25. Vex

25

VEX

" W here are you?" I ask when Calista answers her phone.

"I'm scared, Ti," she says, and her voice shakes.

"Where are you?"

"The boardwalk. By the Paramount on Ocean."

"Talk to me," I say.

I can hear her panting as she walks. "It's probably nothing. But there's a black car, a sedan. I've seen it before. On Mom's street the morning I crept out. I think it's a woman. It must have followed me from Mom's house all the way to the shore, even though I didn't notice it at first. I thought maybe I was being paranoid. But then…"

I straddle my bike. "But then, what?"

"Every time I stopped, it stopped."

"I'm coming to you. Eight minutes, max. Go into one of the buildings. Find the public. Find the cops. Whatever you need to do. I'm on my way."

I'm glad I'm on my bike because I can steer it onto the fucking boardwalk. My heart races as I skirt through traffic, never more grateful for all the gritting that's happened on these roads.

An old guy takes his time making a turn, and I ride in front of him. It's a risk, but I need to get to Calista. Tell her I'm sorry for walking out this morning. Help her find out whoever the bitch that's trailing her is.

As long as she doesn't get to her first.

The minutes feel like hours as I turn onto Fifth Avenue, looking all the while for a black sedan. My first priority is to get to Calista, but if I see a black sedan lurking, I'm taking out the fucker's tires just to be on the safe side.

I pass the pale green Wonder Bar and drive straight onto the pedestrian area next to the iconic theatre. At the sound of the bike, Calista steps out from behind the concrete stairs.

She's shaking, but I don't have time to comfort her right now.

"I don't have leathers," she says, her voice quavering.

"Get on the damn bike, Cal," I say, and she does as I say, her long legs climbing on behind me. "I'll drive safe."

Her arms wrap tightly around my waist. Another time, I'll look back on this moment as monumental. Having a woman I love on the back of my bike.

And, Jesus, now is not the time for such big revelations.

I don't have time to bask in that love right now either.

I look behind us and don't see a car, but I do see a woman walking towards us who seems vaguely familiar, though I can't place her, and I don't have time to figure out who she is now.

When I don't see the black sedan, I pull out onto Ocean, driving down the shore. I keep looking in the side mirror, expecting to see it pull out behind us. But it doesn't.

Calista buries her hands beneath my thick leather jacket. I can feel how cold they are. Why the woman isn't wearing any gloves, I don't know.

I weave in and out of side streets, doubling back and looping around until I am certain that no one is following us.

Once I'm confident, I ride back to my house, but I immediately ride the bike into the garage before killing the engine.

I help Calista off the bike and climb off myself before she throws her arms around me. "Thank you."

She buries her head into the side of my neck, her feet dangling toward the floor. I press the button on the garage wall to close the door and enter the code on the panel to let myself into the mudroom off the kitchen, all without putting her down.

It's only when she hears the door click shut that she looks up and lets go of me to drop to the ground.

"I should have told you before," she says. "Although, that could have been nothing. The car was gone once you got to me. Maybe it was just?—"

"Calista." I cut her off firmly. "You're okay. You're safe."

She stumbles to lean back against the counter and slips her bag off her shoulders until it reaches the floor. Her fingers cover her lips as she swallows. "I took a photograph. It's blurry, but I took one."

"Go take your coat off. I'll make coffee, and I'm going to call Halo to see if him and some of the guys can look for the black sedan and see if they can be ready based on what we can find out."

Calista does as I say, and when I finally hand her the coffee after speaking with Halo, she wraps her fingers around it.

"Can't running a badass organization be enough for you?" I say.

"What?" Calista's face shifts.

"You don't usually get stalked and chased and followed through doing legal shit. Have you still not learned when enough is enough?"

I pace with my own cup, then take a breath. Adrenaline is ruling me right now. And I almost forget the conversation I had with Switch.

"Fuck." I place my mug down on the wooden mantle and then grip the thick wood with both hands. "When it comes to you, the wires between wanting to look after you and wanting to kill you are always going to get crossed."

Calista huffs. "Guess I have a fifty-fifty chance of surviving then."

I turn to face her. "Really?"

"I don't know. Inappropriate humor is a deflection from the brooding man by the fireplace. Your hair looks good, by the way."

"My sister still does it." I reach for the photograph of the two of us camping and touch my fingertip to her cheek. "Maybe it's time we found those kids we used to be." I grab my mug and move to sit next to her on the sofa. To the right of her like I always used to. "The ones who would tell each other everything."

"You really believe we can go back to that?"

"To being friends? Yeah. Sleeping together doesn't change that."

Calista leans back on the sofa and starts to tell me everything. All the details I overheard on the phone. About the people they have investigated. About Orson, the man doing the investigating. About the girl with the one-night stand.

Everything.

When she's finished, I look at her. "You know what we should do?"

She shakes her head.

