Page 126 of The Alpha's Second Chance Mate

Porter’s face fell, and his mouth dropped open in surprise. “Wait, what? No, I didn’t?—”

“I’m fucking with you. Calm down.” Zayde grinned and went back to work.

“What’s black hat?” I asked.

“He’s a hacker,” Trent said.

“Actually,” Zayde said, fingers flying across his keyboard, eyes glued to the screen, “this type of thing is technically calledcracking. Breaking into secure systems, searching out encrypted information. You have white hat and black hat and gray hat hackers.”

“What?” Avery asked, looking as thoroughly confused as I was.

Zayde sighed and looked up from his screen. “White hats do cyber security. They purposefully probe for weaknesses and help companies, organizations, and individuals better protect themselves from black hats. Those guys dive into their networks with malicious, or at least self-centered, interests. Think stealing secrets, hidden money transfers, system takeovers, blackmail, stuff like that. Gray hats operate in the in-between. I would consider myself more of a gray hat than anything else.”

He got back to work, and ten minutes later, he sighed with satisfaction.

“Looks like the municipality that operates the security cams has shit security. I didn’t even have to code a backdoor access gateway. It was fairly easy. I’m already in.”

We huddled around his chair, trying to get a look at his screen. Zayde used the touchpad to bring up the CCTV program.

“What was the date and time of the abduction?” he asked.

Avery told him, and after a few more clicks, a feed from a couple days before showed up. He clicked through the three different cameras at the park until the basketball court became visible. Avery and I both gasped when we saw Ashton dribbling the ball toward the basket.

“Doesn’t look like there’s any audio,” Zayde said. “Video only.”

As we watched, the game played out in real time. I started scanning the three cameras, looking for the pickup where Chuck had taken his last breath. At the top corner of one window, I caught sight of his truck.

“There’s Chuck,” I said, pointing at the smallest of the three windows.

Zayde clicked on the window and expanded it to fill three-quarters of the screen. The camera was pointed at the public restroom, but the back side of the parking lot was just visible. The hood and half of the windshield of the truck could be seen on the video feed.

We watched as a bulky, muscular figure—Kyle, that bastard—ran from the trees to the side of the truck. My mouth dropped open as Kyle pulled a gun from his jacket. The barrel was far too long for a regular gun, but then I realized it had to be the silencer. He thrust the pistol through the open window and fired one shot. Even without the audio, the bright flash of gunfire made me flinch. Avery turned away, burying her face in my shoulder. The camera couldn’t pick up much detail, but I still saw Chuck’s bodyspasm to the right and fall over, a crimson spray barely visible on the interior of the windshield.

“Holy fucking shit,” Trent said.

“Isthisthe fucker who stole Ashton?” Porter asked, glancing at me and Avery.

I nodded. “Yeah. He’s the ringleader, I guess you’d say. At least, I think that’s him. You can’t see his face in this video, but it looks like his outline.”

“Anyone who ambushes an innocent person like that is a walking, talking piece of shit,” Langston said.

Maybe he wasn’t all bad after all.

Zayde changed the camera back to the basketball game.

“The silencer and the noise of the game must have drowned out any noise from the murder. See? The kids don’t even flinch at the gunshot. They just keep on playing. Who’s this?” Zayde asked as a truck pulled up in the closest parking spot to the ball court.

The angle of this camera allowed an unobstructed view into the driver’s seat. Dallas sat behind the steering wheel. I gritted my teeth as he put a hand to his mouth and called out through the open window. Ashton and the boys stopped what they were doing and turned to look at the car. Dallas waved Ashton over, and he jogged to the parking spot while the other kids milled about. After a few moments of talking, Ashton shrugged, then turned and said something to his friends before getting into the truck. Willingly.

“Why would he get in the truck?” Avery asked, her voice thick with emotion. “He doesn’t even know Dallas.”

“Whatever he said must have been good,” Trent said.

The car pulled away, and Zayde hit pause, then enhanced the image.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He zoomed in on the license plate of Dallas’s truck. In a blur of websites, spreadsheets, and strange pages of incomprehensible code, he pulled up the Georgia DMV page. It was not the page the general public could access, though—this was the employee site.

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