Page 39 of Indecent Demands

Adrenaline shot through me and I bolted upright. I had to get rid of what I’d been doing on his computers earlier! I hadn’t had a moment alone once he arrived home from the office, so I couldn’t go back to the room without him noticing, but I’d left it all on screensaver mode. It was only a matter of time until he sat down, brought the computer to life, and discovered what I’d been up to. No way could I let that happen.

I hurried downstairs, his pajamas just big enough on me to make me feel cute and cozy. I ignored that thought and sat down in front of the computer. Okay. Time to finish what I’d started.

The computer sprang to life with just the touch of the mouse. Yikes. Yeah, if he’d sat down here, he would’ve seen everything. Thank God he’d gone right out to get my clothes.

Damien Harcourt’s crypto financials stared at me. “Talk to me,” I murmured. “What secrets do you hold?”

Numbers didn’t lie. They’d give up their truths eventually. I just had to be patient.

Examining his finances, it looked like my microtransactions to the account I’d used to steal from him weren’t the only tiny transactions of crypto that he’d been making. There were also transactions that went into an account in Puerto Rico.

Interesting.Puerto Rico had become a haven for cryptocurrency investors as Silicon Valley stumbled. They’d even introduced tax breaks and benefits, incentives to get people to keep coming—at the expense of the actual locals, of course. Always fun when your literal government was aiding in gentrification and you couldn’t afford to live anywhere on your entire homeland island anymore.

Having an account that linked to Puerto Rico wasn’t that unusual. But I followed the trail to that account to see how much money was in it. That took a bit of hacking, but Seth had state of the art systems on here. I felt like I could hack into the goddamn Pentagon with this computer. It was a hell of a setup.

Once I was in, I saw that the account was… empty?

I pulled up the account history. Okay, let’s see…

According to his transaction history, Damien had been making regular microtransactions to this account for a fair amount of time. They were small like mine had been, but his were labelled ‘interest fee’, something he must’ve gone in and manually changed. It wouldn’t generally catch anyone’s eye, not unless you figured out that these ‘fees’ were going into another account that he owned rather than towards a bank or other institution.

The microtransactions added up to quite a lot in the end—potentially millions of dollars, so long as the crypto market was on a high and so a tiny bit of crypto amounted to a ton of traditional money.

Given that the account was now empty, it looked like he’d done exactly that: cashed out the account into traditional money when the market was high.

That meant Damien now had hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars unaccounted for inhispossession. I had no idea how much money it was, because it all depended on what the crypto was worth when he converted it. I pulled up the internet and looked up some websites to see if I could figure out what crypto had been worth at the date of this withdrawal.

Looked like one total coin at the time of the withdrawal had been worth fiftythousanddollars.

Holy shit.

I pulled up a calculator and did the math, adding up all the various fractions of coins he’d been putting into this account through the microtransactions. Crap. He’d had the equivalent of two hundred coins in here when he’d cashed it out. That was a cool ten million dollars, if each coin was worth fifty thousand when he’d sold them out for cash.

What was Damien Harcourt doing with ten million dollars in cash he didn’t want people to know about? He couldn’t literally have that cash on hand. He had to have withdrawn it, then put it into a separate account, perhaps manually—I was willing to bet that account was either in Switzerland or the Caymans.

Was he planning to cut and run? But why? His account didn’t show any activity once he cashed it out, so this wasn’t a regular scam he was pulling. This was for somethingspecific.

Maybe it was time to take a closer look into Damien Harcourt’s past.

I searched for Harcourt on Seth’s computer, and found that he’d done some background research on the guy to make sure he was on the up-and-up. Everything seemed to be okay, but there were things that a computer search alone couldn’t tell you. Sometimes you needed on-the-ground research, too.

I wrote down the names of the people that Harcourt had grown up with, his parents, and his college classmates and teachers. I had to get out of this house and interview them, find out who Harcourt really was and why he might need to flee with ten million dollars. There was a reason for this, I just had to find it.

Erasing all evidence of my detective work, I shut down the computer and hurried back to bed, tucking the list of names and addresses into my pillow. When Seth left tomorrow, I’d find a way to break out of the house and track these people down. Maybe—just maybe—if Harcourt was caught doing something illegal, my withdrawals would never have to come to light, and I’d be off the hook.

I just hoped that Seth could forgive me.

Chapter17

Seth

Iput in the video feed and sat down to survey it. The camera was state-of-the-art, so I could see exactly what Ariana was doing on my computer in the video.

Huh.

She wasn’t trying to steal anything. She was looking at the history of an account in Puerto Rico that Damien had registered in his name. She was monitoring his transactions…

Ariana stopped and pulled up a window on the internet, looking into what the values of various cryptocurrencies were on a certain date. Looked like the one she’d been looking at specifically had been valued at fifty thousand dollars a coin.Goddamn.

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