Page 58 of Protection (Mobsters + Billionaires 2)
ANTHONY
“Oh look,it’s Anthony. The asshole who’s fucking up my boss’s happy vibes.”
I reluctantly look up from one of the many couches in Tracker Tech’s bullpen. Ryder. The bane of my existence. Her skin is somehow paler than the last time I saw her, and her lips are a slash of blackish iridescent green. She also has enough hardware on her face to set off a metal detector.
“Hi, Ryder.”
“In the flesh,” she says, already bored.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” I say, rising. “Is there a private room we can use to discuss this?”
She licks her lips with a split, double-pierced tongue. “I don’t go into rooms with men unchaperoned. We’ll stay out here.”
“Ryder,” I huff out, annoyed. “You know I’m gay. And this is sensitive information.”
She gives me a dead-eyed stare as the office activity swirls around us.
“No.”
I take a deep breath, irritated until I remember I’ve accessed her files.
Her request is entirely reasonable. And I shouldn’t need to know her history to make the accommodation.
Deep breath.
“Okay, no problem. Out here it is.”
We commandeer an unoccupied couch off to the side. She gestures for me to get a move on.
“Just like in the beginning, we’d like to have you do another round of correlating threatening emails with locations and dates that Mads has seen his stalker. We need to see if they’ve tried to communicate with him recently.”
She rolls one eye and shakes her head. “I’ve been cross-patterning Mads’ entire inbox with surveillance videos since the beginning. There’s still no correlation.”
I stifle a scowl. “How do you—”
“There’s no correlation,” she says, standing. “The emails are mostly a bunch of unwashed keyboard warriors with mommy issues and varying levels of tech-savvy. This stalker person is another thing entirely. So unless you need anything else…”
I stand and match her posture. “Did you find anything in those emails that would raise alarm?”
She shrugs, unaffected. “Plenty, but there weren’t any valid threats.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be the one making that call.”
“Yeah, but then you’d want to handle them in an aboveboard manner, and I like my way better.”
“Which is?”
“Hypothetically speaking, you mean?” she asks, tonguing her sharpened incisor.
You don’t have to understand her to work with her, dumbass.
I stifle a shiver of…just, no. “Of course,” I say, getting back on track. “Hypothetically.”
She claps her hands, the pointed tips of her fingernails clicking together. “Excellent. Let’s say for the sake of argument that sometime this morning, I intercepted a virulently homophobic email from a spam account run by pick your favorite oligarch here.” She gestures, more animated than I’ve ever seen her. “My response is to reverse Uno that son of a bitch hard. Their servers are frying in the eternal flames of hell as we speak.”
“You just said they were all basement-dwelling keyboard warriors.”
“I said mostly.”
