Page 33 of Clean Hack
Which felt very familiar because I often found myself doing the same thing.
But I didn’t have time to linger on why we both did that.
Was Allison there?
It certainly sounded like she was?
I thought back to the bits and pieces of chatter I’d heard recently from out of them. I had been able to catch little snippets of conversation. There was a lot going on and the one big thing was that they were gearing up to attempt to take out Savage. And I had been so focused on listening into those plans that I hadn’t really paid much attention to the other things going on.
Like the girl that had shown up there and was being watched by one of the club members. Closely, too, from what I’d gathered. And that was when it hit me. A young woman and a child. A child. Burke had told me that she had a kid.
Shit!
Had I really been so focused that I missed it all this time?
And why the hell would Burke send her there, into the Steel Paragons’ territory? Wouldn’t that be more dangerous for her especially if they found out where she came from? Burke hadn’t taken her out of the situation, he’d just moved her around in it? My mind went haywire trying to figure out the reason behind his thoughts on this. I couldn’t come up with anything and it bugged the crap out of me.
That was when I went frantic, flipping through their many cameras to see if I could get eyes on her. If she was there, she might even be at the clubhouse. I just had to see her. I didn’t think I’d feel like it was real until I did. But there was nothing other than the same faces I expected to see there.
Then things went dark.
Without so much as a warning.
As in alarms going off and camera feeds from within the compound shutting down. It seemed that Bocca had figured me out and I was curious as hell how he had.
Took him long enough, was my first thought. Followed by,shit, shit, shit!while my fingers worked frantically to keep him from backtracking and finding me out. I had things in place for this sort of situation, but you just never really knew how good someone was.
I was able to keep myself hidden but I wasn’t able to reconnect. The bomb had been dropped and they weren’t going to be caught off guard again. So I lost my in with them. Then slowly over the next few hours, I lost my connection with all the Steel Paragon chapters.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, they reached out to clubs that they were close to. Over the next several days my world began to grow darker and darker. It seemed like a third of the people I watched had gotten wind that something might be amiss, and they quickly went into shutdown mode. Some of them I knew I wouldn’t have trouble getting back up if I really wanted to, but it seemed like there was something bigger at play and I was starting to think that it might be a waste of time at this point.
I turned my attention to finding Savage. Burke had said he had it under control but I had to be sure. The thing was, I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing. I needed to know where Allison was and I needed to know that she was safe.
It had been a while since I’d calledmy cleanerbut I honestly had been too busy to think about it. Okay, so I thought about it a little. There was chaos even though I’d practically gone blind. I wasn’t worried, because it wasn’t like he depended on me to send him places. I imagined that his life had gone on much how it would have before I had pushed myself into the picture.
My anxiety skyrocketed. The more I searched and the less I found the further down I fell. The anxiety quickly turned into depression and I was struggling to force my way through it. I might have been aware of what was going on with me but that didn’t mean I was able to escape it. It didn’t mean that I was able to fix it or move it to the side and deal with it later. It made things harder, having a boulder sitting on top of the weight that I already had on my shoulders. That feeling, well, I would say I didn’t like it at all.
In the middle of everything, I got an alert about a bunch of girls that had gone missing in one area. I shifted my focus, saying that I would work to figure it out as quickly as possible then get back to my mission. Only, this too had kind of become my mission over the years. There was no way that I could turn a blind eye to this.
So, once I had all the details that I could gather, I picked up my phone. I was sure that they’d think I was calling to bug them about the Burke and Allison situation again, but I felt that I’d used up all my free cards as far as that was concerned so I had stopped calling.
“Ashburn Security,” Tristan answered, but there was something strained and fake behind his perky tone.
“Hey, Trissy,” I said and tried to pull all my inner strength together not to sound as tired as I felt.
“Hey, Lulee,” he replied and I could tell that I hadn’t fooled him in the slightest. “You doing okay?”
I let out a sad laugh because I had to cover up the fact that I wasn’t. It was almost like one of those short laughs that people do sarcastically right before they became a blubbering, weeping, snot-pouring mess. But don’t worry, I wasn’t going to crack just yet. I saw it was around the corner and so I took in a shaky breath and regained myself.
“I’m good. I have a case.”
“Oh,” he said sounding surprised by the reason for my call. “Okay. Harrison is in, I’ll get him on the line for you.”
“Thanks, Trissy.”
It didn’t take long for Harrison to pick up. As he answered, I could hear the stress in his voice, though he was trying to hide it from me.
“I don’t have anything new to tell you,” he said right away.
