Are you going to wear that?” She eyes me with distaste.
“Oh, shit.” I laugh, looking down to my schoolgirl uniform from last night. “No. Give me five minutes.”
“Wear a dress, OK?”
And I suddenly see her too. She’s a little dressed up. A white dress, not short and skimpy, either. But kinda classy.
“Something like yours?” I ask.
“Yeah, but not white.” She has a dreamy look on her face. “We don’t want to match.”
“Got it.” I smile. “Be back in a sec.”
I walk into my bedroom and hit the closet. I don’t have a ton of clothes. I didn’t bring much with me. But I have one nice dress. It’s not white, either. It’s a pretty light green. Not short enough to be slutty. Not long enough to be a gown. Just… pretty. Kind of summery, but it’s the nicest thing I have, so it will have to do. I can just throw on my tan wool coat and my knee-high leather boots.
And when I’m ready, exactly seven minutes later—and after several ‘hurry ups’ yelled from the front room—I look at myself in the mirror.
“Hot,” Lily says, behind me. I smile at her in the mirror.
“We both look good,” I say.
“We look like sisters,” she says back. “We could be twins.”
“We don’t look that much alike. I’m three inches taller, for one.”
“And your hair is lighter. They do like the blondes.” She sighs.
“Who?” I ask, turning to grab my purse.
“Oh, the guys, you know. They all like the blondes.”
“Well, you’re blonde too.”
“Not like you, Katya. You’re the perfect blonde. Golden rays of sun to my dingy dishwater.”
“Well, thank you.” I don’t get a lot of compliments, so I take it gracefully. “But we practically have the same hair. I just spent more time in the sun this summer, I guess. Let’s go. I have an appointment at noon, so I really will be leaving your little tea party on time.”
“I’m the one who came ready.” It’s a little dig at me. But I brush it aside and twine my arm in hers as we leave the apartment. I feel guilty for not working on a project this morning. But I can afford it, I guess. I have her next semester’s tuition almost covered. I’m ahead. I can relax a little and enjoy the only family member I have left.
Chapter Thirty-Three - OLIVER
“What’s going on?” Pax says from the top of the stairs.
West and I both whirl around, taken by surprise. Jesus Christ, I really do need an office door. We are both huddled up to my computer, looking at the tracking app I have access to on Ariel’s phone.
“When did you get here?” West asks, recovering for me.
“What are you guys looking at?” Pax asks, walking over to us.
“We’re just trying to figure out what the girls are up to,” I say.
“They’re downstairs. Why don’t you just ask them?” Pax says.
“Because they’re having some kind of secret meeting today at lunch and we want to get in on that.”
“Hmm,” Pax says, taking a seat in a chair. “Victoria is looking for you, West. I told her I’d come see if you were up here with Oliver.”
“OK,” West says with a sigh. He looks at me. “Let me go take care of her and I’ll be right back.”
I nod as he leaves, but I’m looking at Pax. “What?” I say, after West’s footsteps fade down the stairs.
He props a foot on the opposite knee. Like he’s getting comfortable. “I just have a question or two about that ‘hack’ you showed us yesterday.”
“Why are you making air quotes for the word ‘hack?’ You don’t believe me?”
“I’m just confused,” he says, using a familiar overly patient tone. Which I hate. “I need some clarification. About all of it really.”
I don’t volunteer anything.
“So you said that Allen set you up and you had to go along with it because they made a forum which implicates you in some kind of hitman-for-hire operation?”
“That’s what I said.”
“And that’s it? Plus, you saw your sister?”
“I saw my dead sister, Pax.”
“Missing sister,” he corrects me. “Is she presumed dead?”
I just stare at him.
He waves a hand through the air like he’s clearing it. “Never mind her. That was just my opener. To let you know I’m not buying your bullshit. Because while I might not be as clever as you Shrike people when it comes to computers, I am not a stupid man.”
I know what he’s going to say. My explanation yesterday in the SCIF room was lame. So fucking lame. But it was all I could come up with without asking for Ariel’s help.
“They threatened you.”
“They did.” My tone is neutral. “Still are,” I add. Because all that’s true.
“Do they mine data from your site?”
Dammit. I really didn’t think he’d catch on to that. “Yes,” I say.
“Dating site data?” He scoffs.
“Credit cards,” I say. “Emails, addresses, phone numbers. You’d be surprised at how much personal information people share on a dating site.”
