Chapter Fifty-six — Aiden
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
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AIDEN
Idropped into my chair with a sigh.
My warehouse used to feel like home. Now it felt a bit desolate. Definitely lonely. I wasn’t getting rid of it—I needed the computing power I had in this building, but I didn’t miss the time I spent here.
As soon as I’d dug through all the information, I was going home to Trinity. And the others. I never expected all of us to gel so effortlessly, but I was glad. And grateful we’d found each other. It might have been a near miss.
All my crawlers dumped information onto my screens, gathered both over the last couple of weeks and overnight after I set up more.
There were also a couple of things for clients back in Albion, and new clients here.
I could work from anywhere, though I’d stopped doing in-person work since moving to Clarity. But today I was focused on my Omega.
There was still nothing that told me that anyone had caught on to Trinity and what she was investigating, other than the break-in.
For the first time in my life, I couldn’t trust my instincts.
Because everything in me wanted Trinity safe, I perceived everything as a potential threat even when there wasn’t one.
I wasn’t objective.
For any other client, I would have told them they were in the clear, but for Trinity it didn’t feel like enough. The break-in still didn’t make sense, but there was nothing else to add to it.
Pulling up all the data that had been compiling, I pored over it.
And… nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary.
No spike in executive communications after Trinity received the flash drive.
No references to ‘reporter’ or her name.
No thinly veiled memos or coded threats.
If there was anything, it was being done covertly and in person.
Still…
If I was going to settle my mind, I need to go back to the beginning. With Trinity’s former boss, Tracy.
I pulled up the traffic cameras from the accident that had killed her.
I’d already seen it the first time I looked into everything.
This time I watched more closely. At first glance, it looked like a normal asshole running a red light and t-boning her car in the middle of the intersection.
But now that I was staring at it over and over, the angle of the car looked wrong.
Not by a lot. Such a small degree that I wondered if I’d watched the video too many times.
But still a little off. Was there another traffic camera?
No, but there was a security camera on a nearby ATM that might show me. It took me no more than ten minutes to get into the network, and dread ran down my spine.
The car that hit Tracy hadn’t run a red light.
It hadn’t been on the road at all, but in a parking lot exit.
I wound the footage back. The car sat there far longer than someone would when running an errand.
There were plenty of opportunities to pull out.
Other cars got pissed and went around. It was only when Tracy’s car was approached that they gunned the engine and drove straight into the intersection.
Fuck.
She was targeted.
I pushed down the immediate guilt and panic. My own arrogance in my skills and being wrapped up in Trinity lowered my defenses. I should have seen this more than a week ago.
But in my sweeps, I truly had found nothing that spoke to this. No signs that it was planned. Not in my net, which was wide. I needed to expand it, but how? What was I missing? How active was the threat?
I closed my eyes and leaned back, letting the past days with Trinity flow past my memory and look for anything that might give me a clue. Which, admittedly, was hard to do without lingering on the sexier parts of those memories.
There had to be something.
Think, Aiden.
My hands started moving before I was fully conscious of it, pulling up the email serves for Clarity magazine.
Not Trinity’s email, but Tracy’s. If Tracy pissed them off enough for them to kill her, there might be a trail.
I hadn’t gone down this path because my first assessment of the car crash was that it was an accident.
While those messages were downloading, I set a program running with Trinity’s picture on a wider crawler looking for any and all images of her, and seeking a pattern.
A new picture of her popped up from two days ago at the fight. When Bastian had been pointing at her. It was a professional photo, and a good one. Part of a standard batch of press photos uploaded to one of the aggregators.
Images of her popped up from security and traffic cameras. Most of them I’d already seen because of the programs I had running. And nothing gave me a glimpse of whether my Omega was in danger.
I loved the photos an event photographer had gotten at the surfing competition. Not solely because she was sitting between my legs in some of them, but because she looked as comfortable sitting there as she was in her nest.
The photographers had been moving up and down the beach for the entire competition. I remembered them because they had been dressed in black and stood out against all the brightness and color.
I’d seen them the next day before we snorkeled, too.
Something tugged at my memory.
I scrolled through all the images of Trinity that I’d already seen, grainy security and traffic cameras. Why the fuck couldn’t I have been born with a photographic memory? My memory was good, but not perfect. So why—
There.
The date was the day after Trinity and I had had our first scene. When I made her come so many times she was delirious. She’d gone to get waffles with her friends, and some street cameras caught her walking back to her car. Past a group of photographers dressed in black.
Of course.
Of fucking course.
The best way to hide a crime was to have someone who wasn’t connected to you do it. It was rare and almost impossible to sever all connections, but people tried.
They were there. In several of the security shots, there were men with cameras around Rin. They were subtle enough not to be immediately noticed. But as soon as I added that parameter? The photos started lining up on my screen.
The first instance with cameras made my stomach churn. It was before we met. On the beach at sunset. If this was the day she got the flash drive…
But who were they? How could I find them?
A new chirp as my programs found a connection. Could it really be that simple?
The connection it made: the photos of Trinity from the surfing competition and the fight night were taken by the same company. A deeper search told me event photos weren’t their specialty. Headshots were.
Corporate headshots.
