Chapter 33
COLE
I’m not used to having another person living in my home. There’s a reason I keep Nilsson and Anna across the street, the same reason the women I paid to come to the dungeon never spent the night. I value my privacy.
Even when I’m sitting in my office, I feel Kate’s presence in the house. She’s like the hum of a high-voltage wire or the trickle of a distant stream. She’s present at the edge of my mind every moment I’m awake.
Kate Lynch is trouble. She’s reached out to MaskedMarauder in the game. They’ve talked about StarCoin and NightSaber too. I half-expected her to convince him to come after Lone Wolf, after me.
But the clock ticks over to Tuesday, and I’ve managed to survive a full day with the hit list out in the open.
The Wall Street Journal picked up the story.
Financial Times ran it too. I’ve spoken with every one of my clients.
Most are staying with me, but a dozen are jumping ship.
I’m losing more than one hundred million dollars in expected income over the next twelve months.
A handful of reporters have followed up. They want confirmation of the list. They want to know who I think targeted me. They want to see me bleed. I control the damage as much as I can.
In the quiet minutes after midnight, I reread the new threat.
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.
I’m not sure Lone Wolf can survive another day like yesterday. But if I open the tap and pay the demand, I know I’m doomed. Nothing will keep the blackmailer from holding me up for more cash whenever they want.
Staring at the screen, I cycle through the questions that have taunted me since the first demand.
Has Megan added coding to her quiver of weapons?
Can Kate actually lie to me without my knowing?
Who is sending the blackmail messages?
How did they find my client list?
And how do they know I never graduated from high school?
And—most persistent of all the questions driving me mad—how would it feel to fuck my wife, shattering every one of my rules, giving up every last ounce of my carefully calculated control?
Starting one hour after sunrise, Barry Lynch delivers another barrage of demands. I purposely delay my responses, training him to be a better client.
Kate spends the better part of the day in her office next to mine.
She goes online half a dozen times. She exchanges texts with MaskedMarauder, debating a technical hitch in accessing StarCoin.
She visits her grandmother during the afternoon, sweetly asking Nilsson to walk her across the street.
Upon her return, she says she’s not feeling well, and she heads up to her room.
At six o’clock, I wait for her in the dining room as Anna’s pork roast with cinnamon apples grows cold. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Half an hour.
Finally, I text.
Cole Wolf
You’re eating, whether you want to or not
She opens my message immediately, but it takes her almost five minutes to reply.
Kate Lynch
I’m sick
I pounce.
Patel can be here in an hour
Don’t bother
Not a bother—that’s his job
His job is why I’m sick
Body getting used to birth control
Just let me sleep, k?
I stare at the screen as that third message comes through, feeling…something. I don’t remember experiencing this emotion before. Not exasperation. Not impatience. Not anger.
It takes me a while, but I finally find the word I’m looking for: Guilt.
Kate’s my wife now. She’s my sub. I’m responsible for her.
And my demands have made her ill.
Anna pokes her head in from the kitchen. “Would you like me to take a plate up to Miss Kate?” she asks.
I shake my head. “No, thank you. Why don’t you call it a night?”
She starts to clear the table. When she gets to my own empty plate, she doesn’t say a word, just gives me a pitying look. Smothering my irritation, I let her do her job.
Five minutes later, after Anna and Nilsson have both left for the night, I head into the kitchen. Turning on the electric kettle, I take a mug out of the cupboard. While I wait for the water to boil, I dig in the refrigerator.
I find a gnarled root in the crisper drawer—the ginger Nilsson adds to my smoothie every morning. I cut two yellow coins from the end and place them in the bottom of the mug.
Nutmeg used to swear by ginger tea whenever she had an upset stomach. She kept a yellow box of the stuff tucked into her dresser drawer, easy to grab whenever we had to flee a rental after midnight. The entire time we were growing up, neither of us ever saw a fresh ginger root.
I long ago trained myself not to reach for my phone when I think of my sister. I can’t call her. Can’t text. She’s on her own—that’s her choice, because she doesn’t trust me to stay out of her chaotic scams.
Which, honestly, is the only sign of good judgment I’ve ever seen from her.
