I wasn’t going to be able to sit down or walk right, and by the smirk on Stark’s face, he had no sympathy for my current condition.
I flipped him off and made my way to the bathroom. I heard him rustling around in the other room and decided I needed to take a hot shower to get some feeling back in my lower extremities. When the water was running over me, chasing off the bubbles from the body wash I had slathered all over me, I noticed I had marks from him all over my body. Ones I hadn’t noticed him leaving. Marks I’d been too caught up in him and how he made me feel to protest.
Fingerprints in tiny blue bruises on the outside of my breasts and across my hips. Red marks from either his stubble or his teeth on the inside of my thighs. White half-moons in my palm where I had dug my fingers in so hard, I broke the skin. Pink lines along the inside of my thighs where his diamonds had dug into my skin. Even if I couldn’t still feel him between my legs and deep within my body, there would be no forgetting him because he’d left his signature all over my skin. I got to him. I made him react and I wore the proof of his humanity all over my skin. There was something addictive and alluring about that.
We both lost control, yet kept each other in check in our own way simply by being together, both physically and emotionally in the moment.
I was finishing drying off and wrapping myself up in a towel when the bathroom door opened and Stark walked in with my laptop in his hands. He’d found his glasses somewhere and had donned a pair of white boxer briefs. He looked like he should be selling expensive sports drinks or designer underwear, not tapping on a computer and frowning at whatever he was seeing on the screen.
“Your email pinged when you were in the shower. I wouldn’t have paid any attention to it but it seems to be in some kind of code and I . . .” he trailed off and gave me a sheepish look.
“And you couldn’t resist trying to figure it out.” I shook my head. The man was incorrigible. His brain never stopped.
I took the laptop from him and almost dropped it when I saw it was sent from Lisbeth Salander. I shifted my eyes up to Stark who was watching me with open curiosity. “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She’s one of the most famous fictional hackers in all of modern culture. This has to be from someone who knows who I am.”
I clicked to open the email hoping to God it wasn’t a virus or a Trojan Horse that would attach spyware to my computer. I would have to run a scan just to be sure, but I needed to see who was reaching out to me in such a cagey fashion.
The body of the email was nothing but a series of numbers in sets of two. Rows of them that went on and on. It wasn’t signed and when Stark went and got his own laptop to trace the IP address, neither one of us was surprised when it traced back to a proxy server that bounced the signal around a thousand times making it untraceable. He took the computer from me so I could get dressed and told me to meet him in the kitchen. Now, I could see those wheels in his head turning and practically hear the gears grinding as he poked at the keyboard and ran his eyes over the numbers. It was obviously a code of some kind, but I was at a loss as to what the key was.
When I made it to the kitchen, he had both his computer and my computer open next to each other and his was running some kind of program. There were thousands of numbers flashing across the screen, blinking as they rolled by.
“What are you doing?” I propped myself up on a stool next to him and watched as he tapped his fingers on the counter. He should look ridiculous, a giant beast of a man covered in ink and heavy muscles, standing in nothing more than his underwear and glasses holding a computer. He didn’t. He looked smart and sexy. He looked completely comfortable in his decorated skin. There was nothing cold about Snowden Stark at the moment. I could feel heat radiating off every inch of his naked skin and it made me lean in closer.
“Running an algorithm that traces any instances of those numbers located together anywhere. It’ll place them in addresses, phone numbers, location coordinates, and if anything hits, it’ll tell us.”
I shot him a look out of the corner of my eye. Yeah, I was definitely back to being impressed.
“How long will that take?”
He shrugged and frowned at the screen. “Depends on if it hits on anything. Did you say the sender is a character from a book?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
His eyes narrowed and a muscle ticked in his jaw as he cut a look to me. “What if it’s a book cipher? The numbers could be chapters or page numbers. The second number could be the word on the page you need to decipher the message.”
I blinked and looked at the numbers. It was simple but complicated at the same time. “You think?”
