Page 57 of Make Them Cry
“I should walk you back to your car,” I tell her, standing from the bench.
“I liked spending the day with you. Thank you,” she whispers, and I watch the way a strand of blue hair floats across her face.
Every part of me screams to brush the stray strand behind her ear like some goddamn hero in some corny romcom, but instead I keep my hands fisted to my sides.
What if I told her? What if I came clean?
What if I fucking kissed her right now? Right here?
She gazes up at me, and my heart nearly beats out of my chest. “You’re not the person I thought you were.”
I crack a small grin. “Hope that’s a good thing.” I rock on my heels as I shove my hands in my jean pockets before I touch her.
“It is,” she says with a smile as we start heading back toward the office.
I’m sittingin my home rig, screens flickering across the room in a sea of binary light, piecing it together. Who fucking posted that picture? The log files don’t lie. Whoever did this knewexactlywhat they were doing. They didn’t just pull one file—they combed through dozens of archives before finding an image they could manipulate.
River told me once she’d taken some modeling photos back in college, nothing explicit, just portfolio stuff. She said she deleted them. Apparently, she didn’t purge her backup fully.
She never meant for anyone to see them.
And now they’re global.
A part of me wants to crash the whole internet in retaliation.
Instead, I turn on the tracker I embedded earlier and lock onto a partial IP signature. The path leads back to a machine that’s been spoofed half a dozen times, but I’m narrowing in. Every ping, every trace, gets me closer.
“Coward,” I mutter to the screen.
And then, softer—more dangerous, “Youtouchedher.”
I slam my laptop shut and scrub both hands over my face.
This is too much.
I’m in over my head. I know it. Every instinct I’ve got to keep her safe is now screaming that I can’t keephersafe if I stay in the shadows.
But stepping into the light means losing everything.
I check the timestamp.It’s been four hours since I walked her back to work.
She looked so tired.
But there was a softness in her eyes when she said my name—Gage, not Mask—that undid me. She trusts me. Not just online. In person. Even when I don’t deserve it.
She trusts mewith her secrets.
And now she’s carryingminewithout even knowing it.
I scroll to the archived feed of her confession. Just audio. I could delete it. Should delete it.
But I don’t.
Because hearing her talk about me—about Mask—with wonder in her voice and heat in her words, it makes me feel human again.
Wanted.
And fuck if that isn’t the most dangerous part of all.
