Page 9 of Dirty Love

—five—

Wilson

Dawn crawls though the bare, bulletproof windows of my loft, waking me up. In my dreams, I could smell Tabitha on my fingers, taste her on my tongue.

Now I lie in bed, angry and frustrated and impatient. This bullshit has gone on long enough. Fuck. Until I met her last summer, I didn’t do emotional reactions—ever. And now I’m a caged tiger half the time, prowling because my mate’s on the other side of the country and out of reach.

I’m protecting her, though. On her terms.

And I get it. She has a lot of people that depend on the life she leads. The business empire beneath her.

Being mine would threaten all of that.

I force myself out of bed. No more thinking about that. The wheels are in motion. I need to be patient.

I work out first. I’m sore from the fights last night, and it feels good to get blood flowing through my muscles again. Punching bag, pushups, situps. Repeat over and over again until I hear my programmed coffee maker hiss to life.

Shower.

Protein drink.

Coffee.

The office is empty when I arrive. We used to have a receptionist, but she up and quit unexpectedly, and we’ve never hired another one. That was Jason’s call, and I don’t care. I don’t have clients that come to see me.

I’m the eyes and ears of The Horus Group. I watch our clients, their enemies, possible sources, and anyone else who crosses our path. I dig deep into backgrounds and identities, looking for patterns and disruptions.

Sometimes I’m a hacker, following the digital trail of criminals and politicians and businesses.

People hate politicians, and with good reason. Power is corrupting.

But big business is where the truly scary stuff is happening, because nobody’s really watching. Sure, there are federal watch dogs, but the reality is, they’re underfunded and staffed by people who think in terms of black and white. Right and wrong.

That’s not how the business world works.

That’s not how the richest of the rich think—at all. They genuinely think the rules are different for them, that they can operate with impunity and outside the law, because history has given them that ego.

Even the people who are made examples of are relatively “poor” compared to the chess masters. The puppeteers.

PRISM, for example. A shadowy extra governmental organization with unlimited funds and shadowy purpose.

We used to work for them.

Now…well, that’s a bit in flux. Part of that is because of Cole’s experience with his wife. He met Hailey when we were hired to get her father out of trouble—felony-level trouble.

Since he’s a billionaire and we’re good at our jobs, we did it handily. No more dead hooker. No problem.

I’m not so depraved that I didn’t feel a little sick as we disposed of the body. But we had our orders—from PRISM.

We didn’t find out that Hailey’s mother is a PRISM stakeholder until much later.

Too late.

But we’re going to make it right. Tonight is the first foray we’re making into actively investigating them, and I’m stoked about it. Of course I am, I’m an adrenaline junkie.

It doesn’t matter what the risk is, either. Physical harm, good. But hacking gives me the same kind of rush.

I log in to my systems. I’ve got a few different ones set up, all on different networks, routed through cloaking software. This morning I’m doing a couple of things. Running background on Victor Best is on the to-do list. We’ve got a dossier on everyone, including him, but I want to make sure it’s complete. He’d slipped off my radar when he went political, because fringe candidates are usually whackos more intent on hearing their own voices than actually manipulating the process to get real results.

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