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“You keep kissing me, I’ll be fucking you again, very quickly.” I kiss the side of her neck, and she moans.

“I’m not complaining,” her voice is soft as she moves her nails up and down my back. I suck on her nipple hard, giving it a bite, making her moan. “You have no idea how much I’ve been thinking about this.”

“Now you can tell me, what you’ve been thinking about, and how you want me to make you come again.” I lean over her looking at her, and I see her blush which makes me laugh. “Blushing really, I’ve just licked your pussy, and you had my dick in your mouth…” She slams her hand over my mouth shaking her head.

“Stop.”

I pull out of her finally, already hard for the next round. “So, tell me, what does my naughty little girl want me to do to her?” My finger moves up and down her pussy, coating her with my cum, flicking her clit making her jolt and I smile.

“I… I want…” She stops and breaks eye contact with me.

“Come on, we’ve got all night. Don’t be shy now.” I lean down closer to her, licking her lips, biting the side of her neck, then freeze when the words escape her beautiful mouth in a whisper.

“Choke me.”

I smile against her lips, I knew when I choked her as the Ghost she liked it, but now she wants it. Fuck she wants it. I think I’m going to make her love sex in a whole different way.

I lean up, wrap my hand around her neck, and smile. Tonight is going to be fucking amazing.

Twenty-One

Miles

The files have been open for six hours.

That's not unusual. For the first time since I picked up this case, I don't feel like I'm chasing scraps. I feel like I'm standing at the edge of the truth. The tattoo isn't a clue anymore, it's the link. It’s the piece that connects the network to the organization that's been moving girls. They buried their tracks so well nobody saw the pattern, until now.

The burner phone sits beside the rig on my desk. The alert system hums through its background checks. The partition keeps working through the network database, everything runs exactly as it should.

I have plans with Sadie tonight at eight o'clock. It’s nothing formal, she suggested it after regionals, something casual, and I said yes before I'd even finished thinking it through. That's becoming a habit with her, she asks, and somehow my answer is already there.

I’ve got two hours until seven, that’s enough time for me to look through more of the footage I’ve been breaking through.

I pull up the network map and start cross-referencing the tattoo database hit against the financial traces I built last week. I’m looking for the overlap between the documented prison network and the money movement. The place where the two threads become one thread.

The screens flicker, only for a milli second, but I notice it.

I stop typing.

It flickers again.

There’s one second of static. Then two. It’s long enough for someone else to blame a power fluctuation, or a hardware glitch. There are dozens of explanations, but my body dismisses every one of them before my brain finishes the list.

Suddenly, the screens go black. All five monitors have gone completely black. The rig, and everything on the desk, but not the laptop, which rules out hardware failure.

There’s three seconds of darkness, then everything comes back on line.

Well, not my desktop, not the partition, and none of the files I'd left open.

There’s a camera feed instead. It’s grainy, silent and live. For half a second, my brain refuses to make sense of it. It’s my camera, the one I built into the laptop I never use because I always disable it. It’s the same one I disabled six weeks ago and apparently someone has just re-enabled it remotely.

I'm looking at myself, sitting at my desk. From my own laptop. In real time.

Then the text appears across the feed in big letters, in a clean font.

YOU'RE WATCHING US. WE'RE WATCHING YOU.

My jaw tightens. My hands are already moving, reaching for the keyboard, running the counter-intrusion protocol I have set up for exactly this, when the images start loading underneath the text.