Chapter 30 #2
“That night on the wharf, his eyes were so dark. Absolutely black—like he was something else entirely.”
“Contacts?” Bastian said. “You can get contacts that black out your eyes. I wore some for Halloween one year. They aren’t the most comfortable things, but I got used to them after an hour or two.” At Nyx’s frown, he shrugged. “I went as Demon Dean from Supernatural to a Halloween party.”
She snickered. “I just bet you did.”
“Easiest costume ever. I still have the shirt.”
The interlude was enough to break the fear sitting on my chest. “Please keep going on the video.”
“You don’t need to see that.”
“I do. I could have been this girl.”
He seethed, but hit play.
“I honestly can’t believe he put himself on video.”
“I can.” I clutched my cold hands in my lap. “He needs more to get that high or whatever it is he gets out of this way of killing.”
“And they aren’t you,” Bastian said quietly.
“Exactly.”
Nyx suddenly minimized the screen. “Wait. Wait.”
Her fingers flew over the screen, pulling up the keys or passwords that we’d discovered. “Some of the passwords didn’t work or match the videos here.”
“Could there be another level to find other videos? Like the layers of shell corporations?”
“Maybe.” Bastian moved the little papers with letters around on the desk as he’d been doing for the last hour. He frowned. “Who took mythology in school?”
“With a name like mine, of course, I did.” Nyx rolled her chair over to him.
The letters made my gut roil as she quietly moved two of the papers around. “Atropos.”
“I knew it looked familiar.” Bastian folded his arms. “It’s been years since I took that class. I didn’t want to take another damn English class.”
With shaking fingers, I typed the name in the search bar. “One of the three fates,” I said quietly.
The one who controls destiny.
The one who cuts the thread.
Bastian read over my shoulder. “The inevitable.”
Nyx pulled a screen up and instead of another video, a box came up. “It needs a password. But this one will only allow three tries before it will lock us out.”
“It’s Atropos. Nothing else makes sense.”
“Are you sure?” Nyx’s finger paused over the enter key.
I nodded. Too many things made sense now. The control over the women. The knots, the strings of fate. That he was the one to make the final decision about death.
He’d watched over me like the three sisters of fate did in the myths.
They weren’t supposed to interfere, but the twisted mind of this killer wouldn’t see that. He would see that he was the one making the final decision.
Nyx hit the enter key.
It wasn’t a video. It was a file full of account numbers.
“The money.” Nyx leaned forward in her chair, twisting the lower level of the chair so she could kneel. “I need time to figure out what banks or if it’s accounts on the dark web.”
“On it.” Bastian went over to his desk.
“It’s always about the money,” Nyx whispered.
“They aren’t all bank account numbers.” This was my territory. “There are a lot of them, here. Way too many.” My stomach pitched. “They’re not just accounts, they’re payments to watch the videos.”
Nyx scrolled the document. It was endless and so many damn links.
Suddenly a video came up.
“What did you log into?”
Nyx shook her head. “I didn’t do anything. Someone else is in the server.”
It wasn’t a video, it was a live feed of a building of some sort. It was an empty room and dark save for a bit of light through a window.
Suddenly there was movement and four men fanned out inside.
“Locke,” I whispered.
A white light blew out the camera lens. Then the feed went black.
“No!” I stood up. “Bring it back.”
“I’m trying.”
My heart was racing, and I couldn’t hear anything over the blood rushing in my head. The whole lab was one throbbing heartbeat.
Bastian ran back over to us. “Nyx?”
“I can’t get in.” Her eyes were laser focused on the screen as she typed in passwords again and again, but the feed didn’t come back. “I don’t know how it came up.”
“What happened? Is he alive?” My voice was little more than a whisper. “He can’t be dead.”
Suddenly the feed came back, and the screen filled with the mask that would forever haunt my dreams. The eyes were black again and the cartoon smile was so close to the screen there was no room to see anything else.
“She was mine first,” came the modulated voice of my nightmares.
The same one that he used when he told me not to lie there like a fish.
“And she’ll be mine last. You can’t escape fate.”
Then the screen went black again.
“He cut the feed.”
“How could he know that we were able to figure out where he was?” Bastian picked up the phone on the desk. “Leo, I need you and Dom down to the lab.” He hung up.
Nyx had her fingers over her mouth, and she was shaking her head.
“C’mon, we need your genius, Nyx.”
With shaking fingers she found the half broken sphere on her desk and snapped it back together.
I wanted to take it out of her hands and hurl it against the screen, but I knew the little blocks helped her think.
I pushed my chair away and got up to pace. “He can’t be dead. He just can’t.”
Leo and Dom came running through the doors. “What happened?” Dom asked
Nyx’s hand shook as she squeezed the Lego sphere as she relayed all that happened. The more she spoke, the steadier she got.
Finally, she sat back down. “It’s not just about killing.”
“Explain,” Dom said tightly.
“There are payments for access.”
Bastian ran back over to his station and yanked his laptop off the docking station and brought it back.
“Yes, the payments track to a whole lot of the earlier murders. Not every single one, and sadly more than we actually found in Stone’s files at the Salem PD.
There are more victims out there, but the fee for each video has increased. ”
“Jesus,” Leo said darkly. “This guy is making snuff films?”
Bastian nodded. “This sick fuck thinks he’s got the power of the mythological fates.
I don’t know if it was a game at first, or that he did this as a marketing thing to get people to watch.
We still have to dig and I bet we’ll find more videos of killings.
The killings are getting more and more intricate.
The earlier kills were cheaper, however, with each one, he’s getting bolder and needs more to get that high of the kill. ”
“Because he needs me.” My voice was flat and icy.
Dom’s face was a blank mask. “And that’s not happening. We have trackers on Locke and the team. Check the biometrics.”
“Right.” Nyx went over to the larger screens on the side of the lab. We all followed her as she pulled up all four. Two of them had no readings.
Which two?