Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
COLTEN
Leaving the apartment knowing Lexi is pissed at me is harder than it should be, but she needs time, and I need to give it to her.
The least I can do after dropping so many bombs on her in such a short amount of time is to give her a few hours by herself to process everything.
Plus, she really needs to eat something, and despite my best efforts to convince her to come out for breakfast, I didn’t get any response other than to tell me to fuck off.
I have a few errands I need to run, anyway. Starting with chasing up the only solid lead I have on who tried to abduct Lexi and ending with picking up my girl’s surprise.
I think she’s going to like it, and I really fucking hope it’ll make her a little less angry at me for…everything.
I pull into the parking lot of the Seattle branch of Fan Faves and tug my laptop from the passenger seat. They’ve upped their security since the last time I hacked into the system, and it was taking far too long to crack it from my apartment.
Once I’ve broken through their firewall and connected to their in-house system using the same internet connection they do, it’s only a few minutes before I’m downloading the reports I need.
Every conversation Lexi has had on the app, as well as all the personal details for each of her subscribers, is in my possession within a matter of minutes.
It’s going to take time to go through each subscriber and rule them out as a suspect, but at least I have something to go off now, something I didn’t have a few hours ago.
I still have another hour before I can go to my next meeting, so I move the car to another parking lot and start going through some of Lexi’s more recent conversations.
At this point, I’m hurdling over boundaries like it’s a professional sport, but it’s nothing new for me. Not when I installed cameras around her house and tracking devices into her phone and every one of her shoes years ago. This is just a drop in the ocean.
Nothing jumps out at me initially.
Most of the conversations are surface level, and although it would make things a hell of a lot easier, there are no overt threats.
I tap the edges of the laptop as I think about my next steps. Some of her more loyal fans were in the live stream she did last night. I didn’t see anything come through in real time, but I was also very fucking distracted, so there’s every chance I missed something.
Bringing up the chat log for the live, I browse through the comments.
It would be pretty stupid to post something threatening in such a public forum, and whoever tried to take her was smart enough to bypass all of Cruz’s security, which means it’s unlikely he would make such a rookie mistake, but not totally impossible.
Sifting through hundreds of comments that are mostly made up of emojis and “that’s so hot” is beginning to make the words blur together, and I drop my head back, giving my eyes the break they so desperately need.
Once I’m finished with this log, I’ll head to my next appointment and pick it back up when I’m home with a bigger screen.
Not that that’s going to help, but at least my neck won’t be aching the way it is now.
I open my eyes and stifle a yawn as I read through a series of comments I missed yesterday, obviously too distracted by watching Lexi come apart in front of my eyes.
But it’s the very last one before she ended the live that makes the air whoosh from my chest.
Unknown: You’re mine, Wildcat. If you let him touch you, he’s dead.