I tip my chin at her bag. "Do you have your laptop in there?"

"I have two. Company and personal non-traceable."

"We should get to work. Our two heads were always better than one."

Calista smiles sadly. "When we hacked into the school reports?"

"You came up with how to hit the network from the math department computers."

"And you came up with the code."

"So, what are we waiting for?"

I grab my laptop from the office, and she removes one of hers from her bag. As I'm opening mine up, there's one more question I need to ask. "Do you still hack? Outside of things for work?"

Calista bites her lip as she looks at something on her computer. "Sometimes. Yes."

"Why?"

She shrugs. "Because sometimes corporations and individuals have way more money than they need that was built on the back of other people's hard labor at a less-than-fair price. I like to redistribute it."

"Give me an example."

"Okay, so you heard about that firm that has a workforce that's seventy percent women but removed birth control from their health care plan option?"

It was all over the news. "Sure."

"Their CFO loves classic rock, so I found his social media platform and figured out what exactly he was passionate about. I made a flyer of five big bands I knew were his favorite and said they were doing a festival together. Made a website for it and everything. Got his email, sent him the flyer, and invited him to register using the website. The link activated the code. I stole two million dollars and sent it to Planned Parenthood, who want to enshrine reproductive rights into law."

"How did I never hear about them losing that kind of money?"

"Because I hit it nice and slow. Super small amounts. I set it to mimic amounts they are used to paying. Set up the bank account name to mimic one of their vendors with a small difference, a Cyrillic letter as opposed to a regular English alphabet letter. No one in their finance team noticed. Took the two million, sent it to a bank in the Caribbean. A friend withdrew it and sailed it back to New York. It was cycled through a shell company and presented as five-thousand-dollar donations to four hundred different centers."

"Why split the donations like that?"

"Too low for anyone to be overly suspicious."

I huff at that. "Clever. But there's no one who would fall into the organized crime category?" My heart thuds in my chest.

"Not recently. And I feel like this is someone working alone."

She dismisses the organized crime angle quickly, and I don't know if that's a good or bad thing. "Why's that? You know better than to close out variables."

Calista smiles at me. "You and your variables. I guess some things never change. I haven't heard your design of experiments speech in a long while either."

I roll my eyes. "You know both things are powerful. But back to variables. Why do you think it's an individual?"

She pulls out her phone and shows me the texts. "I feel like they are the messages of an angry man, but that doesn't tie with the woman we just saw."

Rage is a wild thing. It's like a forest fire. Unpredictable. Violent. Destructive.

And mine grows as I take in every name he's called her, every threat he's delivered. I want to find the fucker and cut his balls off for threatening my…

I nearly said woman.

"Fuck," I mutter. "We should check where these messages are coming from. Maybe we can?—"

"Ti." My name is softly spoken as she reaches for my wrist. "I run a well-respected cybersecurity firm. We've done all the things that technology allows."

I take a deep breath. "Right. Of course you have. Why haven't you blocked him? Why haven't you got a new number?"

She lets go of my wrist. "He already found this number. Whoever it is will find out the new one if they really want to badly enough. Both Orson and the police agree on a couple of things. First, I need as much evidence as possible in the event we find out who they are. And second, for as long as they have this number and are content to menace me virtually, I'm safe."

"Until he comes looking for you."

Calista glances out of the window towards the street. "Unless it's a woman and she already has."

"Okay. Then let's deal with that first. Let Orson know what just happened. And I'll see if I can find a feed from any security cameras I have access to."

Calista raises an eyebrow. "I thought I came up with the plans and you were my stalwart aide."

"Might be how you remember it, babe. Not how it is now."

"And what security cameras do you have feeds from?"

I just stare at her, not answering.

She barks out a laugh. "You're not going to tell me?"

I shake my head. "Might have to kill you. Club business is club business, babe."

"Can't decide if that was hot or rude."

I put my hand around her neck and tug her to me before kissing her firmly. "It's hot."

She shoves me away playfully. "Jury's still out on that. But I will call Orson, and you do your magic shit. And I'll have to call into a business meeting I was meant to attend."

I'm about to reach for her again, because one kiss wasn't enough, when my phone rings and I see Alessio's name on the screen. Calista glances at it, and her smile fades.

And I realize I'd do just about anything to put it back. So, I ignore the call.

"Let's get to work."

I start with the cameras in front of my parent's house, but they are angled toward the house, not away from it. The car was parked in such a way that the camera aimed at the drive doesn't capture the black car's plate.

Calista joins her call sitting professionally at my dining table. Occasionally I tune into what she's saying but quickly tune her out again as listening to all those smart words from her mouth gives me boner.

I'm sure there's some fancy word for getting turned on by a highly intelligent woman.

Over the next few hours, I find a security camera feed from the city that shows the black car. But there is no plate on the front either, so we can't trace it. It looks new, though. A Toyota. Makes me wonder if there's a way to find out who bought a new, black Toyota in the last twelve months. I'm sure it's a lot, but maybe a name will pop for Calista.

