Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
SYLVIE
“Shit, shit,” I said under my breath. “Hold on.”
I pulled out my phone, opened the app of one of the sites, and clicked to log in. My username and password autofilled. I clicked the button to submit. I watched a circle swirl in the center of the page, and then a red exclamation point followed by Username and/or Password do not match our records.
“What the fucking fuck,” I muttered. I tried another app. Same thing. And another. Then the back end of my website.
“Alice,” I said, my voice thready and a little high-pitched.
Losing my home had been one thing. Having my money disappear was another.
Knowing someone had tried to kill me still another.
But this. This felt like a stab through the heart.
My podcast and my website, how I delivered what I’d learned—all of it was my voice.
My narrative. This was my life’s work. And someone else had control.
“Go, show Eli,” Alice said. “I’ll bring the coffee when it gets here.”
“Thanks, and thanks for letting me know.” I hadn’t looked, hadn’t paid attention. I should have. I should have changed my passwords immediately, should have been more proactive.
I walked down the hall, my eyes still glued to my phone, finding my way back to Hacker Central and to Eli. It was like he felt my agitation as soon as I hit the doorway. His eyes found my face and flared wide.
“Sylvie,” he said, starting to stand.
But I was at his side and handing him my phone.
My heart pounded, my palms cold with sweat.
As the ramifications of all of this hit me, my knees wobbled more than they had when I’d first seen the page up at Alice’s desk.
Someone had been in my socials, in my website.
They’d told my fans—the world—I was in over my head, and I might not be coming back. It felt like a threat.
Duh, was all my inner voice had to say. They blew up your van. Obviously, it’s a threat.
“Someone put up a post today?—”
Eli had plucked my phone from my hand and read it out loud.
“Well, that’s a threat,” Emmett said.
“That’s what I thought,” I said.
“And you can’t log in?”
“No, not even on my website.” I shoved my hands in my pockets when I wanted to curl them into fists and punch something.
“Did you try to reset your password?” Emmett asked.
I shook my head. “I thought I should show you guys first.”
“Good call. Don’t do it yet.”
Emmett stared down at the phone, tapping his fingers on the desk. “We’ve been trying to track them. But this might be a mistake. Harder to trace a social media post—not that we can’t do it—but he logged into your website. That’s an entirely different game. And it’s likely he’s accessed your email.”
“I love it when they make mistakes,” Maddox said, his mouth curving in a scary grin.
I sank into the chair beside Eli, finding myself leaning into him, resting my head on his shoulder for barely a heartbeat before I remembered where we were and jerked upright, scooching to put space between us.
At that moment, I wanted nothing more than Eli’s arm around me, the thump of his heart under my ear.
I wanted something to make me feel safe because safe seemed very far away.
Nerves skittered up my spine at the idea that whoever had tried to kill me—and had killed Emily Shaw—was in my website, my socials, my email.
They’d shut me out from my bank, my credit cards.
With every move, I was more isolated, alone, vulnerable.
The only thing standing between me and that faceless threat was Eli.
I glanced up to see Maddox and Emmett, the room of professional hackers around them, and thought of Alice at the front desk.
Maybe not just Eli, but everyone here worked for Sinclair Security, and I wasn’t a client.
They had their own interest in Emily Shaw—an interest that extended to whoever had tried to kill me and was behind all of this.
But when their interest was satisfied, they might be done.
And where would I be? Still isolated and hung out to dry.
Then what was I going to do? I didn’t know.
Eli ran his palm up my spine, his fingers curling around the back of my neck. “Sylvie, we’re going to figure this out.”
I let out a breath, not sure what to say. Promise me you won’t leave me to face this on my own. That was what I wanted to ask, to beg.
I wanted to go back in time, to scroll past the article on Emily Shaw. To find another case and be out there somewhere, driving down the highway in my van, scheming on how to get some witness to talk to me years after a crime.
But then I wouldn’t have met Eli.
I looked up at him. Despite our agreement to keep the change in our relationship a secret, he rubbed the back of my neck, not caring that both Maddox and Emmett—and probably half the room—had noted we’d gotten a little closer than reluctant partners.
“Eli,” I whispered, not even sure what I was trying to say.
He lifted his hand and stroked his thumb across my cheekbone. “We’ll figure it out. I promise.” I heard a muffled snort from Emmett, and Eli muttered, “Fuck off.” I raised an eyebrow in question, and Eli shook his head. “General policy is not to make promises we can’t keep.”
