Page 603 of Dark Love

“Drugged? She had a glass with a pink drink in her hand.”

“Did you check her pupils?”

“I checked nothing. Clicked on. Wanted to puke. Clicked off and deleted it.”

Max doesn’t have to die today. “I need to check her pupils. And I need to find out who took the video and kept distributing it.”

“Distributing it?”

“They followed her for years, harassing her with it until she almost killed herself. I’m not letting whoever did this get away with it.”

“You don’t need a woman hacker. I can find that out for you today. We’ll put a filter up so that all we’ll see are faces. Come with me.” Max stridesupstairs without bothering to look back. He shuts his office door behind us. “This shouldn’t take long. Do you have an idea of who might have done this?”

“A feeling more than an idea. Her brother has this friend. There’s something about the way that he looks at her—”

“You hate every guy that looks at her.”

True. I want to kill every man for looking at her, but it’s not the same inherent jealousy. “This guy is different. If you met him, he’d make your skin crawl.”

“Name?”

“Montgomery. Don’t know the last. He’s her brother’s best friend.”

“That should be enough to start. We’ll just look and see if he has it saved anywhere.”

Did Max and Shock go to the same school to learn to type? Their fingers fly over the keys, but their eyes never leave the screen. “Did you really learn all this without going to school?”

Max glances up at me. “There was no one to teach you about computers when I was growing up. It was all uncharted territory. A dream became an idea that I turned into a global enterprise. Did you go to school to learn to kill people?”

“My dad would have had a doctorate if there was such a thing. But no, I have no formal education at all.” I wander around his office. It’s full of pictures of Hope and the rest of his family, kids’ drawings, and some weird handmade pottery.

“Can’t say you missed much. Except for meeting Ivy, school felt like a waste of time.”

The clickety-clack of keys being struck follows me around the room.

“You would have liked playing football, even though you would have been stuck as a lineman.”

That’s not much of a loss. “I prefer MMA.”

“Really? Me too. My mom hates it with a passion.”

No one cares if I come home battered and bruised… That’s not true. Not anymore. Dahlia cares. “I haven’t figured out how to explain it to Dahlia yet.”

“Have fun with that.”

“Wanna join me for the next match? Payne and I have ring-side tickets.” To every big game there is.

“If I say yes, that means we’re actually friends. Can you handle that?”

“I invited you, didn’t I?”

“Sounds good. We just can’t tell Hope. She’ll want to come and then end up making it a hobby. It’s bad enough when she spars with her cousins and the Kamenev boys.”

“What’s it like having a kid?”

The clickety-clack stops. “You and Dahlia thinking about having a kid?”

“Yeah. Eventually.”

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