Page 119 of Get A Fix

“Okay.”

“But if you hunt on the dark web, which Voss uses because he’s shady as shit, him and his boss, Rhodes, he found that Conrad Harris links to Terrence Moss and Darius Hawthorne.”

“Right.”

“And if you search up associates of Darius Hawthorne, among many is Jared Colter, owner of Torus Intercession, based out of Chicago, and Torus International, headquartered in Paris.”

“Yeah, but I still don’t––”

“Torus Intercession is trending on the internet at the moment because everyone is reporting on me because I’m here with you.”

“So this is all my fault.”

I squinted at him. “Dial back the guilt, willya?”

“No, I––”

“You’re a celebrity. People want to know what’s going on with you, especially when a new guy suddenly pops up and it looks pretty hot and heavy in pictures.”

“It is hot and heavy,” he snapped at me.

“Don’t sound so happy about it,” I grumbled.

“That is not—could you just finish, please?”

“So, just like everyone else, it’s easy to go to the Torus website and find Jared Colter, and easier still to look up his employees. Even better, there’s a picture of me, and voilà, there I am, the new man in Ashford Lennox’s life.”

“I hate this.”

“You have no privacy as a public figure. You know that.”

“I do, but it’s never almost gotten someone I love killed before.”

I let the love part go. This was not the time to point out that he’d just used a huge word like it was normal. “No one was almost anything, but once they found me, all they had to do was look you up, and there you are in Maine, attending a wedding at the Castine Harbor Inn.”

“The internet will be the death of us all,” Ash stated.

I scoffed. “That’s dramatic.”

His scowl was instant. “It’s true.”

“When the machines rise, you mean?” I asked innocently.

Pulling the throw pillow from behind my back, he whacked me in the face with it until I curled up into a ball laughing.

“You understand that she could have shot you,” he yelled at me.

“She needed me,” I told him, uncurling and looking up at him. “Her plan was to have me call Jared and then have Jared call Darius. As plans go, not horrible, especially with a ten-million-dollar payday at stake.”

He fell down onto the bed, facing me, and pushed my hair out of my face. “I was terrified that she was going to kill you.”

“You hit her in the face with a foam bat,” I reminded him, grinning. “You were great under pressure.”

He stared at me, saying nothing.

“Hello?”

“I’ve decided something.”