Page 219 of Dark Love

“No.” But it’s tempting.

“Vincenti wouldn’t rat on us.” They’re liable to steal our marks, not report us.

“Whatever Shock did, we’ll deal with it.”

Payne has always been an idealist.

A knock sounds at my door. Shock pokes his head in. “Good, you’re here.” He carries in a bag, sets it on my desk, and takes a metal box out of it. “Put your phones in the box.” Shock unplugs my desktop computer and unplugs the television from the wall. “Do you have any other electronics in here?”

Definitely squirrely. I give Payne a look and he nods.

Whatever he’s about to tell us is worse than we even thought. Dahlia would ask if we’re spies. Which would be a fair question since this kind of feels like a spy movie at the moment. “No.” I drop my handful of phones in and Payne does the same.

Each phone does a different job.

Shock closes the lid on the box and pulls out another machine. “This should jam anyone trying to record us.” Then he pulls out a laptop and opens it up. “None of what you’re seeing is live. This computer doesn’t have the tech to stay invisible, but it’s air-gapped, so no one will see what I’m about to show you.”

Is this going to be one of his techy rants that make no sense to plebeians like us? “What are you showing us?”

“I’m not sure yet, but it’s bad.” Shock starts to open files.

“Barb didn’t do anything bad.”

“No. But the people that had Barb as a baby might have.”

The screen fills with the image of one of those DNA testing companies. “You found her family?”

“No. Yes. Sort of. These companies are made to help people find out about their history. Since Barb didn’t want to do it, I took a hair follicle off of her brush and sent it to a private company under a fake name.”

“That’s wrong in so many ways,” Payne mutters, looking over Shock’s shoulder at the screen.

“It’s not wrong when it may have saved her life.” Shock hits another key.

That got real fast. “Talk to me.”

“As I was saying, since Barb didn’t volunteer for this, I was going to keep everything private. After I hacked into the private testing company’s site and got her information, I went to build a program that would back door information to me without anyone knowing.”

I can feel the but coming.

“But someone had already done that—”

“How does that have anything to do with Barb?” Payne leans forward.

“I’m getting there. The other hacker was looking for something very specific. Which just felt odd to me, so I did a little more digging. They’re looking for siblings. Identical siblings, to be exact.”

Did Shock find another pervert for us to deal with? But that wouldn’t have anything to do with Barb? Why didn’t he just say twins?

“The program was designed to pull the sibling data, then delete all records of them. Everything was supposed to be wiped from the system.”

He’s bragging now. I don’t have time for Shock to bask in his own skills. “And?”

“I was able to restore the information; names, locations, DNA information, and with a little more research, I was able to get images of each person.”

“Why is this important? We don’t care about information theft.” I couldn’t care in the least about people who just put their information into the system.

“But we do care about murder.”

Points for dramatic delivery. “Are you telling me all the identical siblings are dead?” Payne asks what I’m thinking.

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