Mr. Match (Mister #5)

by JA Huss

  “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 th
e 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.”

  “Oh, it was a private commission. That’s the Tate Modern in London.”

  “Uh-huh.” I turn away from the art and look around nervously for the back door, ready to get the fuck out of here. “You should probably have that thing locked up. It has to be worth quite a bit.”

  “Oh, we have the best security,” Lauren says, wrapping her arm in mine to lead me towards the stairs. “We use ShrikeSafe. They are the best, I hear.”

  My heart is in full-on gallop mode when I hear the name Shrike come out of her mouth. And all I want to do right now is go grab my sister and get the hell away from this creepy chick.

  “Let me show you the upstairs. We absolutely adore Lily, Katya. I just want to let you know she’s a delight in every way. So smart, so pretty.” I don’t even have a chance to object to climbing the stairs with her, that’s how smooth her transition is.

  When we get to the top, she points to the line of bedrooms. There are a lot of bedrooms, and this house is definitely longer than it is wide, because it’s certainly not anything close to as small as it appeared from outside. “Only Michelle, Angie, and I live here at the moment. But I think Kelly is moving in next week. And we hope that Lily will move in as well.”

  “Hmmm,” I say, controlling all the feelings I have right now. “I really don’t think this is her cup of tea, you know? She likes her dorm.”

  “Oh, come on, Katya. We both know you don’t want her here. So stop pretending. I want us to be friends. If there’s something you don’t like about us, just say so. Maybe I can fix it.”

  “Yes, well, I don’t really know you ladies well enough not to like you. I just think that a… what is the Antimony Association? A club? A sorority? Whatever it is, I just don’t think it’s the right place for Lily.”

  “She has told me how much you despise the sisterhood.”

  Oh, good God. Can she be any more dramatic?

  “And I must say, I’m surprised. You are strong, and smart, and pretty. You have carved a place for yourself. And she tells me you did it alone. But why go it alone, Katya, when you don’t have to? Why not harness the support of other smart, pretty, and better-connected young ladies? Wouldn’t it have been much easier to get where you are if you had help?”

  I sigh, like I’m trying to be patient. “Look, Lauren. I get it. You’re all about helping others and everyone needs help some times. But I’m just not interested, OK? And I’d prefer if you left Lily out of it as well. We’ve worked really hard to get to this place and while it was tough go
ing it alone, we like it that way.”

  Lauren is nodding her head. “I totally understand. Lily asked me to try to talk you into it, but I respect your decision. How about we just forget about it and go enjoy the festivities outside?”

  “Perfect,” I say. She doesn’t twine her arm in mine as we descend, but that’s A-OK with me. When we get back to the living room there’s even more people at the front door. The girl I recognize as Kelly is directing people to go around the side of the house to the back yard. But Lauren leads me further inside to a long dining room with a table that seats twelve, and then into the large commercial kitchen where there are about a dozen people busy cooking and setting up serving trays.

  “This is some brunch you’re having,” I say to Lauren as we pass through without a word to the caterers.

  “It really is. We only do this twice a year,” Lauren explains. “Once in the fall for Initiation Week. And once in the spring for Scholarship Week.”

  Yeah, I’m so done with these girls. Initiation Week? “And what does initiation consist of?”

  “Oh, they’re science fairs. Lily told you that, right? Everyone has an exhibit and they present them at the brunch. Her project is amazing. She’s been working on it for so long. Last month she was so afraid she wouldn’t get results worth publishing.”

  “Publishing?” I ask. “She thinks she’s going publish her science fair results?”

  “Katya, this is what I’ve been trying to tell you. We are no ordinary science organization. The Antimony ladies work with some of the best mentors in the country. The world, in some cases. Lily couldn’t afford to travel last semester, so I got Professor Albright from Cornell to come here.”

  “You what?”

  “And Lily didn’t disappoint. Albright loved her so much, she’s offered her internships in her lab at Cornell for both winter and summer break. Free of charge, of course,” Laurens adds, as if money was my biggest concern right now.

  I decide to just stop asking questions. Obviously Lauren knows more about what my sister has been up to than I do, so why pretend? Why make a fool of myself? And wasn’t that Lily’s warning to me? Don’t ask too many questions, Katya.