Including some of the very companies Trinity was targeting.
It was a strange sensation to have a wave of relief and a rise in fear at the same time. I found what we needed, but what we needed meant that Trinity was in danger.
We’d been with her most of the time she was in public, or she’d been with her friends. The DuPonts always had discreet security for Ocean, so Rin was in a protective bubble there as well. Which meant her only unprotected travel was to and from work and her friends.
A beep drew my eye to the newly downloaded files from Tracy’s server. It didn’t take long for me to find what I was looking for. An anonymous email address and a grainy photo of Tracy from a very familiar angle.
The email was a single line:
Back off. They know.
I knew that angle because I’d seen it just days ago. It was the security camera at Port Sunset that I’d deleted for Trinity.
I traced the email address. It bounced off nothing, now inactive, but all the other communications were there too. Including the one Trinity had used to arrange her meeting with the contact. So that was how they knew to tail her. The email had already been compromised and Rin had no way of knowing.
My mind filled in the blanks. There hadn’t been any attempts to breach our apartment, digital or otherwise. So they followed Trinity home, tossed her apartment the next day, found nothing, and left her alone because they didn’t think she had anything of substance.
But they had her followed just to make sure, and everything was quiet because Trinity hadn’t made any public moves in her investigation.
Until she’d gone to Port Sunset and started taking pictures.
I’d practically deleted that footage as it was being recorded, so no one should know she’d been there. How did they know?
I shoved everything I’d pulled into the pattern recognition program I’d made. It was far, far faster than I was. Thank goodness I’d decided to come to the warehouse today. The computers here were far more robust, and I was too impatient for any latency using them remotely.
Windows started opening with connected records—two in particular. An ID photo that might as well have been a mugshot of someone who worked at the docks, and the name of someone who worked at the photography company.
Brian Davies.
No one saw me except the gate guard and the guy who thinks I was a clueless blonde who was lost.
He was the gate guard. I could see him on the security footage from the port the day Trinity went. That camera hadn’t caught her face, but I’d deleted her car. He’d seen her face and knew she was the one they were already following.
The earlier dread spread through my chest. It was an almost perfect crime.
Police wouldn’t have investigated an accident that looked like someone running a red light.
Based on the traffic camera, they wouldn’t have had a need.
There were no direct connections between the companies and the photographers unless you dug deep for it.
As for how they communicated what they needed, I still wasn’t sure, and I also didn’t care. I could find it. That mattered less than what would happen now.
Tracy had gone to the port, taken pictures, and now she was dead. The date of the email was the day before her accident. And Trinity hadn’t driven alone after she visited the port. Until today. When she was meeting Ocean and Isolde.
Fuck.
I pulled up the live feed of Port Sunset. Brian wasn’t on the gate. But he was on the employee schedule.
My body went cold.
I grabbed my phone and dialed. Rin’s phone went straight to voicemail. There was no ping off any tower. Anywhere. The phone was off, and Trinity never turned her phone off. Fuck, fuck, FUCK.
I fought to keep my raging instincts in check while I dialed another number. Maybe it had died, and she hadn’t left the apartment yet. Please, be there. Please.
Brooks answered. “Hello?”
“Where’s Rin? She’s not answering her phone.”
“She had lunch with her friends, remember? Left maybe a half hour ago.”
I didn’t need the confirmation. Deep in my gut, I knew. “She never made it.”
The stillness on the other end of the line matched my own. “What?” The single word was lethal.
“There’s no time to explain. They’re coming for her. We need to find her. Now. Get the others and get ready to move. I’ll call you back.”
I ended the call and started another. Everett answered with his customary sarcasm. “If this is about that favor I owe you, can it be another day? We have—”
“Where’s your wife?” Maybe Ocean’s security had eyes on her.
It was a small hope, but it was the only one I had.
I’d helped set up the trackers they put on their wife’s devices—with her knowledge—but I didn’t have access.
And though that was a barrier I could shatter without a thought, Rin might not have that kind of time.
“What?” his voice sharpened.
“Trinity was meant to have lunch with Ocean and Isolde. I have reason to believe she didn’t make it.
” I forged ahead before he wasted time with questions I knew he would ask.
“There is no danger to Ocean. She and Isolde are nowhere on their radar. But please, find your wife and ask her if she’s seen Rin.
Call it the favor you owe me, I don’t care. ”
A beat of silence. “Stay on the line.”
Putting it on speaker, I braced my hands on the desk and let my head hang while I bore the silence.
It didn’t matter that I already knew what the answer would be.
I clung to the faintest shred of hope that I was wrong.
That my precious Omega wasn’t currently at the mercy of someone far worse than me.
Everett’s voice was wary now. “Ocean says they got a text that she was on her way, but she never showed and hasn’t responded to any calls or messages. What’s going on, Aiden?”
My hands flew over the keys. If I couldn’t trace Trinity’s phone, then I could trace others. I could create a net that would search for Brian fucking Davies and hope that he was foolish enough to have his phone with him.
Yes.
The red dot on the map was moving away from Clarity Coast and toward Sunset Port. Already so far away. They were almost there, and I didn’t want to think about what would happen once they got there.
“I don’t have time to explain, but I’m going to need a helicopter.”