I wonder where she is now. Maybe she hooked up with one of the wedding guests. She could be fleecing half of Baltimore’s Irish mob, without a thought for what she’ll do once she’s caught. The idea makes me shudder.
The kettle switches off and I pour boiling water over the ginger.
It’s always possible Megan followed Kate and me out of the church, choosing not to hang out with career criminals at the reception we missed.
Maybe she’s set aside her con-artist ways and she’s working a traditional office job, nine to five, drawing a paycheck and paying income tax like a normal, law-abiding citizen.
And maybe she found a secret formula for turning dirt into gold.
That’s as likely as my other pie-in-the-sky dreams.
I fish the ginger out of the mug and deposit it in the trashcan under the sink. The stairs are familiar as I head to the second floor. The guest bedrooms are dark.
I tap on our bedroom door with the knuckle of my free index finger.
Silence.
Kate might be listening to something on headphones. It occurs to me I have no idea what sort of music she likes.
Maybe she’s napping. The last few days have been a lot.
Perhaps she’s decided to ignore me.
That last thought’s the one that makes me open the door. She’s my wife. In my bedroom. Living by my rules. She’s not allowed to ignore me.
I turn the knob quietly, ready to make her pay.
And I’m swamped by a fresh wave of guilt. She is asleep. Her flaming hair curls around her face, the color so bright in the glow of the nightstand lamp that I half expect to hear the ice-blue pillowcase sizzle beneath her cheek.
She looks younger with her face relaxed in sleep. Softer. One arm folds around a pillow, holding it close to her chest like a teddy bear. I can’t catch a glimpse of her Fuck You ink.
I could wake her.
Hell, I could order her down to the dungeon.
I could strap those pretty ankles into a spreader and suspend her wrists from the hook in the ceiling and spend a few hours memorizing more about her—how her chin sets when she’s refusing to admit she’s lost a game, how her teeth close over her lower lip when she’s unsure of her position, how she catches her breath just before she comes…
I could test my self-control for hours, tasting her, smelling her, touching her, even—especially—the soft, raised line of the birth control stick nestled in her arm.
But she’s my wife now. I have as long as I want to learn every inch of her body, every sound she can make. I can let her sleep.
I set the ginger tea on her nightstand and leave the room as silently as I entered.
Back in my office, I dig deeper into the computer accounts of the woman sleeping upstairs.
I study her emails and texts, absorbing more of her voice.
She can clean things up when she wants to, scrubbing away any hint of Irish phrasing, dropping every four-letter word until she sounds like some sort of college professor.
But when she’s angry? Or relaxed? When she’s cutting loose with her crew—not one of whom seems to know she’s a woman…. My Kate’s tongue is sharpest then. She’s funny. Foul. Cruel.
That’s the Kate I’m drawn to. That’s the woman I want to know better.
And so I do as I’ve always done—I study where she’s weak.
Over the next week, I explore where I can best apply pressure. I calculate exactly how much tension she can take before she crumples.
I tell Nilsson to order new clothes for her, an entire wardrobe, from lingerie to evening gowns. I tell him to burn her old things once the new ones arrive.
I tell Anna to vary our meals, to forget about roasts and baked goods and simple flavors. I feed Kate exotic dishes scented with saffron and fennel pollen and cardamom.
I lock down my wife’s access to various sites on the internet—all of Ireland one day, all US government agencies the next. I watch her build workarounds almost as fast as I can destroy them.
Every step of the way, I cover my own trail. I have no delusions that Kate will demurely abandon her former life, just because she’s mine. She’ll attack whenever she thinks she has the upper hand. It’s that fight that fuels me. Fuels both of us.
Just to stir things up more, I set up a private chat room in Winter Reckoning. I limit entrance to people with a new in-game status—Ice Knights, I call them. They’re the best of the best. The cream of the crop. The players I’m considering inviting to work for Lone Wolf.
I send an Ice Knight invitation to MaskedMarauder. To IceKiller and DarkMoney666 and to Shaddow, too. I purposely leave Kate off the list.
She’ll be furious when she learns she’s been left out. I hope she fights back—in the game or elsewhere online, rebelling against all my restrictions. I long for the opportunity to defeat her, to make her pay.
Because online, CyberGhost doesn’t have a safeword.