Page 25 of Wizard

“Gonna love this,” I told Thea with a grin. “Courtney makes several at a time and freezes them for us to eat whenever we aren’t in the mood to cook and neither of them are around.”

As predicted, Thea loved the casserole, but as we walked out of the kitchen, I leaned down to whisper in her ear. “Still not as good as eating you for breakfast.”

Thea flushed bright red, making me smirk wickedly, for which I earned a promise of retribution. “Bring it on, baby,” I told her with a wink.

When we stopped at my office door, I unlocked it with a fingerprint and retinal scanner before ushering her inside.

“Wow,” she breathed as she looked around the room. There was an entire wall of monitors, as well as several computers set up on the half-circle desk in the center of the room.

There was also a micro-kitchen installed on the wall next to the couch. King had it put in when I worked three days straight and forgot to eat. More than once.

A bunch of gadgets were also scattered around the room, ones I didn’t explain the function of because they were top secret or illegal.

Once the little tour was done, I pointed at a desk, then the couch. “You can set up shop in either place. Wherever you’re most comfortable.”

Thea smiled and wandered over to the couch, flopping down on it, then wiggling around to get comfy.

Laughing, I handed her the laptop bag I’d been carrying for her, which had been tucked in her suitcase when I lugged her out of her house.

I pointed at a red button on the wall next to the door. “You need anything, press that.”

“I thought you were never supposed to push the big red button,” Thea said cheekily.

“It sends a signal to my headphones, playing a tone that lets me know someone is here or needs something.” Rolling my eyes, I turned and walked around to sit at my desk. “And Blazethought it was fucking hilarious to make it a big red fucking button.”

“Okay,” she replied, clearly repressing her laughter. “I’ll try not to bother you.”

“You’re never a bother, baby,” I stated. “I take care of what’s mine. You need something, you come to me.”

Thea huffed and crossed her arms over her chest, pouting. “That bossy, growly, possessive act should not be so hot,” she snapped.

A grin spread across my face, and I winked at her as I put on my headphones. “But it is, so why keep fighting it?”

She glared at me, making me chuckle as I got down to business.

I compiled all of the information I had for Thea’s stalker—which, admittedly, wasn’t much. But I’d had less to go on before.

I set up several searches that would comb through every corner of the web that I could access. If they caught a whiff of something, it would alert me. Then I would dig deeper—usually that meant hacking a database or server.

After several hours, I hadn’t made much progress, although something about the flower delivery shops niggled at my brain.

I decided to analyze them more closely—their locations, clientele, employees, even their inventory. The first few times Thea received flowers, they’d all been different. Then somehow, the stalker discovered her favorite flower because from then on, it was always Gerber daisies. Since they weren’t sold at every shop, I ruled out those two. However, when I plotted them all out on a map, it felt like something was missing. So I added the discarded nurseries to the map, then stood back to look at it from a larger perspective.

As I scanned the map, a pattern popped out. The funny thing about random patterns is that they’re never actually random. Byattempting to make something appear random, you still end up with a pattern.

All of the stores were in different towns, but they weren’t evenly spaced as most “random” patterns tended to be. There were clusters and sections where it looked like there should be a shop but wasn’t. Some of that had to do with whether they sold the right plant.

The similarity that stuck out to me was the distance of all of them to one location. And when I took into account the dates the flowers were sent from each shop, it was clear that the stalker had started closer to this location and worked their way out to the shops an hour away but never went any farther.

The similarity point was a five-to-seven-mile grid about two towns over in the next county. I set up some bots to analyze specific data points about the area, then marked it out on a paper map.

Shortly after lunch, Ash sent me a text to head to Blaze’s office.

“Need to get to a meeting, baby.” I gathered up some of the information I’d collected, as well as one of my laptops. “You wanna stay here or go up to the room?”

Thea yawned and stretched her arms out. “I think I might go take a nap.” She gave me an impish smile. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.” She shifted on the couch and winced. “And I’m a little sore.”

I grinned, completely unrepentant. “I’ll kiss it all better later,” I promised as I fished a keychain out of my pocket. “This opens the door to our room. Make sure you get everything you need out of here. I’ll get your biometrics in the system tomorrow so you won’t have to wait for me to let you in.”

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