Chapter 27
COLE
I’ve been downstairs for five hours when Nilsson delivers my morning smoothie, along with confirmation that Dr. Patel will see Kate at two this afternoon, per my middle-of-the-night text.
I couldn’t sleep next to Kate, not even for my usual four hours. It wasn’t the lamp left on, in accordance with our agreement. I’ve long since trained myself to snatch my hard-won sleep anywhere, under any conditions.
It was the fact that I wanted to fuck my wife.
My life requires a number of rules to run smoothly. They keep my life organized. Orderly. Successful, to the tune of billions of dollars. I have requirements about eating, sleeping, exercise.
I don’t need a shrink to tell me I thrive on control because I grew up without any. I prove my superiority to Shannon with every limit I maintain.
And my strictest rule, one I’ve never broken: I don’t fuck my subs. I tie them up. I use them for role play, for impact play, occasionally even for breath play. They get off at least once each session, because that’s the kind of Dom I am.
But I don’t come. Not with them.
I can’t keep myself from getting hard—that’s what a body does. But I can delay gratification forever, if need be.
It’s never forever. It’s rarely further away than my next shower. Than a few business-like strokes taken between meetings. Than a replay of a dungeon scene in my memory, accompanied by my own right hand in the privacy of my bed.
But watching Kate take her punishment on the cross last night had me second-guessing my own rules. Holding her on the couch was an unexpected torment. Refusing her offer—it’s our wedding night—was far more difficult than I ever dreamed it would be.
That’s why I ordered Nilsson to get Patel here today.
The solution to my will growing weak is to make the challenge harder.
Years ago, I added kale to my morning smoothie because I started to daydream about bacon and eggs for breakfast. I stopped wearing colored neckties and socks because I craved a break from black.
I added a hundred crunches to my morning workout because I wanted to skip a day in the gym altogether.
After Patel sees to it Kate can’t conceive, it will be that much harder to avoid fucking her blind. I need that challenge.
I’m strong enough to do it. But Christ, Kate doesn’t make it easy.
If Nilsson has any questions about why I need Patel, about what I’ve done to break my new wife, he keeps them to himself—precisely as I expect.
The same way I expect him not to comment about the state of Kate’s wedding gown, currently shoved into a corner of our bedroom’s walk-in closet.
Or the two dozen tiny cloth-covered buttons piled on the nightstand, because I didn’t have the patience to unfasten each and every one when I undressed my sated wife for bed.
When I want Nilsson’s opinion, I’ll pay for it.
I’m setting aside The Wall Street Journal and reaching for The Financial Times when an email arrives on my private account. I’ve been expecting it since I woke beside my sleeping bride. After all, yesterday was the deadline for me to pay up, to avoid the release of my extended client list.
The subject is New Business Model.
Now you know this isn’t a game.
Time for a new business model… I know you never graduated from Dunbar High, and I know why. Twenty-five million will keep the world from knowing too.
Noon.
Next Sunday.
Don’t make the same mistake you made yesterday.
P.S. Congratulations on your wedding.
They’ve repeated the link to their Bitcoin account—convenient, I suppose, if I happen to have misplaced their earlier demand. And they’ve linked to an article that appeared on The Verge fifteen minutes ago.
White Hat Hacker’s Client List Exposed reads the headline. All five of my clients are listed. The article cites an anonymous source.
Right on cue, my phone rings. It’s Marty Lyon, from Lyon Momentum.
I let the call go to voicemail, then set all my devices to Do Not Disturb. I’ll do my best to soothe clients’ ruffled feathers as soon as possible. For now, I have a much bigger problem on my hands.
My correspondent is right. I didn’t graduate from Dunbar High. On the day I was supposed to walk across a stage to collect my diploma, I was locked up in a juvenile detention facility, serving a sentence for multiple counts of criminal fraud in the first degree.
If one hint of my conviction gets out, Lone Wolf will be destroyed.
If I had committed murder, people would make excuses and look the other way. Arson would make me an intriguing curiosity. Armed robbery would demonstrate a character flaw, but not a fatal one.
But there’s not a businessman on earth who will hire a computer security specialist who’s served time for fraud. Especially when those convictions came with aggravating circumstances—targeting multiple victims, incurring high monetary loss, and targeting the elderly.