“Yeah,” Pax says. “I get it. It’s not totally worthless. But the threat to you is way too low, Mr. Match.” He narrows his eyes at me. “Hitmen? Really? I mean, surely you understand you probably have an alibi for every single hit—if, in fact, there ever were hits. They can’t possibly have covered all their bases. Your explanation…” he says, trailing off to think about his word choice. “While it doesn’t completely ring false, it doesn’t completely ring true, either. So why don’t we go into that little room of yours and you can show me the other half of the truth you’re hiding.”
I let out a long breath and take a few moments to think. “Look, Pax—”
; “No,” he interrupts. “You look. I’m on your fucking side, asshole. I’ve had your back for ten years.”
“Eleven,” I say. “Did you even notice that another anniversary went by?”
He pauses and I know he didn’t.
“Neither did I,” I say. “Until today.”
“Go on,” he says.
I get up and motion for him to follow me with a nod of my head. “You wanna see? OK. There’s really no point in hiding it anymore. We’re already in the middle of it, Pax.”
“Middle of what?” he asks, following me over to the door on the other side of the room.
“The shit hit the fan some time ago, brother. It’s all over us and we never even smelled it.”
I open the door and we go through the ritual of entering the SCIF down on the third floor. When we’re inside, there’s just that one laptop sitting on the stainless steel table. I sit down on the stool, flip it open, and then log in.
The black command prompt box opens and I type in the code to bring up what I didn’t show the other guys yesterday.
“What am I looking at?” Pax asks, data scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.
“Code.”
“Obviously, asshole.”
“Just give me a second,” I say, my fingers flying on the keypad. A beep comes from a cabinet just to my left. Pax reaches over and tries to open the door, but it’s locked.
“That’s just the secure server coming online. It’s nothing.” I type for another three or four minutes, then press Y, to initiate the final command, and a website pops up.
“What’s this?” Pax asks, leaning in to get a better look at it.
“That,” I say, turning the laptop so he can see the screen better, “is the real Hook-Me-Up website.”
“You’re using Tor?” he asks. “An onion domain.” He looks at me. “You have another deep web marketplace? This is more than hitmen, isn’t it? That’s what you’re hiding?”
I sigh and shrug at the same time.
He points to the screen. That’s an advertisement for—”
“Counterfeit money. Yup.”
“So it’s real, then? You sell all this shit?” He points to another forum. They are all stacked neatly up into rows on the page. “All this illegal shit? Prostitutes, and drugs, and—”
“Not me,” I say, disgusted. “I’m not selling any of this shit.”
“Wait,” Pax says. “This is where Cindy gets her ‘clients?’” He makes air quotes again.
“Yeah, about that. Look, she’s talented, OK? She’s sneaky and smart and she figured us out pretty early. She got in, we couldn’t realistically keep her out because we cannot—let me stress this hard—we cannot fuck with this code. I’m not lying about that part.”
He leans against the server cabinet and scratches his chin. “They’re blackmailing you pretty hard,” he says.
“They are, Pax. Only they’re not blackmailing me with some stupid threat to go to the cops. I made that up to try to explain away my involvement with the Misters. I didn’t really connect the dots that this was the origin of all our trouble until today. I had suspicions, but that’s all they were. Now I have proof. They own this site, OK? Hook-Me-Up on the clear web is ours. But Hook-Me-Up on the dark web belongs to them.”
“Who is them?” Pax asks.
“My guess would be as good as yours, Paxton. I have a few good ones, but I don’t know anything for sure. Other than who it isn’t. But none of this is the important part. None of this is why I’m showing you all this now. Every year since this site popped up on our server, they’ve added to it, Paxton. The first year, that night that girl accused us of rape, they added the drug marketplace. The second year it was pirate shit. Music, books, term papers. The third year it was assassins.” I scroll down the main page so he can see all the different marketplaces. “Ten in all, one for each year. A little reminder on the anniversary to keep me in line. To keep the threat fresh.”
He zeroes in on the worst of them. Which isn’t the hitmen. And then he gets a disgusted look on his face. “What the fuck are you doing, Shrike?”
“I’m not doing this, Pax. You, of all people, have to know I’m not doing this. I have no control over this site. I get no money from it.”
“But you host it.”
“I host it, yeah. Because they make me. They have everything tied into me, my sisters, my parents.”
“That’s why you covered for Allen that night.”
“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t understand anything back then. I had no clue that eleven years later I’d still be dealing with this shit. That every year it would get worse. Darker. Sicker. If I knew this would be my life, Pax, I’d have taken my chances with the rape charge.”
We both look up at the ceiling. Footsteps creaking the old floorboards.
“That’s West,” Pax says.
“Yeah. But I don’t want to show him this yet. We just had an anniversary, right? It’s eleven years now. But we still only have ten categories in the marketplace.”
