Page 44 of Business vs. Pleasure

An hour was how long it took for Ricardo to create a completely different profile on RateYourHit. Well, the profile itself only took a few minutes to put together. Getting it approved by the admins? That was a different story. In fact, that part usually took weeks thanks to the vetting involved.

When the owner of the site owed Ricardo a favor? Things could be… expedited. Not things that involved looking into other members, unfortunately, but Ricardo would take what he could get.

Remember that thing with your mother-in-law?

Allen

Cashing in your favor?

Yes, and I need it taken care of fast and discreet.

FFS. What do you want?

Breathe a word about it to anyone, even another admin, I’ll know about it.

Fine. What do you want?

Exactly thirty-seven minutes later, the profile was approved.

Allen

We’re even now, right?

We’ll see.

I hate you so much.

Do you want me to tell her what I did? And that you hired me?

HATE. YOU.

(halo emoji)

He chuckled to himself as he sent the new profile to Heidi.

“What’s so funny?” August’s words were laced with suspicion as he entered the suite. “You have that evil grin. What did you do?”

“Nothing.” Ricardo let the grin come fully to life just because he loved that “oh fuck” look on August’s face.

Still eyeing him warily, August came closer to the bed where Ricardo was sitting. “You gonna fill me in or what?”

Ricardo sobered and glanced down at his phone, where a text had come in from Heidi confirming that their Brazilian ex-husband job had been assigned to the ghost profile. He told her thanks and said he’d fill her in later.

Then he put the phone aside and faced August. “I want to throw NightPigeon off our scent.”

The wariness shifted to interested, and August sat beside the open, half-packed suitcase. “Go on.”

“So… if we’re reading the situation right, this fucker seems to be following us to jobs somehow. And I think the connection might be RateYourHit.”

August frowned. “So much for being a secure site.”

“It’s possible he’s an admin. Or he’s in close enough with one to be accessing information he shouldn’t.’

The frown turned to disgust. “Ugh. You can’t trust anyone, can you?”

Ricardo cocked a brow. “Did you ever really think you could trust people who ran a site for taking out hits?”

“Okay, that’s fair.” There was, after all, a reason no one accessed that site without layers of cybersecurity and fake metadata. But patterns could still emerge, and someone on the admin end of the site could see which avatars were connected to which jobs.