I've sat in the same spot the whole time. But since Calista's call ended, she has sat on the sofa, the armchair, the rug, and then back onto the armchair. Although, the second time, she's thrown both her legs over the chair arm.

"You got any tricks for enhancing this image more than I can?" I ask her.

She unravels herself from the chair and sits right next to me on the sofa to look over my shoulder. The scent of her is intoxicating. So is her proximity. "Hmm. I have a professor friend who created software to fill in the gaps on images using digital clues and artificial intelligence. He might be able to help."

The he bothers me. A little flicker of jealousy seeping through my bones. I reach out and stroke the narrow band of smooth skin between the top of her jeans and her sweater. "He?"

"Professor Harry Stokes. And while that jealous growl is quite attractive, you have utterly nothing to worry about."

"I'm not jealous," I say, dipping my fingertip beneath her waistband.

Calista bites down on her lower lip. "Me thinks thou doth protest too much."

"Jesus, that sounds like something King's old lady might say."

"Shakespeare?"

"Exactly. That's how Rae and King bonded. Her telling him he reminded her of Shakespeare's tragic kings, and him freaking the fuck out because she was so much smarter than him."

"Oh, like you and me then?"

I try not to laugh, but I can't help it. "Touché." I take a lock of her hair and twirl it around my finger and use it to tug her closer to brush my lips over hers. "What else are we?"

Calista's face softens. "I think after all this time and all the hurt, we're actually friends."

"We're that and more," I say.

Calista shrugs. "I'm not sure I need a label for it. We're friends. We've had great sex. It's hard to deny we're attracted to each other, at this point. But in some ways, we're still strangers."

I know what she means.

"Then let's go back to the beginning and get to know each other."

"What do you want to know?" she asks.

I close my laptop and put it on the table. "The fun stuff. Do you still collect vinyl? What's your favorite drink? What do you like to do when you're not working?"

Calista closes her own laptop. "Yes. Champagne. And I'm always working."

Champagne. I make a note of that. "You know what I mean."

"Let me see then…yes, I still collect vinyl. So much so that when I had my house remodeled, I added a listening room."

"Shit. How big's your house?"

"It's a seven-thousand-square-foot home in Santa Monica. Pool. Five-minute walk to the ocean. The listening room is my favorite. It's set up with all the right acoustics to really bring out the sound of the vinyl."

"You sound like one of those wine snobs who eat strawberries to bring out the flavor of the champagne."

Calista laughs. "I do that. And I suppose I shouldn't mention that I have a hundred-and-fifty-bottle wine cellar."

I glance out the window. The sky is gray. The shoveled snowbanks are turning gray and slushy. Matt, my neighbor, hurries out of the car and tugs his beanie low over his ears. "You missing it?"

She sighs. "The sunshine, yes. My own bed, absolutely. My first work coffee of the day with Becca, my right hand. What about you? Fill in the gaps for me too. Do you still read fiction?"

I tip my head in the direction of the bookshelf. "Occasionally. But I prefer to be doing something physical with my free time these days, as what I do for the club is sedentary. Switch and I go running in the summer, camping, fishing, hiking. That might change this summer now that he's got a wife. We bought this place probably four house flips ago. Was going to be a property we'd flip and sell, but I kinda grew to love the place. Switch helped me fix it up, so I bought him out and kept it."

Calista rests her elbow on the back of the sofa. "How did Switch become your best friend?"

"Same vibe. Love long rides. The brotherhood. Our moms."

Calista laughs at that. "Hard to imagine big bad bikers missing their moms. But I kind of get it. You and your mom were always close."

"Yeah. And Switch and I… we're less…chaotic, than some of my brothers in the Outlaws."

I notice Calista bristle at the mention of the club, but today isn't the day to push that. Today, I want to get to know her more.

"You think you'll ever come back here to live?" I ask.

"Is that a loaded question?"

I shake my head. "Not at all."

She sighs and bites down on the side of her thumb. "If I'm honest, I'm really torn. I used the trip to see the banking client as an excuse to break my routine, making it hard for my stalker while we tried to find out who they were. I wasn't even going to come and see Mom. I'm glad I did, but…"

I reach for her hand. "Now you're worried about her?"

Calista nods. "I wonder if I was meant to come back here now so we could…I don't know, reconnect. Even though I hired Melanie to look after her and got her in the process of understanding what is happening to her, even though I have all the money in the world to throw at the problem, money can't always buy time, can it?"

I put my arm around her and pull her close to my side. The way she tucks in beneath it makes me sigh with satisfaction. "No, sweetheart, it can't."

"So, what am I supposed to do?" Her voice is small. It sucks that she's hurting.

"I don't know, sweetheart. But we'll figure it out together. You don't have to figure it out alone."