AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It was after the ceremony, after they’d taken all their posed photos and were waiting around for the limos to arrive to take them to the reception. He’d pulled Viv back into the church to get a bit of privacy. He’d just wanted to look at her for a minute.
He was leaning back against a pew, and when he slid his arm around her waist to pull her in against him, she’d leaned against his chest and wrapped her arms around his neck. Her head was tilted up for a kiss, and she had the beginnings of a smile playing on her lips. The photographer had captured the moment perfectly.
It was the first time he’d called her wife. He’d been testing the word on his tongue, and she’d responded by calling him husband. He didn’t realize it then, but that had been the moment she’d become so much more to him. He only wished now he hadn’t resisted it for so long.
Saving that photo to his personal files, he pulled up the ones from the reception. These were a lot of the same photos in rapid succession, so he clicked through them quickly until they started to look oddly familiar. He scrolled through their first dance, the cake cutting, and the bouquet toss until it hit him.
Jumping up, he crossed to the desk in the far corner of the room and pulled open the top drawer, fishing out the pictures the stalker had sent them. He dumped the contents of the envelope onto the desk and spread the pictures across the surface, picking out the ones he recognized.
They were the same shots, the same moments, but from different angles than the photographer captured. In some of the printed photos, he could even see the photographer’s elbow peeking into the frame or the strap of the camera as it dangled in the corner.
Except…Collin hadn’t been at the wedding. After the engagement party, security had been tight at the church and the reception hall. You had to show both an invitation and ID to get into either one, and Collin’s name and photo had been on a red flag no entry list. If he’d even tried to get in, they would have alerted Declan and Falcone.
There was no way Collin could have taken any of these photos, and Aidan had no idea why the hell none of them had put it together before now. Probably because he seemed like such a perfect culprit. But he was getting ahead of himself. Collin could have just as easily paid someone to help him take the photos.
Aidan selected all the photos that matched the ones from the stalker and clicked to enlarge them in a slideshow, paging through each one. The first few didn’t strike him as odd, but after the third or fourth photo, the same person was in the background of every single shot, phone in hand.
In some, they were obviously taking a photo during a moment other people were also capturing with their phones. In others, they were doing their best to remain inconspicuous, their phone aimed at odd angles or partially obscured by objects. These seemed to match up with photos that were a little fuzzy or weirdly cut off.
He tried to zoom in, but it blurred out the face too much. Ripping the thumb drive free, he sprinted up the stairs to Brogan’s lair. Surely his brother had some kind of technology that could clear up this image so he could see who the fuck had been taking photos of Viv from across the room.
When he burst into Brogan’s lair, his brother and Evie jerked around to stare at him. “Brogan. I need your help.” He threw the thumb drive at him. “The photos on this drive, in the folder marked Reception. I need you to enhance one of them.”
“Why?”
“Because I think Viv’s stalker is in them.”
“You think Collin got into the wedding somehow?” Evie wondered.
“No. I think if Collin was the stalker, he had help. And if he wasn’t—”
“Then they’re still out there,” Evie finished as Brogan quickly plugged in the drive and brought up the folder.
“These,” Aidan said, pointing at the pictures he’d been looking at downstairs. “They’re in all of them. The one in the back, holding a phone.”
Brogan brought up a program on a different screen and dropped the first photo Aidan indicated, drawing a square over the face of the person in the background holding a phone half hidden by a planter. Pixels moved and shifted over the image until it cleared up ever so slightly, but it still wasn’t the best shot.
“Let me try another one. Something with better lighting and less contrast between the fore and background.”
Another series of clicks and the pixels were undulating over the image before it produced a much clearer result.
“Shit.”
“Is that—” Evie peered at the screen.
“Her friend Alex. She was a fucking bridesmaid.”
“She could have just been taking pictures of her friend’s wedding,” Evie said, but Aidan could tell by her tone she was tracking his suspicions.
“And all the same shots happened to end up in a box outside our hotel room door the next morning?" He turned to look at Evie. “Didn’t they use some pictures from the engagement party in the article for the paper?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “I think they did.”
Aidan didn’t have to ask; Brogan was already pulling it up in search and saving the photo to run it through the scanner. It didn’t even need cleaning up. You could clearly see Alex’s face at the edge of the frame in three out of the four photos used, each one with her cell phone raised to snap a picture.
Fear shoved his heart into his throat, and he scrambled to dig his phone out of his pocket. Taking deep breaths to steady himself, he punched in Viv's number.
“Come on, Viv. I need you to pick up,” he muttered as it rang in his ear.
