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Chapter 18
The Google alert on Dax’s phone went off again as he navigated through his settings to change his notifications.
“Okay, that sounds good.” Ginny’s tone was calm without a hint of stress in it but he could see the tension and anxiety in her beautiful features. Her expression was tight, like she was just holding it together.
This had not been how he had envisioned capping off their twenty-four-hour lovemaking marathon. He had planned to wake her up with breakfast in bed, and then they’d take a shower together, playing out one of his earlier fantasies, and then he would take her to the studio.
That hadn’t happened.
Instead, they’d been sound asleep, naked, warm and in bed with Ginny wrapped up in his arms when both of their phones started going off at six a.m. They hadn’t fallen asleep until three, so they were both fairly disorientated as they’d blindly grabbed at the nightstand. When he’d picked up his phone he saw that he had twenty Google alerts. By the time he got one open that number had doubled.
When the first headline populated on his screen he’d read the words at the same time that Ginny gasped beside him. He read it again: “Is Country Artist Virginia Valentine Snubbing Her Roots?” The subtitle encouraged readers to judge for themselves.
Before he’d been able to read any further she’d thrown on sweats, answered her phone and was up pacing the floor as she talked to her mom using words like backlash, un-mastered files, damage control, strategy and liability, while he scrolled through article after article telling the world that music from her much anticipated album had been leaked.
Once he’d skimmed through about a dozen articles that all basically said the same thing, he made the big mistake of reading the comments on them. Some were people saying that they loved the new music, but they were in the minority. The majority of them were people that were outraged that her music wasn’t country enough. There were a lot of comparisons to Taylor Swift, which he would have thought was a good thing—hell, he’d never willingly listened to her music but for some reason he knew several of her songs. They were catchy and everywhere. The people on the internet apparently did not see it that way. They definitely were referring to Taylor Swift in a negative context.
Then several minutes later, while Ginny was still on the phone with her mom, his phone lit up again with alerts. This new wave had nothing to do with her music. Instead the headlines all included Derek St. Vincent’s name and were variations on the believability of Derek and Ginny’s romance. Was the “it” couple ever really a couple at all?
As he read the first one, Ginny rushed into the spare room. He and Capone followed her and watched as she opened her computer and he saw the look of horror on her face as she pulled up article after article, all featuring pictures of her and Derek. Some had timelines of when they’d been seen together, some had graphs of how much time they’d spent together vs. apart in their year-long relationship, some had pictures with Derek and the other girl on a beach.
He stood beside her feeling helpless, enraged, protective and furious. Every instinct he had was telling him to take care of her, to shield her, to fix this. But he didn’t know how. He’d never felt so useless. In his life, when there was a problem, he handled it. He was proactive and he took care of the people that he loved. He loved Ginny and all he could do is standby and witness as her life was unraveling.
After a few minutes of searching through the articles, she shut her computer and left the room. She was still on the phone with her mom but was mainly silent, only saying yeah or mmmhmm every once in a while. He assumed that she’d be heading back to the room but instead went straight to the back door and let Capone out.
It honestly blew his mind. He’d been so caught up in the situation, in what he was feeling that he hadn’t even heard Cap whining. But nothing was actually happening to him. All of this was happening to Ginny, yet she’d had the wherewithal to let his dog out. This was why it was hard for him to wrap his mind around the fact that she was for real. Because she did things like that, things that just kept being added to the growing list of why he loved her.
Once Cap had done his business, he and Ginny snuggled up on the couch and that is where she still sat, on the phone with Chase now, with the dog pressed against her.
Dax had been following each alert up until now, but he’d decided that he needed to stop before he did something he’d regret.
Over the short time that both of the stories had broke, he’d sat there and read through the comments and seen how much of a mob mentality they seemed to breed. Commenters were getting each other riled up and it reminded him of an online version of villagers with pitchforks. Before his very eyes, in real time, the situation escalated from negative people saying that they didn’t like her music and never believed that she and Derek were an item to calling her horrible names. Worthless. Whore. Bitch. Slut. And those were the less creative posts. Some were so descriptively heinous that he honestly couldn’t believe anyone would ever write them. And he’d been in the Marines for eight years, surrounded by men that had all the time in the world to come up with creative insults.
Those posts made him want to hunt down each and every one of the low-life degenerates that had written those things and explain to them with force, exactly why they would never be writing another derogatory comment in their lives.
Even though those had made his blood boil as hot as the pits of hell, they hadn’t been the reason that he’d decided he needed to disarm his alerts and stop reading the trash. That realization had been triggered when he started reading people saying that she needed to die.
Die.
And they didn’t stop there. These sick fucks described how she should die and what they would do to her when she was dead.
He’d already put a call into Nate, who headed their cyber division to find out if they could track the IPs to uncover where these death threats were coming from. He wanted names. He wanted addresses. He wanted to kill them, but he would settle for legal action being taken.
“Okay. Thank you so much, Chase. I’ll see you soon.” Ginny disconnected the call and for the first time all morning, she looked up at him. “So, how’s your morning going?” She let out a small forced laugh and shook her head as her bottom lip trembled and tears filled her eyes.
He’d been trying to give her space while she was on her calls, but now that she was off the phone he rushed to her side. Sitting beside her, he pulled her onto his lap and she melted against him.
He rubbed her back and said the only thing he knew to say, “What can I do? How can I help?”
Her left shoulder lifted in a shrug. “Nothing. It’s done. The songs are out there. And what they’re saying about Derek and I is the truth.”
“Do you know how the songs were leaked?” he asked, trying to get some clarity on the situation.
“No. The only people that have access to the files are Chase and I. He sent one song to Karina and I’ve sent the songs to my mom, but that’s it.”
“I have a call in to Nate, our cyber, guy already, do you want me to have him look into it? See if he can find anything. He’s literally a computer genius. Like Mr. Robot dude level genius.”
“I’ve never seen that show, but yes, that would be great if he could. I mean, it’s not urgent. At this point you can’t put the cat back in the bag.” She leaned her head against his shoulder and he ran his fingers through her hair. “Wait, you said you already had a call in to Nate, Is everything okay?”