I don’t need to spell it out for Pax. He gets it immediately. “They have a surprise coming, don’t they?”
I nod. “They set us up again. I’m not sure how, but they did. And brother, we are going down this time. They are planning something that will take us all out at once, and probably tie it all back to the rape charge eleven years ago.”
Pax walks to the other side of the room. Stops, turns back. Paces towards me and then turns again. This goes on for a few more laps and then he looks me in the eyes. “Fuck that,” he says.
“Fuck that,” I agree.
“I’m done with this life. I say we put it all on the line right now. We tie this shit up with a bow or we go down trying.”
“What do you have mind?” I ask, so fucking thankful I can finally get his opinion on all this.
He smiles. But it’s not a Paxton Vance smile.
It’s a Mr. Mysterious smile.
“I’m gonna kill Mr. Corporate and Liam fucking Henry is gonna tell me everything.”
Chapter Thirty-Four - KATYA
The house is not big. Lily wasn’t lying. It’s small, ultra-modern, and looks brand new. It sits on a lot right across the street from the west end of the CSU campus, and it’s sandwiched in between a Greek fraternity on one side and Greek sorority with a for-sale sign in the yard, on the other.
As if that wasn’t enough to make my stomach twist with apprehension, there is a metal sign over the front door engraved with the words The Antimony Association.
So… not a house. Right.
“Lily,” I say with as much patience as I can muster up. “Tell me again who these people are?”
“Oh, there’s Lauren!” Lily exclaims. Completely ignoring me. Lauren is greeting a group of young men and women on the concrete slab outside the open front door that must be the new version of a porch. All of them are dressed up like they are going to a board meeting instead of a science-nerd college brunch, and they all look decidedly upper-class, despite Lauren’s insistence to the contrary yesterday morning. “Lauren!” Lily calls. She runs up to her—leaving me to traverse the front walkway alone—and gives her an excited hug.
“There you are!” Lauren says, looking down on Lily with a benevolent smile. Like she’s some kind of queen. And then Lauren meets my curious gaze. “I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to make it.”
“Hi, Lauren,” I say. “This is a very nice house. Is it yours?”
“My parents’,” Lauren says, reaching for my hand to give it a squeeze. “They bought the lot a few years before I came to school. It took almost a year to rebuild after they tore the old house down. But it was definitely worth the wait, don’t you think?”
“So you have always lived here?” I peer past her to try to get a glimpse of the interior décor. “By yourself?”
“Stop asking questions,” Lily says, annoyed with me. “It’s just a house, Kat. We’re here to have fun.”
“Would you like a tour, Katya?”
Lauren says, ignoring my sister. “I’d love to show you around.”
“Sure,” I say, thrilled at her offer to sanction my inevitable snooping.
“Great. Lily”—she turns to look at my sister—“why don’t you go out back where we have the tent set up? Michelle could use some help.”
“Sure,” Lily says, giving me a sisterly glare. “Но не задавать слишком много вопросов, Катя.”
Since when does my sister speak Russian? Her accent and grammar is terrible, even to my mostly untrained ear, but still. I don’t remember her taking Russian at Parson. And we never spoke it. I can understand it, but I don’t really speak Russian. Not off the cuff like that. Unless she came prepared…
“Oh, that’s adorable!” Lauren says. “You two have your own secret language. I love it!”
Lauren tugs on my hand just enough to let me know we’re moving on to the tour. But my mind is stuck on Lily’s warning. Don’t ask too many questions, Katya.
“So the old house,” Lauren says, leading me into the front room, “was over a hundred years old.”
“Wow,” I say. “I’m surprised you were allowed to tear it down. I thought they had a historical society here?”
“They do.” Lauren laughs. “But my parents are good friends with the mayor.”
“You’re from where again?” I ask, taking in the sleek modern furniture. I happen to love sleek modern furniture, and I know this stuff does not come cheap.
“The Western Slope,” she says. “We run cattle over there.”
“How fun,” I say, eyeing the artwork on the walls. Is that an original Berndnaut Smilde photograph? “How big is your ranch?” I ask, stopping to admire the large framed photo of a hovering man-made cloud inside the halls of some extravagant building.
“A hundred and fifty thousand acres.”
“Well.” I almost choke as I look away from the captivating photo. “That is some spread you have.”
“Do you like this photo? Lily tells me you’re kind of a big deal in the art world.”
“Lily exaggerates,” I say, noting how she skipped right over the part where she admits to unhumble beginnings. “Where was this taken?” I ask, pointing to the photograph. “I don’t recognize this location.”