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24
CONOR
HEAD ON COLLISION - NEW FOUND GLORY
Me:Jonesy’s left Manhattan. Any idea why he’d be heading in your direction?
Me:Aidan?
Today had been hell.
Literal hell, and I already knew it wasn’t anywhere near over. Not just because of what I’d uncovered, not only because of what Savannah had sent to me via Star, but because I’d gotten an alert that Jonesy had left Manhattan and was approaching Jersey.
Suspicious in itself when we had no business that way and our territory was definitely not in the Garden State, but once I sent the message to Aidan, I allowed my attention to shift to what I’d been working on for months.
Something that had culminated in my DDoS attack yesterday—the security breach in the elite crypto exchange where I was currently rifling through blockchain after blockchain in an attempt to match addresses to identities.
Star’s gift was helping.
The powerful worm she’d allowed me to access was tearing through the exchange at an unprecedented rate, making connection after connection that would save me hours of time; essential as the exchange was working on locking me out.
Annoyingly, my zero-day exploit had a half-life of thirty hours.
Celebrities and criminals alike were exposed as the worm went to work, linking IDs to payments, putting faces to anonymous bits of code that enabled me to see the extent of the Sparrows’ clientele.
My hands curled into fists just thinking about what I’d discovered.
A shopping website—for people.
Transactions made as if those people were simply objects.
And this was only in the dawn of the crypto era.
What about before, when crypto was a glint in Satoshi Nakamoto’s pseudonymous eye?
How many financial transactions had been deleted when paper pushers could fudge the numbers?
I existed on the dark web. It was my playground. I knew what went on, was aware that the seedy side was so much worse than the Feds would ever realize, but Star had been on that site.
I’d seen her fucking listing.
Like she was a bottle of shower gel or a goddamn tee shirt.
I knew what they’d trained her to do. I knew what she’d been forced to learn. I’d seen pictures I wanted to scour from my brain.
The men and women who’d bought her…
I wanted to kill them all.
Tear them apart.
So fucking many had tried to break my woman, but she was still standing. Still strong. Still somewhere not here, but fuck.
Fuck.
I let my forehead connect with the glass surface of my desk—a new one I’d had shipped in overnight because I’d shattered the other when I’d first come across her listing—and the cold chilled my heated flesh.
No wonder she was so afraid to trust.
