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“Coffee,” he said, approaching me. “I figured you might need some.”
“Thanks,” I replied. I said. “I didn’t figure you for the nicety type.”
He shrugged. “We’re on good terms now, aren’t we?”
I took a sip of my coffee and winced. “Jesus, is this espresso?”
He chuckled, giving me a look as if I were silly. “Oh princess, are you just now realizing that strong coffee exists?”
“You could’ve said,” I replied.
“Figured you’d need to wake up for the shitstorm of a day we’re about to have,” he said. “Jace woke up early this morning and has been meticulously going through every single one of Miranda’s messages with her for a clue. It seems like maybe he found something.”
“He did?” I asked, sitting up and taking another gulp of the coffee to wake myself up. “What kind of clue did he find?”
“I don’t know. Something on her computer, I guess,” he said. “Grayson thinks we should use Miranda to set up a meeting with this person impersonating your mom, the one who has been manipulating Miranda.”
I took another sip of the espresso and winced. “When did you guys have this conversation?”
“In the morning,” Victor said. “While you were having your beauty sleep.”
I rolled my eyes. “You guys should call me before anything like this happens again. I’m not just going to sit in a corner for my own safety and twiddle my thumbs, you know.”
Victor shook his head. “You’re not,” he said. “Jace said that he found an uh, IP address or something, you know, something that indicates this person is somewhere down south. So we go down there and use Miranda as bait. We figure out the person who’s been putting a bounty against you and kill them. Once that’s taken care of, well, honestly I have no idea what happens once that’s taken care of. But that seems like the first order of business.”
I finished my coffee and sighed. “It feels kind of horrible to use another human for bait.”
“It’s either her or you,” he said. “And Teo would never allow for it to be you, Sofia.”
“There aren’t any other options?”
“One,” he replied. “Your brother.”
“Absolutely not. That is not an option,” I said, my stomach flipping. I didn’t feel good about using Miranda as bait, but she had taken part in tormenting us for long enough, and it wasn’t like the guys were going to let her die. “This doesn’t make me feel good about myself, but we should use her.”
“Right,” Victor said, slapping his knees as he got up. “I thought you would say that. And don’t worry, it’s very practical.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” I said, taking another sip of the espresso. “You have any idea how much caffeine is in this?”
“Not enough. Get ready, okay?” he said, cocking his head and narrowing his eyes as he looked at me. “I know this will sound surprising to you, but I genuinely think this is good for you, Sof. It’ll be good for all of us to finally put all this shit behind us.”
I nodded, chewing on the inside of my cheek. “I hope you’re right,” I said.
“I always am,” Victor said, winking at me. It was enough to make me crack a smile, but it didn’t make me feel much better about the practicalities of the day ahead.
Only a few minutes later, we were at HQ. I had a second to think that this felt more like home than my apartment had the last time I had been there. Miranda wasn’t bound by anything anymore, but I could tell she had given up on running. Every single man around us would be able to easily catch up with her and kill her just with a twist of his wrist.
She was quiet, though, listening to us as we planned what was about to happen.
“After a lot of arduous work,” Jace said, glaring at Miranda for a second. “I figured something out. I’ve been digging through every piece of information we have on this person contacting Miranda, and I have reason to believe it might be this criminal based in the Everglades.”
“Who?”
“Someone called the Everglades Viper,” Jace said. “They were using several IP addresses to mask where they were actually engaging from, but I tracked them down using some of the information I managed to put together just through sleuthing and breaking into some key servers. See, sometimes, he wasn’t using an address to mask where he was coming from, but actually traveling to different places in Florida. These IP addresses all belong to internet cafes or hotel lobbies around the state. The farthest was Cape Canaveral on the coast between Tampa and Orlando, and he’s been traveling up and down the entire middle of the state.”
“Oh my god, I’m so bored,” Teo said. “Get to the point.”
Jace laughed. “Okay, right, sorry,” he replied. “The weird thing is that as he goes to these places, people go missing. And it seems like the Viper’s HQ is in the Everglades so maybe we should pay them a visit.”
