Page 169 of The Darkest Chase

“Anything yet?” Talia asks.

“No, still got three more…”

The next one comes up dead.

And the next, and the next, and the next after that.

I flop back, raking a frustrated hand through my hair.

“Fuck. Guess I’d better call Ariana Lewis.”

“Maybe not.” Talia leans over me. The soft curves of her breasts press against my arm, warm through the sheer layers of her breezy floral top.

She points at one of the passwords—ArianaBlondieBabyI.

I nod back.

“That one. That’s a play on a song title about being in love,” Talia whispers. Just like how Ariana said it was with Brian. “If they were really so gooey over each other, that might be the one. Try replacing the I with a one.”

“You think that’s all it takes?” I quirk a brow.

“I think it’s the quickest way people change up their passwords to make them secure without forgetting,” she says with a shrug. “It’s what I do all the time.”

“And if it doesn’t work?”

She blinks at me innocently. “Then you use your big shot police resources to run a password cracker with these passwords as seeds to try every variant.”

I stare at her.

“How the hell do you know about brute forcing passwords?”

“I spent my childhood as a shut-in.” She shrugs. “I read a lot of dorky books.”

“Apparently so.” But it’s worth a shot. I turn back to my laptop and try to log in again with ArianaBlondieBaby1.

No dice.

“Damn it,” Talia hisses, and I hold a hand up.

“You gave me an idea. One number, one uppercase, one special character. That’s how it goes these days, right?”

“On most sites, yes.”

“Then…” I type in ArianaB1ondieBaby!

Bingo.

“What did you do?” Talia squeals with delight as the login screen pops up.

“I figured since one and the exclamation point are the most common substitutions, he’d swap the L or the uppercase I with one or the other, but not the lowercase I since it’d be harder to remember which one it was. So I made the L a one, and the uppercase I an exclamation.” I smirk with satisfaction. “If that hadn’t worked, I bet the other way would have.”

“Okay, Mr. Smarty-pants, let’s just see what he saved.”

That’s sobering. I’m almost hesitant to click.

The page opens up on dozens of thumbnail slides, all of them so dark it’s hard to make out what’s in the photos without expanding them to full size. My heart thumps hard.

If there’s enough evidence in these pictures, I’m finally going to do what I came here for.

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