25. Char
25
CHAR
T he shrieking was turning heads from all around the bar, but I didn’t care. This was fun .
“Omigod, omigod.” Annabelle waved her hands in front of her watering eyes, then reached into her giant purse for a clip and pulled her smooth, dark hair back in a bun. “This is going to be my finest work. Aliens.” She sucked in a breath and blew it out, giggling. “Tentacles,” she managed, voice quaking.
Gravod bent over our little group, seated in the back corner, and set a second round in front of us. “You can fix this?” he asked her.
Annabelle drank most of her whiskey in one gulp, then she nodded.
“I’m the best.”
She wasn’t exaggerating. Annabelle ran her own successful marketing business, and she was a computer genius. Sometimes, she was kind of scary.
Jess stroked Gravod’s arm and smiled up at him. “Give us a little more time over here.”
Oh, wow. The way Gravod looked at Jess before he walked away was pure lust, like he wanted to devour her. I glanced over his shoulder toward Ryoch and found the same look directed at me. My breath caught. I could feel my cheeks heat as I forced myself to turn back to the discussion at the table.
“Okay,” Annabelle was saying. “I can manipulate the video to make it look doctored, and then leak that version as if it’s the original. At the same time, I need to buy up all the domain names associated with this. Like Lydaxian.com, and as many related to tentacles as possible.”
“Domain names,” I repeated. Jess was writing things down on a napkin.
Annabelle sipped what was left of her drink. “I could buy them through my business LLC, but it’d come back to me.” She drummed her fingers on the table. “It’s impossible to hide online these days, unless you have some dark web connections. Which I do.”
“Of course you do,” I said, shaking my head. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
She shrugged. “If the feds can track you, maybe. But they’ve never tracked me yet.”
Jess started to ask, and I widened my eyes at her to let it go. Not the time to get into Annabelle’s double life.
“Ultimately, people believe what they want to believe.” Annabelle pulled a tablet out of her bottomless purse and started tapping on it while she talked. “What’s easy to believe. So, we’ll give them an easy story—an alien deepfake hoax that’s part of a guerilla marketing campaign. We’ll hint about a movie or a video game in production, organize a merchandising blitz. Stuffed tentacle monsters, t-shirts, stickers. I know someone who could draft up a screenplay in under two weeks.”
“Why not just make it look like a fake video and leave it at that?” I asked. Her plan sounded like a big undertaking.
“What’s the motivation? You’re a writer, Char. Why would anyone go to the trouble of putting out a convincing alien video? Marketing. No one will question this thing if it’s obviously about making money.”
I could see her mind going a million miles an hour as she put the tablet down and sent a text on her phone.
Jess lowered her pen and grinned. “I like the screenplay idea. Ooh, this is exciting.”
Annabelle raised her brow. “Not as exciting as you two hooking up with actual fucking aliens. I’m so fucking jealous.” She glanced around the bar and sighed. “So hot. I even think the one in the video is hot. That image is going to be all I’m thinking about for a while.”
“Especially since you’re going to be doctoring it,” I put in.
She snorted. “Yeah. Signed myself up for a lot, didn’t I?”
Jess hummed as she sipped her pink cocktail. “You did. This is huge. Thank you so much.”
Annabelle stilled and looked between the two of us. “Do you think there’s room for me on that spaceship?”
I almost spit out my drink. Which would have been a shame, since it was the best Lemon Drop I’d ever had. “You found out about aliens thirty minutes ago, and you already want to hitch a ride? I’m not even sure I want to.” Jess made a sound of distress, and I patted her hand. “It’s a big decision. I’m almost there, but not quite.”
Ryoch’s gaze was a constant whisper against my back, and I wondered if he could hear us from that far away. It was all I could do not to look over at him.
“All the mates are doing it, Char.” Annabelle sighed. “I don’t need to think about this. My family doesn’t get me, and you ladies are my best friends. I’m not seeing anyone. Just the idea of the kind of technology they must have… Shit. I want in. I’ll help with the cover-up, and in return, I want a ticket out.”
“I’m not sure if that’s up to us,” Jess hedged. “But I think we can get you on board the ship at least, maybe get someone to show you some things.”
Annabelle’s eyes narrowed. “I’m going to find a way, Jess. I’m coming with you.” She looked at me. “You’re going to leave too, I know it.”
“Then you know more than I do.”
Jess waved Gravod over, but it wasn’t just him who came. Ryoch was by his side, along with two men who’d been introduced to me earlier as shifters. Jake, a tall, blue-eyed hunk who was a wolf shifter, and Hal, a very broad and sexy bear shifter.
Annabelle started going over the plan, and they all agreed to help, ready to take on whatever was needed. There wasn’t much I could do but listen and nod.
If anyone was going to pull this off, it was Annabelle. But I could practically feel the tension in the air, like an oppressive weight. They were so close to being discovered. Ryoch’s story of what happened on Nax-5 was horrifying, and I had no doubt the same thing could happen here if we weren’t careful.
And then there was Naomi. I’d known it was a risk to treat her, but now? If someone were to figure out she’d been mysteriously cured, put it together with the alien video… I wasn’t going to second-guess saving her, that wasn’t up for debate. But the reasons for them to leave Earth as soon as possible were adding up.
My feelings for Ryoch were nudging me to join them, but uncertainty still plagued me. What if he changed his mind about us being mates, and I was stuck on another planet with no recourse? I’d thought my parents’ divorce was messy, but at least they each had options afterward. I felt incredibly uneasy about not having a back-up plan if things went south.
Ryoch’s hand circled mine, and I let out a breath. His warm touch helped me feel grounded. He’d said he’d stay with me, whether it was on Earth or in the stars. I wanted to believe him.
Naomi would be fine with Mathol tonight. I leaned against Ryoch’s shoulder as the conversation ended, and everyone broke apart to start on their respective tasks. It was evening already. Exhaustion was catching up to me.
He looked down at me, and I smiled.
“Come home with me tonight,” I said. “I might not be awake much longer, but I want to be with you.”
His eyes sparked with silver. “Always, Charlotte.”