Chapter 22 Gabe
GABE
"We should get home." Lena's voice is soft and drowsy, and her cheeks glow as she sighs against my chest.
"Yeah." I stroke her cheek once more. "But I want you to hear this before we move."
She looks at me, waiting.
"I'm going to find something on him," I say. "Something clean, something real. One thing that puts him back in whatever hole he crawled out of. And I'll do it without dragging you through hell."
Her throat works. "You'll tell me what it is?"
"When it's done." I kiss her slowly, and she leans into it. "You don't need more stress. Just trust me."
She nods, tired but sure. "Okay."
I help her straighten her dress. She fixes her hair, cheeks pink, lips bitten.
She looks like she just got wrecked in an SUV behind an abandoned strip mall, which is…
accurate. I brush my thumb along her jaw again before I climb into the front seat.
She sits next to me now, flushed but composed.
"You'll text me when you're home?" she asks.
"You can count on it."
I walk her to her door when we get back.
She kisses me once, lingering like she doesn't want to let go, then slips inside.
I hear voices and then the sitter laughs about something, and she responds with a little giggle of her own.
Smiling to myself, I wait until the light in her bedroom comes on, then head out to where I left my car. Once I'm there, I get in and head home.
And now I let my mind settle into the place it used to live before Lena and Jace. Before I remembered what normal people look like when they're happy.
My focus now is on intel, and nothing else. I sit at the table, crack my knuckles, and pull out my laptop. Hotspot on. Screen up. I key in the name I've already pulled from the phone messages she showed me.
Tom Easton.
I hate his face already and I still haven't seen it.
I open three browser tabs and start running my usual back-end sweeps. Not hacking—just using the public traces the average idiot forgets exist. Half the world leaves digital footprints the size of tank tracks. Tom is no exception.
The first sweep covers the basics—phone number, email, any old usernames tied to either. I plug them into a few search tools, nothing fancy, just the kind of thing I used to do on bored stakeout nights when command needed dirt on a local informant.
He's sloppy. Every username links to another, each one recycled across sites he probably forgot he ever made accounts on.
There's no separation between his personal email and his throwaway one.
The man treats the internet like a laundry basket—everything goes in one pile and he hopes nobody notices the stains.
Within five minutes, I have his old dating profiles up on my screen. Not one. Not two.
Three.
All active.
He calls himself "self-made" and also claims to be "great with kids" and "looking for a partner who's serious about the future"—yet somehow, shockingly, he remains single because he's been "taken advantage of".
I keep scrolling, my jaw grinding. He calls himself "emotionally mature", too— interesting choice of words for a man who's been threatening Lena over voicemail like a kid trying to start a rumor in a school hallway.
His "interests" are a tangle of clichés—hiking, gym, cocktails, road trips. The usual copy-paste personality men use when they can't find one of their own. And he reused the same photo on two different sites with two different captions.
Most sloppy men forget that the internet remembers everything.
I scroll down farther, letting the profile load piece by piece. The first photo that catches my eye is one of him holding a toddler on his hip. The caption reads my niece, written like he deserves a medal for proximity to a child.
I tilt my head, zoom in, and pull the file information.
The metadata shows it was taken on his phone last year.
I run the child's face through a basic open-source match.
It takes three seconds for the truth to pop up.
Not a niece. An ex-girlfriend's kid. The same ex who posted, on her now-moribund Facebook account, that she was ghosted by this guy on her birthday less than a year ago.
Interesting.
I take a screenshot of the profile and store the image in a separate folder, then move on.
Second sweep.
Instagram first. His profile is locked down, but not enough to stop the public traces.
I map accounts linked to his phone number, then jump to TikTok, where people forget that privacy settings exist. The patterns line up the way I expect.
Every account tied to him has the same posting hours, same captions, same habit of tagging places he visits.
I scroll through his followed accounts. Buried between fitness trainers and motivational speakers are three profiles linked to a local high school's girls' soccer team. Two accounts are private. One is open. I check his interaction history. He hasn't just looked. He's sent messages.
The usernames tell me what his DMs won't say outright. One of these girls is seventeen. Her account has public comments from her classmates wishing her luck on her college applications.
I click the message thread. The first DM from him is the usual bait. Cute pic.
The second one is worse. Don't tell anyone I said this but…
I sit back and let my lungs fill. A slow inhale. A slower exhale. I stare at the glowing screen until my pulse settles into something cold.
He's already hanging himself, and I haven't even pulled out anything beyond public data.
Third sweep.
LinkedIn. The man painted himself as a "regional data liaison", which is the kind of job title you invent when you want to look important without doing anything measurable.
I verify the company he listed. It closed three years ago.
The certifications he claims don't exist. The endorsements are from accounts that were either deleted or never posted again.
Another lie for the pile.
I click the business link he connected to his profile.
It sends me to a half-functioning website with a single page and an outdated footer.
The HTML pattern is familiar. Someone once taught him how to use a template generator, and he reused the entire structure without changing anything beyond the text.
That laziness works in my favor. I run a search using the unique template string. Cached snapshots pop up. Old test pages, alternate drafts, and one live directory listing his professional email in a different format.
t.easton.consulting@gmail
There it is. The mask is slipping.
I plug the email into a breach checker. A match appears instantly. Password reuse. The oldest amateur mistake. He uses the same password across platforms, probably because he thinks adding a number to the end makes him a cybersecurity expert.
I track the password through job portals. His login history gives me what I'm looking for.
He ran a background check on Lena from his office.
He paid for it with his personal card but logged in through his company's network.
I whistle under my breath, a low sound of disbelief that doesn't last. I keep scrolling.
There's more.
He looked up her dad.
Then her ex.
Then the public school directory where Jace is enrolled.
Searches placed over the last eight weeks, all clustered around late nights—times when he'd called her and she didn't answer.
I lean back in the chair, shoulders set, eyes on the river of data in front of me. My pulse doesn't spike. It sinks into the steady rhythm that carried me through war zones, interrogations, and extraction missions. A rhythm that has never marked good things for the man on the other end.
This isn't simple jealousy. This is obsession with a trail and timestamps attached. The kind that escalates if people don't intervene.
A man like Tom thinks blackmail works because he believes he's smarter than the person he's targeting. He thinks leverage is permanent. He thinks no one will notice the fingerprints he leaves on every page.
But leverage only works if the other side doesn't know what you did.
And I'm sitting here watching him dig his own grave, one digital breadcrumb at a time.