Page 68 of Untamed Sinner

I glance back at her. "You never asked."

"I asked if you had a computer."

"You asked if I could run facial recognition. I said yes." I push the door open and motion her inside. "How did you think I did it?"

“I don’t know. A Ouija board.” She steps past me into the comms room, and I watch her take it in: the three curved monitors mounted on the far wall, the server rack humming quietly in the corner, the secondary workstation with its array of external drives and backup systems. The room is small—maybe ten by twelve—but every inch is optimized.

"I have an electronics hard-on right now," she says, running her hand along the console of the main workstation. "This is beautiful."

"It's efficient."

"It's overkill." She runs her fingers along the edge of the center monitor. "What is this, a 49-inch ultrawide?"

"Forty-nine-inch curved, 5120 by 1440 resolution." I move past her to wake the system. "The side displays stay dedicated to live feeds. I don’t like windows stacked on top of each other."

"And the server rack?"

"Custom build. Commercial-grade workstation. More processing power than most businesses." I pull up the secure email interface. "Redundant storage. Air-gapped archives. Dedicated AI accelerators. It’ll chew through facial recognition, satellite imagery, financial records, and communications metadata simultaneously without lag."

"Stop.” Mandy fans herself. "You're turning me on."

I pull her between my legs, my hands on her hips under the shirt. "It’s just hardware."

"No, Adrian." She loops her arms around my neck. “It’s foreplay.”

I bite her nipple through the shirt, gratified when she gasps. "And I haven’t shown you the network architecture yet."

She grips my hair, pulling my head back. “Are you flirting with me, Hendricks?”

“I don’t flirt.” I slide my fingers between her legs and into her, watching her cheeks flush and her eyes go hazy. As I pump into her slowly, I snag a chair with my foot and roll it over. I ease my hand out and guide her to the seat. "Stop trying to distract me. We have work to do."

Breathing heavily, she watches as I lick her from my fingers. She tugs the shirt down, her thighs pressed together. “You are a fucking menace.”

Ignoring the fact that I’m harder than I’ve ever been, I turn back to the monitors and pull up the encrypted email from my contact.

The files load one after another. Raw images. Metadata. Search logs. Every dead end Marcus hit trying to identify the girl.

Mandy rolls the chair closer as I open the first file. Time to find out why someone went to so much trouble to make a woman disappear.

The young woman’s face fills the screen.

"Blown up like this, she looks really young," Mandy says quietly. “But she’s a little older than me when I was taken.”

For a second, all I can think about is the men who touched her. Most of them are dead. The fact that I wasn’t the one who killed them feels like a personal failing.

I force my attention back to the screen, zooming back out to take in the full frame. "Let's see what the photo itself tells us. Maybe we can ID her that way."

I start with the background. The setting is clearly equestrian—wooden stall doors visible behind her, hay bales stacked in the corner, riding equipment hanging on the wall. The lighting is natural, streaming in from what looks like a large window or open door to the left.

"Stable," Mandy says. "High-end, from the look of it."

"Agreed." I zoom in on the stall doors. "Look at the hardware. Brass fixtures, custom ironwork. This isn't a public riding facility."

"Private estate?"

"Most likely." I shift focus to the girl herself. "Now, look at what she's wearing."

Mandy leans in closer, her hair brushing my shoulder. "Riding jacket. Breeches. Boots."