Chapter 16
Chapter sixteen
Protection Protocol
Aiden
I’ve lost track of what hour it is, but I know the sky’s gone anemically pale, bled dry of all color by the city’s permanent haze and whatever is happening inside my own skull.
The kitchen island vanished beneath strata of laser-printed access logs, sticky-edged folders, curled club event flyers, and a local topography of empty espresso cups, all orbiting a half-eaten takeout carton of cold noodles.
The only light is from the three laptop screens and a halogen lamp, harsh and clinical, pointed directly at the mess.
What I’m looking at isn’t any of the logs, or the screens, or even the murder board propped up on the kitchen island, its riot of red string and pushpins like an FBI agent’s obsession. It’s a photo, real, printed, matte stock, face-up on the table, slightly off to my right.
Not a threat, or at least not one anyone else would classify as a threat.
It’s a candid. Cat at one of our corporate events when she first started here, laughing at something just off-camera, shoulders hunched and mouth wide.
Her lipstick’s fresh, but her hair is all wild dark curls, no effort spent on taming them.
She never noticed the camera. I have never stopped noticing the photograph.
I remember that night. She was the newest employee of PDI and yet it seemed like she knew everyone. Or perhaps everyone wanted to know her. It was the same magnetism that I saw in the Scarlet Muse. The same gravitational pull that trapped me in her orbit.
I push the photo away and drag in another mouthful of cold coffee, bitter enough to make my back molars ache.
My hands are shaking, a side effect of not sleeping, or maybe too much caffeine, or maybe just the fact that the last seventy-two hours have been a controlled demolition of every system I thought would keep me safe.
I flip Cat’s photo face-down, but her silhouette is burned into my retinas anyway.
Behind my eyelids, I see her standing in my doorway three nights ago, the way her jaw set when I told her we needed to step back.
She didn’t cry. I think, in the moment, that was worse.
There was a second where her eyes went empty and flat, and that was when I knew I’d fucked up.
A tremor runs through my right hand. I close it into a fist against the counter’s stone edge. It makes a satisfying thump and knocks over a cheap pen. One of the laptops beeps, but I ignore it. Something stings at the back of my neck, an atavistic warning.
My phone buzzes. I don’t look immediately. I don’t need to; there’s no one left in my life who would call or text at 3:37 a.m. unless it was bad news, and in my world, bad news doesn’t wait for business hours.
I grab the phone. The message preview is visible even through the oily fingerprint smears on the glass:
Tick tock, St. James. Cash or access. Your choice. Next photo goes wider.
Italics, this time. The sender’s learned style.
I open the message. There’s a file attached, JPEG.
The preview is enough. It’s another club photo, but the angle is different, closer, catching the sharp edge of my jaw above my mask, and Cat’s birthmark just below her ear is clear as a fingerprint.
This one would not require a cryptographer to connect.
I study the image. I know exactly when it was taken.
I know the shape of Cat’s mouth when she’s fighting off a laugh, and the way her hand is pressed to the small of my back, and the way her knees are just barely visible in the photo, bent beneath the edge of the club’s black velvet table.
There’s nothing explicit, but the implication is nuclear.
I set the phone face-down, beside the photograph I’d already turned over. I want to punch a hole through the table, but I don’t. Only because I can’t. I pick up a marker instead, the chisel tip worn down by weeks of overuse, and scrawl the date and timestamp on a yellow sticky note.
The wall calendar is pinned up at the far end of the room, the next in a long series of my self-inflicted punishments.
I stand up, careful not to scatter the evidence, and limp over.
The calendar is the size of a movie poster, each day a neat square, but almost every third box is ringed in red, sometimes with two or three overlapping circles bleeding into each other.
I find the date and it’s circled already, labeled “Velvet Stag - invite-only.” It’s the fourth time the blackmail threats have lined up with a club event.
I circle it again. I stand there a long time, feeling the marker squeak against the paper, until the circle is more bloodstain than outline.
I step back and look at the entire wall.
This is the part that would alarm anyone who walked in, the corkboard, half a foot thick, layered over with color-coded index cards, string, photos, and printed message logs.