No one is supposed to know I served time. My records were expunged the day I turned eighteen. That was the entire reason I took the fall for Shannon—because I could walk away clean.
Shannon already had a string of prior arrests when the cops busted her for running a fraudulent collection agency. She was on the hook for a ten-year sentence. All her assets would be liquidated for restitution, and Nutmeg and I would be farmed out to foster homes.
Or I could say the entire scam was my idea, executed without her knowledge or approval. I was only sixteen. The most they could do was send me to juvie for two years—even with all those aggravating factors.
Shannon tried to talk me out of it for at least five minutes. By letting me win, she got to keep her property. Nutmeg stayed out of the system. I’d be free on my eighteenth birthday.
I just didn’t count on Shannon ODing three months into my sentence. Or my fifteen-year-old sister taking to the streets instead of moving into foster care.
The day I was released, Mr. and Mrs. A waited outside the facility. I lived with them for almost a year. Got my GED. Started classes at community college. Looked for Megan, day and night, until I finally found her counting cards and turning tricks at the MGM casino across the river in Maryland.
Megan… She could be sending the blackmail notices. She’s never heard about a con she won’t try running once.
She knows every detail of my sordid juvie past. But Megan can’t write a single line of code. She’d need help to spoof my address, to make it seem like the messages came from me. And there’s no way she—or any down and out hacker she just might happen to know—has the skill to access my client list.
Even if I’m wrong about that, my very clever sister wouldn’t risk upsetting the gravy train. She doesn’t come around often, but she needs to know I’ll be here when she does—me and my bank accounts.
Who else knows I got married?
I told Nilsson and Anna I’d be returning with my wife. But if they were going to betray me, they could have done it years ago.
Kate knew. She’s the only recent risk I’ve taken. She and her Red Cap Raiders, who have sworn to take down Lone Wolf.
But blackmail doesn’t seem like Kate’s style. Issuing a press release maybe. Hosting a party to reveal all her dirt. But the woman who scrawled Fuck You across her chest for her own wedding ceremony isn’t a likely candidate for stealth.
Plus, I confronted her at her grandmother’s nursing home. I looked her in the eye. She’s not a good enough liar to fool me.
Annoyed that I don’t have an answer, I open the floodgates on my devices. It will take the rest of the day to triage calls, emails, and texts, speaking with my clients in order of their importance.
Before I can make my first pass at sorting the mess, my phone rings. It’s Barry Lynch.
He’s not my largest client, not by a long shot. And his issues aren’t the most urgent—he hasn’t been named in the press. But he is my fucking father-in-law.
“Wolf,” I snap into my phone, one ring before it goes to voicemail. I don’t want him getting used to my answering too quickly.
I expect him to apologize for Kate’s Fuck You display. I expect him to say we were missed at the reception. I expect him to ask if he’s interrupting my honeymoon, if I’ve taken his daughter somewhere exotic. But he says, “I need you to clear a crypto deal.”
Well, I suppose twenty million dollars still buys something, even in the current economy.
“Tell me what you know,” I say, reaching for my keyboard.
I listen with half an ear as Lynch reports meaningless background crap—a wedding guest he’s known for years, deals they’ve shared in the past, a new lead mentioned last night, an outfit called NightSaber.
“And I heard back from NightSaber this morning.” Lynch finally gets to the heart of the matter.
“I’m logging in,” I say, which is a lie, because I opened my back door into his system sometime around his telling me how his mobster buddy likes his steaks. The email is sitting at the top of Lynch’s inbox—from someone named Cornelius Cantrell at NightSaber.pw.
PW. Palau. That’s a country in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, famous for its rock islands, a shark sanctuary, and being one of the top three sources of internet scams.
Scams work because people want something for nothing—valuable real estate at killer rates, a Rolex watch for the cost of a Timex, a share of lottery winnings without the risk of a losing ticket.
Lynch is still babbling in my ear. As with the StarCoin deal he brought me a couple of weeks ago, he has an opportunity to buy into a new cryptocurrency at the ground level.
This one requires a significant investment—one million up front—but it’ll turn a profit in less than a year.
All he has to do is find three other investors.
