Page 145 of What We Burn

He does it slow, his palm warm behind my knee as he bends my leg, propping my ankle on his shoulder. For a moment, he just looks, his thumb stroking the inside of my thigh.

“There.” He presses a kiss to the inside of my knee then helps me into clean underwear and a baggy T-shirt and sweatpants. “You want socks?”

I shake my head, and he just grins at me then strips the bed and bundles it into a pile at the door. Returns with fresh linens and remakes the whole thing while I sit there, loose-limbed and light-headed. My body aches, but the pain is background noise now.

“You want in?” he asks when he’s finished, and I climb in.

“Thank you,” I say as he tucks the blankets around my shoulders. The gentleness would hurt if it wasn’t so perfectly balanced by the bruises on my hips, the raw scrape along my thighs from his stubble.

“You need the heating pad?” he asks.

I think about it. Roll my hips, testing. “Surprisingly? No.”

His mouth quirks. He kisses me again, softer than before, but not shy. Not ever.

“Next month, wildcat,” he says. “You call me first.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

MILO

Cell phones are needy bastards.

Kill the signal and a phone doesn’t sit there patiently waiting for service to come back. It panics. It hunts. It throws itself at any known and available network like a drunk at closing time, desperate to connect to anything warm and willing. Which is why the device in my backpack—a custom-built rig the size of a paperback novel—is the most effective tool I own. Flip the switch, and every phone within forty feet loses its carrier signal. My rig then broadcasts a stronger “twin” signal that tricks the phone into treating it like a tower it already trusts. Everything looks normal on their end.

My dashboard shows them all connected to KittenNet.

The network gets me through the door. The exploit suite does the rest—temporary mirrors pulling messages, photos, app data, browsing history, and saved passwords. All of it copied and cataloged before your beer gets warm.

I’m at a high-top near the back of Sully’s Bar & Grill, nursing a Coke I ordered fourteen minutes ago and haven’t touched. The backpack is on the floor between my feet, the rig humming quietly under the zipper. My laptop is open and angled toward the wall, but I’m working from my phone through a separate hardened connection.

Several phones have connected to KittenNet in the last six minutes. But I’m only interested in three—Chris Walton’s iPhone 14, Darren Ricks’s Samsung Galaxy, and Jake Petersen’s iPhone 12, which has fourteen unread texts from his mom.

For God’s sake, Jake, call your mother.

The data is already streaming. I can see the packets flowing on my screen, each phone dumping its contents like a confession. I’ve got a script running that sorts everything by category and timestamps, flagging anything connected to Brock Davis, Sage Adams, Tyler Kavanagh, or any of the other keywords I’ve been tracking for months.

But right now my focus is on the show playing out twenty feet in front of me. Because Holden just walked through the door.

He doesn’t look like a man about to interrogate three potential accomplices to a sex criminal. He looks like a detective doing follow-up. His jacket is on, badge visible, as he scans the room. He walks over with the unhurried pace of a man picking up dry cleaning.

This is the quiet follow-up ordered after I went back through Brock’s dog-training chat and connected it to Tyler’s crew. The Lodge proved men like them were already organizing online, and we suspected they’d moved somewhere more secure. Now we need one of these idiots to show us where. Tyler gave us Chris, Darren, and Jake. I pulled their numbers from the old data and found their regular Thursday-night booth at Sully’s.

We considered doing to them what we did to Tyler—picking them up and beating the shit out of them—but panic is more useful when the target doesn’t know what you already suspect. Holden rattles the tree. I watch what falls out.

I’m not saying I’m brilliant, but if all evidence points to me, I’ll claim the title.

“Chris Walton?”

Chris looks up from his beer. He’s mid-twenties, broad-shouldered, with the kind of thick neck that comes from either lifting weights or a genetic predisposition to looking like a thumb. His eyes narrow. “Who’s asking?”

Holden taps his badge. “Detective Cross. I’m following up with some questions about a friend of yours, Brock Davis. From my understanding, he left town after a house party back in May.”

“I already talked to cops about this.”

“Some information has come to light. New situation. Different questions.” Holden pulls up a chair without being invited and sits at the end of their booth, blocking their exit. “Won’t take long. Just need to fill in some blanks.”

Darren Ricks is across from Chris. Skinnier, dark-haired, the kind of face that fades into the background at parties. He’s got his phone on the table in front of him. His thumbs stopped moving the second Holden sat down. Good. That means KittenNet has had uninterrupted access for at least a minute.