Names of every PDI employee with admin access in the past eighteen months, club staff, former members, security contractors, even our building’s janitorial service.
Cat’s name is on the board, once in blue, and again in green, for reasons I don’t want to think about right now.
There are patterns, overlaps, confluences, spikes in digital traffic.
I’ve mapped every vector and every point of exposure.
It’s the architecture of paranoia, and I’m the only engineer.
I go back to the table, pull the next laptop forward, and enter the new timestamp into the database.
On the second screen, the scripts I’ve written cross-reference every piece of data, keycard logs, server access, internal memos, the club’s members-only newsletters.
I lean back against the counter, running my fingers through my hair and let the code do its work.
My mind drifts, unwillingly, back to Cat.
To the last time I saw her, really saw her.
Before she came here and I ruined everything.
She’d come into my office with a question about travel expenses, a bullshit pretext if there ever was one, but I appreciated the attempt at plausible deniability.
She waited until the door was closed, and then she leaned in and said, low and serious, “Are you okay?”
I lied to her. I said, “I’m fine. Just a heavy week.”
She didn’t buy it. She never buys it, which is what I love and what I hate. She only said, “You know I’m not an idiot, right?” and then left, the smell of her perfume lingering in my office for hours.
A new window opens on the laptop. I snap back, attention locked.
The log comparison has produced a hit. The server access spike on the night the photo was taken overlaps with a brief, unauthorized login to our internal security camera archives.
I click into the record. It was covered, of course, someone used a virtual machine and anonymized credentials, but the window of time is tight, surgical.
Whoever did this, they planned it for months, waited for a night when the club’s schedule and my own would make me vulnerable.
I feel a weird, sick pride blooming in my chest. It takes a predator to spot another predator.
I thumb through the evidence stack, rearranging it into fresh piles.
Every time I think I’m close to a breakthrough, the case slips sideways.
There’s always another layer, another fake-out, another way for my own reflection to become the enemy.
I start to suspect I’m not the only one playing chess here.
For a moment, I’m tempted to text Cat. To apologize for the things I said, but mostly for the things I didn’t say. I don’t do it. There’s no point in dragging her in deeper, not until I know for sure who’s behind this.
The windows have gone completely black now, no trace of city glow leaking through. I catch my own reflection, hunched and wild-eyed, in the glass. The resemblance to my father is sudden and nauseating. I close my eyes and breathe through my nose, count to eight, open them again.
The kitchen island corkboard looms in my peripheral vision, obsessive and ugly. But it’s all I have. I reach for another sticky note and start the next line of inquiry.
Somewhere, a clock ticks over into the next hour. I don’t bother to check which one. I know, eventually, the evidence will break. But I’m running out of time.
I click into the terminated employee file and select the filter: “data-related dismissal.” I give it a window of three years, for good measure. Eleven results. I mouth the number out loud, “eleven,” and it sounds like a death rattle in my dry throat.
The list loads in a thin, mocking column.
Systems analysts, database managers, two engineers from R&D.
I remember firing most of them personally.
The memory triggers a familiar shame response, never pleasant, but sharper with no buffer of sleep or adrenaline to dull the edges.
I select the names and dump them into a spreadsheet.
The second laptop is running a different query now.
Every Velvet Stag member, past or present, whose membership lapsed within the last two years.
There are a lot of rich, self-destructive people in this city, and the club’s non-disclosure contract is legendary for both its strictness and its creativity.
But even among a population self-selected for discipline, there are bad apples.
Ms. Voss’s email sits atop my inbox, her message subject: “Per our conversation, urgent.” The membership records are attached as a zipped archive.
I open it, cursing the password protocol, twelve digits, random alphanumeric, plus an emoji.
The password is “SHIBAR1Bunny??.” I type it in, press enter, and the records open up. Of course.
I re-read Voss’s message before digging in, just to let her words re-infect me.
Mr. St. James,
Following our discussion, I am writing to you in an official capacity on behalf of the Velvet Stag Partners.