Page 140 of Stolen Vows

The clockon my desk ticks over to the thirty-minute mark.

I flex my fingers against the desk, the muscle in my jaw ticking. My phone sits next to me, screen dark, mocking. I could turn my servers back on. Run a trace. Break every rule I set for myself about patience and discipline.

I don’t. Instead, I open my messages.

Me: Update?

I watch the screen. Wait and wait some more.

I stare at my phone, then at the screen in front of me. The last text from Francesca sits there, the pin she dropped still open in a window on my laptop. It’s a machine custom-built for situations like this. When everything goes to hell and I need a fucking lifeline. The case meticulously engineered to be impervious to fire, water, extreme temperatures, just about everything. It weighs a solid fifteen pounds, but that reassuring heft is a small price to pay for the peace of mind it provides.

This isn’t the sleek, lightning-fast setup I usually use, but it has the basics. And more importantly, it’s a hard-wired set up that independently connects to my encrypted backup server.

Which means I have Sentinel, Oracle, my database, and access to all the information I pulled from the Blackwire computer. So I dumped everything I have into the programs and instructed them to cross-reference my database. On my regular setup, this would take an hour or two.

On my apocalypse laptop? We’re on hour seven.

Seven hours of waiting.

For my wife. My programs. My server.

I blow out a breath and rest my palm on Romeo’s back. He was a little distraught after Francesca left, but after a few hours, he mellowed out a bit. He hasn’t left my side, and I didn’t have the heart to put him in his kennel.

I open the text thread with my wife and stare at the screen. Fuck it, she should’ve texted me by now.

Me: Francesca.

When she doesn’t immediately reply, I force myself to take another deep breath. I flex my fingers, tunneling them through Romeo’s fur, grounding me. It’s not as good as my wife’s hair, but it’s not bad either.

It’s hard to curb my impulse to take action. Power up my servers, run a trace, fly across the country to get my wife. The need to do something rides me hard. But that’s the problem. Doing something impulsively is exactly what they’d want. If they’ve been watching, waiting, this is the perfect moment to bait me into making a mistake.

And I’ve learned that lesson already.

The apocalypse laptop beeps, a signal that it’s done sorting.

“Here we go, Romeo,” I murmur, my heart kicking inside my chest.

He groans as stretches his legs out next, eyes still closed.

I lean forward, my fingers flying across the keyboard as I sort and sift through the data now populating my screen. Sentinel and Oracle have finished their analysis, compiling all the information into a comprehensive dossier.

First, the financial records. Small transactions, buried deep. The kind that don’t set off alarms unless you know what to look for. Everyone knows you have to follow the money.

My eyes narrow as a pattern emerges. Shell corporations, offshore accounts, complex webs of transfers designed to obscure the money trail. But with Sentinel and Oracle untangling the threads, a clear picture starts to form. I just need one mistake, one slip up.

And there it is. A single transaction, larger than the others, made from a shell company tied to another company. One not hidden behind an alias.

Baldini Holdings.

The timestamp is from a month ago, right around when Giovanni Baldini showed up at Fiction & Folklore.

Coincidence? Not a fucking chance.

My pulse steadies, slow and lethal. I picture it. Baldini standing too close to Francesca in her store, planting something on her systems while she was distracted. A backdoor for Blackwire.

“You son of a bitch.”

Anger sears through my veins, white-hot and consuming. But I force it down, compartmentalize it. I can't afford to let emotion cloud my judgement, not when every second counts.

---