“Only one way to find out.” He picked up his cell and opened his Kindle app. After a few minutes, wherein he bought the book and downloaded it, he told me to read off the numbers and then rattled off words that corresponded with the numbers. We figured out quickly that it alternated between chapter number and page number depending on how big the number was, but the second number in the row was always the word we were looking for. I watched his lips move as he silently counted the spaces out on the page and marveled at how quickly he had put it all together. I liked to think I would have figured it out on my own, but could begrudgingly admit I wouldn’t have seen the connection as quickly as he did.
When he was done dictating, I gaped wordlessly at the message in front of me.
She found a hacker the same way she found me when she wanted out of the Point. The girl was fearless when she wanted something. She wasn’t scared of the dark or the monsters that hid inside of it. The guy she found coded the message for her and figured out a way to send it to me so that it couldn’t be traced.
Julia Grace had seen the stories about her stepfather on the news. She knew the girls from the streets, the ones from the kind of homes that had driven them into Goddard’s clutches in the first place, weren’t going to talk. She knew no one would believe them, but they would believe her. She wanted to tell her story. She wanted to press charges. She wanted to see the man rot behind bars. She wanted to come back home, but she needed to know that she would be safe. That someone could protect her until Goddard stood trial.
“If she comes back, I can put Nassir or the cop on it. Either one of them would go out of their way to see that man go down, and both have a soft spot for girls on the run.” I felt his presence steady and strong behind me.
“If she presses charges, our plans get derailed. He needs to be alive, both physically and digitally, in order to stand trial, Stark.” The idea of letting go of my revenge, my payback, was a hard pill to swallow.
“He does, but we already took his money and he doesn’t have a friend left in the community. He’s not going to be able to afford any kind of defense. And chances are once he’s in lock up, he won’t last very long, so that life insurance policy will go to Julia anyway. Cons don’t like child molesters. They like them even less when they spent most of their tenure being tough on crime. Who knows how many of them are there because of Goddard? This is for the best, Noe. Julia needs this. She wants to tell her story because she knows people will listen. She wants to speak for all those girls who can’t.”
I knew he was right, this was what was supposed to happen, but then I remembered the dirty cop touching me and Goddard watching me with those cold eyes as I was tied to a chair. He was going to kill me and had no remorse about it. He treated me like I was disposable. I curled my hands into fists on the counter and lowered my head so he couldn’t see the conflict in my eyes.
“Make sure your people can keep her safe and I’ll reach out to her.” I figured she would be checking the email address she’d reached out to me with. I would send her an email and see if she responded. After everything that had happened, it felt so anticlimactic and easy. A little girl was going to take him down with nothing more than her appearance and a few words. I was back to wondering if I was nearly as in control as I told myself I was.
Stark ran his hand down the length of my spine and gave my ass a little tap. He told me he was going to make a few calls and left me stewing in my own thoughts.
Once Goddard was locked up, once he went down, I had no reason to hang around Snowden Stark anymore. I wouldn’t need him and he would have no use for me. I was going to have to get back to my life, back to being unfettered and free to jump from place to place. Suddenly, the idea of not being weighed down, not being pinned by something heavy, wasn’t as appealing as it always had been before.
Even when things were easy, they were still incredibly hard. I guess it was a good thing I was used to sleeping on the ground because I was going to be back there before I knew it.
Stark
She was young . . . so young.
She was also small, except for her baby bump. It was hard to look at. She was hard to look at, but luckily Nassir’s knock-out wife was great with skittish young women who had everything on the line. She was leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of us when it came to assuring the frightened teenager that nothing would happen to her. She soothed her, calmed her, and generally made the girl believe that she was making the right choice. Keelyn Gates cut her imposing, quiet husband a look, practically demanding that he make sure her words to Julia Grace were true. In the end, it was decided that Nassir was the better bet to keep the teenager safe after she filed a formal complaint with Titus against her stepfather. The cop told us that the police department was in disarray with the sudden loss of not only the assistant commissioner, but also several beat cops and a couple of higher ranking officers who had all been on Goddard’s payroll. Titus was currently running the station and trying to do the job of twenty men. He grudgingly admitted that the girl was better off under Nassir’s protection. His name carried more weight than a police badge; no one could deny it.