Page 30 of Wizard

“True.” He kissed my temple before heading to the bathroom, giving me a perfect view of his naked butt. He returned shortly with a damp washcloth, cleaning between my legs before tossing it to the side.

“Cuddle me to sleep?” I asked, my eyelids growing heavy.

He laughed before sliding in next to me, his arms going around me so I could snuggle in against his warm chest. “Anything for you, baby.”

11

WIZARD

Thea and I had both been worn out by the time I was done with her last night. We fell into an exhausted sleep, but it didn’t last long for me. My eyes popped open when the sun was breaking over the horizon. The events of the day before flooded my mind and burned in my gut all over again.

I laid there for a bit, just holding my woman and reveling in the feel of her gentle curves pressed against my body.

But eventually, my mind was too restless to stay in bed. I carefully shifted Thea off me and quietly grabbed clothes before I went into the bathroom to shower. When I emerged, she was still fast asleep, so I left her a note, directing her to find me in my office.

I made a pit stop in the kitchen for a bagel, then got settled in front of my army of technology.

King hadn’t had any luck pinpointing the ink and printer yet, so the only thing I could think of was to scan footage from security cameras all over the town where I was confident the stalker either lived or worked. Or both.

I also had a program going through all the footage from the cameras that had an angle on any of the flower shops. Mainly,I was hoping to find a familiar face at multiple places like the flower shops, a post office, the library, bookstores, etc.

With the delivery yesterday, I had a little something new to work with. The nursery he’d used was only a few minutes from the center of the town I was fixated on. I added the camera footage in and around the shop to my program. Then I went through it manually as I’d done with the other shops. Sometimes, the human eye caught things a computer dismissed and vice versa. I wasn’t taking any chances with Thea’s life.

At two o’clock, a man rode a Vespa into the store’s parking lot.

A Vespa? What kind of grown man rides a fucking scooter?

But something was familiar about the vehicle. It was silver and had every standard feature that all Vespa’s left the factory with. It was completely unmemorable.

Maybe that was what made it stick out to me. I didn’t know a single person who hadn’t customized their cars before or after they came off the lot. Motorcycles, bikes, scooters, skateboards…basically anything you could travel on. Even if it was something as simple as a single enhanced feature.

However, when I pulled up the specs for the most basic Vespa, it matched this one to a T.

I paused the footage and quickly pushed my chair in front of another computer and added the information for the scooter into my program.

Suddenly, it started spitting information at me. Not only was the Vespa on cameras at each of the flower shops but it was also seen all over town. Unfortunately, the license plate was obscured just enough to keep a camera from seeing it clearly but not so much that you’d get pulled over.

While the program continued to search for a common person near or on the vehicle, I went back to the footage from the most recent shop. The rider appeared to be a man with brown hairand a somewhat muscular build, of average height and with no distinguishable marks from the back. He kept his head down and turned away from the camera, as though he’d studied the location to find the best way to avoid them.

He went inside and came back out twenty minutes later. To my irritation, he had no overtly distinguishable marks from the front either. Even his clothes were plain and unremarkable.

I sighed and rubbed my eyes, tired from lack of sleep and frustration. When I focused back on the screen, the man's head was just turning down as if he’d looked up for a split second.

Did we finally catch a fucking break?

Putting the video in reverse, I let it play at a speed slower than a snail’s pace.

A few frames later, I froze the screen, staring straight into the face of the man who I was certain had to be Thea’s stalker.

Thirty minutes later, I had a full dossier on Mark Johnson—a.k.a. Mark Xavier, his stage name as an audiobook narrator who’d recorded a good portion of Thea’s books. Including an FBI file. Turned out, he’d applied for the bureau but hadn’t passed the psych eval.

He also had a sealed juvie record. Or the filewassealed until I got ahold of it. And several undisclosed settlements for cases where charges had been brought up on him for voyeurism, stalking, breaking a restraining order, and similar.

No wonder he could only make a living as a narrator. He didn’t interact with almost anyone in person.

It was just after nine, so I sent a text to King, then printed several copies of an abridged dossier. He replied to meet in his office in half an hour. Both King and Blaze had homes built on the compound, so they were able to get to the clubhouse for a meeting in minutes. However, while a lot of the patches lived on-site, plenty of them had their own homes and would take a little longer. Echo and Violet would live the farthest away once theymoved into their house. Still, it was less than twenty minutes, but getting out the door took them a while, so King’s set time allowed all the key players in this operation to get here. Two minutes before our scheduled meeting, I gathered up the files and my computer, then headed to the prez’s office.

King, Blaze, Echo, and Kevlar were already there when I arrived. Ash and Ace owned homes a few minutes away, but Ash walked in less than a minute after me, and Ace was hot on his heels.

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