That’s a classic pyramid scheme, and Lynch may come out ahead, at least in the beginning. But the more of this currency he buys, the more new customers he’ll have to deliver. And the market for idiots—at least for idiots willing to invest in an unproven crypto scheme—is limited.
A year down the road, or two years, or more, Lynch’ll be left holding the bag. The guys running the con will have made off with his entire investment, along with capital from the friends he drags in.
And if Lynch’s friends turn out to be unforgiving? The type of guys who settle their debts with bullets? Well, that’s not the scammers’ problem.
“I ran a search on this Cantrell yoke,” Lynch tells me. “Found his website. Testimonials and all.”
I could put up a website like that in my sleep. Hell, half the kids in the local elementary school have created one for their coding class. So could most of the players in Winter Reckoning.
In fact, it’s worth running a check to see if Cornelius Cantrell is in the game. A quick search shows he isn’t an active player. He’s not a former player either.
But his name shows up in the game.
It only takes a few keystrokes to drill down. Two years ago, a snow elf ran a solo campaign in the DarkWood. When a stormbear attacked, the elf spun up half a dozen WindWalkers, sending them in six different directions to lure the bear away. One of those walkers was named Cornelius Cantrell.
It might be sheer coincidence. But Cornelius isn’t exactly Liam or Noah or Oliver, a name you hear every day.
I pull up the snow elf’s account. The character is run by a fifty-year-old woman named Barb Hamilton who lives on Riverside Drive in New York City.
Anyone can lie when they set up an account. I expect people to lie. That’s one of the filters I use to determine which players are worth watching. I won’t hire a hacker who doesn’t cover his tracks.
I check Cornelius/Barb’s IP address, the numeric code showing where their computer is located. Despite that New York City address, they’re logging in from Monaco.
No one logs in from Monaco.
That’s not true. 40,000 people live in Monaco. At some point in time, I’m sure one of them decided to play Winter Reckoning.
But it’s a hell of a lot more likely that Cornelius/Barb is hiding their physical location, only pretending to be from Monaco. The same way a Red Cap Raider pretended to log in from Monaco when they went after Banque Wagner.
Lynch is getting impatient. “So this NightSaber crypto. It’s a good bet, right?”
“It’s a risk, like any cybercurrency,” I say. “It isn’t backed by any government. It’s not controlled by any bank.”
“But Cantrell says—”
“Cantrell might be a sixteen-year-old kid playing hooky from high school.”
“But the website—”
“Your daughter could throw that website together in under fifteen minutes.”
“Breagha doesn’t know a thing about computers.”
“Not Breagha. Kate. My wife.”
Lynch’s snort sounds like surprise. It only takes him a moment to regroup. “But you don’t see any special risk from the crypto.”
“Nothing special.”
That’s not entirely true. But I won’t elaborate to a man who forgot one of his daughters, or who thought no daughter of his could draft basic code, or who’s already overlooked yesterday’s wedding ceremony.
After a little more bluff and swagger, Lynch signs off. I’m certain he intends to throw away his money on the crypto scam, which will come back to bite him in the ass. And I’m left staring at my computer screen, at the Winter Reckoning records for Barb Hamilton.
I don’t like coincidences. Especially not when they involve my game.
I start to dig with a lot more determination. Even without Barry Lynch babbling in my ear, it takes time to find the connection. It’s buried deep, in a string of old accounts, almost lost in a thicket of data.
But the link is there: Barb Hamilton is MaskedMarauder, one of the players who runs with Kate on her Winter Reckoning campaigns. MaskedMarauder is almost certainly a Red Cap Raider.
I push back from my desk.
The simplest thing would be to go to Kate and ask her. Find out what she knows about MaskedMarauder in real life. See if she has anything to do with NightSaber, with the crypto opportunity that landed in her father’s inbox. Learn exactly what my wife is doing behind my back.
But going to Kate would mean letting her know I run Winter Reckoning. And that’s not something I’m willing to share yet. Maybe ever.
It only takes a few keystrokes to set a tracker on Kate’s account in the game. I add surveillance on all her Red Cap pals too. While I’m at it, I activate monitors on the network here at home. In seconds, I have access to every word she types.
If Kate finds out? If my wife chooses to complain? I have one easy answer: All’s fair in love and war. And if she’s going after one of my clients, we are most definitely at war.