Page 89 of Curvy Quirky Omega

Liam made the sun look dull in comparison with how brightly he shone and that wasn’t something we mortals could compete with, but Gideon wasn’t exactly mortal. He too possessed the red eyes of a legacy.

Maybe I’d misread the entire thing and Gideon was actually the Adonis to Liam’s Apollo. His blood was the one spilled to fertilize the soil so the tree could grow and bear the fruit of the dead.

I watched Frankie stand slowly, her eyes fixed on the shelves behind me.

“What did you find?”

Knowing Frankie, she probably hadn’t even dug that far to find whatever juicy information she was about to tell me.

Most people had a digital footprint that was easy to follow. Frankie didn’t need me to hack into anything to look at their social media profiles, their resumes and business accounts, or to reverse image search from their photos to find out where they’d been.

Everything from who they knew to what they were interested in was out there for anyone to find, and Frankie could use all of that to build a profile on someone so accurately and easily it was honestly a little scary.

But Helen Moss had been a bit more careful than most.

Frankie walked toward the coat rack and set her hand on top of the hook where my coat was hanging as she studied what was within reach. “Back when we first started this case, I had the interns help me create profiles for anyone and everyone who could access anything sensitive – the people working security, the receptionists, the maintenance staff, the janitorial team, everyone in the finance department, and the entire IT department.”

I’d seen the profiles, but I hadn’t had time to go through them all yet. Was there something I’d said that made her realize there was a connection between them and Gideon?

Frankie slid her hand under the first shelf from the bottom and tugged on one of the encyclopedias. “I went through those profiles last night and dug through anything and everything I could find online to match their designations.”

I frowned, not sure what she was getting at.

“Helen Moss isn’t just the Director of IT at Valor Enterprises, someone who has access to all the servers and everything on Gideon’s computer.”

Frankie, she rarely mentioned anything I didn’t ask for unless it fulfilled her strange rule – the rule of three. There had to be three unlikely coincidences for her to consider it a significant lead.

Frankie put the encyclopedia back and pulled out a different one. “Helen Moss is also an omega.”

My heart lurched into my throat as that tiny piece of data had pieces effortlessly clicking into place.

I turned to see Liam leaning against the conference table with his arms crossed over his chest and the grimace on his face told me it was possible – that there was a very high probability Gideon and Helen could have had more than just a working relationship.

Frankie grinned at me, and I knew she’d found it before she even opened her mouth. “This one’s kind of light. Wanna take a look?”

She came over and set the encyclopedia on the desk in front of me, but she didn’t open it.

“You’re the one who found it,” I told her. “You should be the one to open it.”

Frankie deserved to have this moment.

She flipped through the first hundred pages and the knots in my stomach got worse as each one went by, but halfway through someone had carved a two-inch, rectangular hole into the book.

And right in the center was Gideon’s second phone.

CHAPTER 34

Lucy

Frankie and I were at my new desk in the office at the townhouse in Chinatown. I’d charged the phone the whole way home and now it was plugged in again while we waited for it to power up.

“Once this finishes charging we can try to unlock it.” I inspected every tiny detail of the phone. “But if we can’t get it open, I’ll just pull the SIM card so we can track down the provider.”

I wanted this shit to fucking power up already. What was taking so long?

“We can pull all the records for this number if it’s the provider Grimm owns,” Frankie told me. She leaned down and rested her arms on my desk so she could watch as it charged. “Then we can figure out who he was talking to and why. How long do you think it’ll take to get it open?”

“If he used a different password or code than all the other ones I found…” I frowned at Gideon’s phone, my knee bouncing up and down at a million miles a minute as I waited impatiently for it to power up. “I could try to crack it with one of my programs and the data I already have, but it could take some time – time we don’t have.”

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