“And you can’t promise you can fix this,” I said. “We don’t even know who?—”
“Oh, we’ll find the fucking who,” Maddox growled. “That I do promise. Fixing it—fixing it’s always more complicated. But we’ll find him.”
“I’m promising anyway,” Eli said. “We’ll find him, and we’ll fix it. You just have to hang in there.”
“Okay.” I sighed and forced myself to sit up.
Alice came down the hall, a cardboard tray in her hand.
“Caffeine has arrived,” she said and sent a kind smile my way. “Don’t worry, Sylvie. The team is on it. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Another snort from Emmett.
“Are you telling me you’re not going to fix this?” Alice asked, a hand on her hip, her sky-blue eyes sparking with demand.
Emmett grabbed his green tea and didn’t bother to respond.
Alice tossed her sleek bob and smiled at me again. “They’ll fix it,” she said. “I can’t wait forever for the next season of Evidence & Echoes.”
I watched her march out, feeling slightly buoyed by her certainty. Turning to Maddox and Emmett, I said, “Explain to me how you’re going to track them from my website login.”
Emmett gave me a long look. He glanced at Eli before he asked, “How much do you know about the back end of a website or how the internet works?”
I shrugged a shoulder. “I can WordPress. I work with audio files and do some video editing. But I don’t really know how any of it works under the hood.”
“Then my explanation is probably not going to make a whole lot of sense,” Maddox said, leaning back in his chair and propping one booted ankle on his knee.
“But, basically, everybody connects to the internet through an IP address, a series of numbers that are specific to your entry point.” He leaned forward and tapped a finger on a highlighted set of numbers from the note on the table that Eli and I had been referencing for our research.
Eli added, “That’s part of what we’ve been cross-referencing all day.”
Maddox went on. “Most sites record IPs when you log in. You know how sometimes you go to log into a site you’re a member of, and you’re in a different place, and it asks you to verify your identity?”
“Yeah.” As much as I traveled, I’d had that happen often.
“That’s because they’re used to you logging in from a certain IP address, or at least a general geographic area.
Then, when you’re somewhere else, they want to make sure it’s you.
Well, in this case, whoever this is, is logging in from a different IP address.
They could be masking it. They could be bouncing it using a VPN.
Getting into the logs of your socials is a little more work.
Accessing the back end of your website, on the other hand, unless you’ve got some high-end security in place?—”
I was already shaking my head in a negative.
Emmett nodded. “Much easier. If he has a VPN?—”
“I don’t know what that means,” I interrupted.
“A VPN is a service that masks your location by bouncing your signal through various IP addresses in different geographic locations,” Eli said.
“So, if they’re doing that, we’re out of luck?” I’d heard these terms before, but I still didn’t really get how it worked.
“Not necessarily,” Emmett said. “It depends on the VPN, and it depends on how good they are.”
“Doubtful they’re better than we are,” Maddox said with a smirk.
“Agreed.” Emmett took a long sip of his green tea. “We’ll find them. The wheels are already turning on getting the fraud dropped from your bank account. You’re not clear yet, but we’re closer.”
Maddox looked to Eli again, then back to me. “Like Eli said, you just have to hang in there. We’ll figure it out.”
“Okay,” I said, not sure exactly what that meant. Hang in there for how long, and for what? What was the answer going to be at the end of this?
I wanted revenge. Justice for Emily. And the freedom to go back to my life.
I was beginning to have a very bad feeling that I wasn’t going to get everything I wanted.
I might have to be happy with just a sliver.
I might have to accept that everything had fundamentally changed for me when I decided to look into Emily Shaw’s case.
I didn’t yet know how I felt about that, except that I was pissed. And not able to do anything about it. Yet.
I sighed and sipped at my coffee.
“Here,” Eli said, sliding my laptop back in front of me. “I divided out that drive. Scroll through this stuff. See if you find anything that connects to this.” The sheet from the envelope with the cryptic code was sitting between us.
I sighed and dug in.
“I know it can be boring as hell,” Maddox said. “But trust me, the fun parts of the job make it worth it.”
“And what are the fun parts?” I asked.
He just quirked a smile and turned back to his keyboard.
“You don’t want to know,” Eli said.
“I kind of think I do,” I said, but he didn’t answer.