Page 17 of A Love So Deadly
“You just don’t want to learn.” But the thing is, she can pull up files. And she does but only when she wants to. That’s the difference. “What’s this?”
“Someone who tried to infiltrate VMR. It’s someone who wanted to get into the other side of the business.”
I look at the screen. “Who does he work for?”
Get into VMR to try and find out secrets and we’ll feed them bullshit for free. Touch the other side…
“No one. Investigative reporter. He’s looking into Vinnie. Came across a visit to VMR that one of Vinnie’s people made.”
I glance at my new hand mirror. It’ll take a bit to restore it, but that new project will have to wait.
“Why did…?” I stop. Because does it really matter? The when and the why don’t. There’s one thing that matters here: someone poking about.
So we need to control that. Our way.
“Maybe we should go hunting tonight after all,” I say.
Vittoria just smiles.
My favorite thing about Tenebris, apart from being one of the most powerful cities in the country is it’s a world where finance, crime, and media crash together. Give New York City the stock market. L.A. Hollywood, Tenebris is special.
It’s big enough to compete with those, and the fact this is where the flagship of VMR is located boosts the power of the place.
Better yet, it’s a place where rain happens more often than not, and falls and winters are long. Summers aren’t too much.
A place like this holds secrets.
But I won’t have news media from somewhere we don’t control being our undoing.
Josh Hutton’s apartment’s easy to find. He’s not home, and we glamor any person we see.
As vampires, humans are easy to find. They always leave scent trails. They try to hide but we can find them, if not by scent, then by the call of blood or the warmth that lights up a space.
The journalist’s place is empty, lacking in all but the faint lingering of his lifeblood.
“Maybe he’s dead,” Vittoria says as she flips through a notebook.
“He isn’t.”
She pauses, looks at me. “Not even you can tell that.”
But I can. At least with some certainty. I evoke an air of the old world; she embraces this one. On the outside. Inside, I use whatever tools come with time. Even in the past, there were down sides to every perk of the times that came along and I made it my business to use them to my advantage, both the good and the bad.
In this day and age, I have no online presence, but we use computers. We have digitized files and the old, dusty sort.
This world studied every molecule and preserves it. But this world isn’t deep. Shiny things and thirty-second-deep dives are in. The humans dissect their musicians and stars. They devour their scandals and worship the altar of shallowness and sound bites.
People like this Hutton are dying breeds clinging stubbornly to life.
As for people like me? The ones who are attracted to the glitter of the light die. I live in plain sight in the dark and shadows. I thrive there. I don’t need to be adored. I never did.
Feared on the other hand…
That could be a downfall. One I discovered had a silver lining in kink and play. In ropes and domination of a different kind.
“I can be reasonably sure. Unless something happened to him on the way home. I looked him up. Now, we need to get to work.”
I scour his computer and remove anything about VMR. He doesn’t know much. But there’s enough to start to link us to Vinnie and Vinnie to his real prize… Anton Baroni, a crime boss I’ve never dealt with.
