Page 17 of Morally Grey

I pull the laptop in front of me and frown. “Do you have a VPN?”

She shakes her head. “What’s that?”

“It stands for virtual private network. It basically encrypts your data, making it harder to track your digital footprint. Instead of entering websites head on and announcing your IP address at the front door, a VPN scoots you in through the back. I’d set you up, but I don’t exactly have a method of payment.”

She nibbles her lip and looks at a stack of envelopes on the table beside the door. “You think something in this footage will be the answer to both of our problems, right?”

I nod.

With a sigh, she goes to her bedroom and returns with a card in her hand. She holds it toward me. “Fucking charge it.”

I pluck the card from her fingers and set to work. Within a few minutes, I’ve set up a secure connection and logged in to my secure accounts. I start by pulling the saved videos from the vault. If I want Briar on board with my plan, she needs to be made aware of a few things.

“There’s something I want you to see.” I turn the laptop so that the screen fully faces her. “When you’re ready, hit play, but make sure you’re ready. This isn’t easy to watch.”

Briar’s eyebrows pull together, but she leans forward and hits play. I turn my head. The video was difficult to watch the first time, and the second time was torture, but I had to make sure I hadn’t imagined what the camera captured. I don’t need to see it a third time.

The sounds are enough to turn my stomach. A door creaks open in the video, and footsteps thump on expensive flooring. “Is that fucking crayon on my wall, Doris? What did you do, you sorry little shit?” a female voice slurs.

It’s Gloria, and she’s drunk. Doris is her adopted four-year-old daughter, and what Gloria thinks is crayon is actually a scuff from the movers mounting a picture in the hall. It took me all of three minutes to figure that out by going back just a few hoursin the footage, but Mommy Dearest doesn’t care where the mark came from. She’s angry, and a four-year-old is a very easy target.

Briar slams the laptop shut after the first crack of the belt, and I don’t blame her. This wasn’t just a spanking. This was a full-on physical assault on a small child.

“I’m going to be sick,” she says before rushing out of the room.

The reaction doesn’t surprise me. I felt the same each time I watched that clip. The worst part? That video isn’t the only proof of her depravity, and the little girl wasn’t the only recipient of her unbridled rage.

The younger child, a mere infant, regularly screamed in his crib for hours. She probably wised up once the doctors started asking questions about the incessant rashes the baby developed from sitting in his own excrement for hours on end.

The dog she adopted from the shelter—an act which garnered a ton of publicity for the bank—met the most horrific fate of all. I won’t go into the details, but let’s just say that no living being can survive without food and water.

My original plan wasn’t murder. When I cracked into her cameras, I had every intention of finding the skeletons in her closet and taking her down. I sent the videos of the abuse to news outlets, police departments, and anyone else with a listed address. No one responded, and it was swept under the rug.

That’s what finally pushed me over the edge.

She took my wife and child from me. She took my home. There is no telling how many other lives she ruined. But when I outed her for the abuse of her children and the dog, nothing was done, so I had to do the right thing. When no one else cares, someone has to.

So I did.

Briar comes back into the room with a glass of water. She takes a sip, then sits beside me on the couch. “Sorry. That was more than I anticipated.”

“It’s understandable. I’d be more concerned if it didn’t make you sick.”

“No worries there.” She holds the glass to her forehead and looks at the laptop. “I don’t have to watch any more videos, do I? I can’t handle seeing kids like that.”

“We have more to see, but no more videos like that. Have a seat, and I’ll lay out my plan.”

Chapter Eleven

Grey

We’ve spent the last four hours poring over old footage revolving around one room in the house. In particular, one specific item: the safe. She kept it tucked away in the closet of her master bedroom, and one camera faces that closet. In each clip, she squats at a slightly different angle as she punches the numbers into the keypad, and we’ve almost cracked the code.

The plan after that is simple. Break into her mansion, crack the safe, and split whatever we find inside.

“Do you really think this could work?” Briar asks. “It sounds too simple.”

I don’t respond. I’m too busy watching her as she squints and leans closer to the screen as she rewatches a clip for the thousandth time. I should be focused on the task at hand, but that’s difficult when my kidnapper/accomplice is so fucking hot.

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