Page 125 of South of Nowhere

More slogging through the leaves and the mud. His poor Ferragamos would never be the same.

Thank you so very much, Fiona. You’ll clean them. You’ll make them shine like new.

Looking at the ground, doing his own tracking, like Shaw. No prints yet. But he’d find them.

As he trudged, he considered various scenarios about what might have happened.

Most likely this was a trick so she could run off with someone, get to a motel and…

He shivered in rage at how that sentence would end.

It occurred to him that Shaw found the car pretty fast. Maybe he was a good tracker but then again maybe the two of them engineered the whole thing.

That’swhy he’d sent Millwood to a motel—to get him out of the way so the two of them could shack up in a room of their own.

He was a good-looking guy, and younger than Millwood.

A thought that made him want to scream.

Then, though, the holes in that conspiracy began to emerge. For one thing, Shaw had seemed genuinely concerned about her.

And how could they have met previously?

It would have to be somebody else.

But who?

Months ago he’d gone to the dark web and found a hacker, whom he gave five hundred dollars by way of a gift card number for instructions on constructing a keylogger—malware to record her passcodes.

The instructions were:

Use visual basic or borland delphi to write a cyclical information request, OR a system hook, you gotta use C Language, I like filter drivers inside the keyboard stack…U want other boxes which is always good go with DLL…

At which point, Millwood had thought: Screw this. And simply hid a tiny spy camera in the vent over her desk, videoing her typing in her passwords.

A lot easier.

Last night, at the motel, the emails he read were not about his work; they were hers. And there was nothing suspicious about them—though they could have contained a code. The wordrecipemight mean “motel room.” The wordgroceriesmight mean “condoms.”

But even if not, she still had to be punished for putting him through all this.

And he suddenly had a thought.

What if the punishment had a second purpose? Something that brought them closer, tied them together forever?

Ah, yes…He liked that.

It centered, of course, on dependency.

The end result of the punishment was that she would have to depend on him completely.

Say, she lost her hearing.

Or went blind.

He liked the last one best. If she was deaf, she couldn’t hear his orders or his corrections.

How could one become blinded?

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