Page 106 of Heartsong
Growing up, home had been wherever Shannon signed a lease or shacked up. The constant moving around had been exhausting, and once she was out on her own, Anna made it a point to try sticking in the same place for a while. Although it was expensive, she’d stuck to SF because it was what she knew; she understood how the city worked, its neighborhoods, its ebbs and flows. Her first apartment had been damp and crappy but it’d been hers. Getting the lease on her current place had felt like such a coup, and she’d been a good tenant for over five years. The space was small, the furniture secondhand, but everything washers.
And someone was trying to infiltrate that space.
Not on my fucking watch.
She’d worked too damn hard for her little life. She wasn’t about to let anyone, even the cops, ride rough-shod through it. Especially not now that it was Frey’s home, too.
Indignation and righteousness weren’t cures for headaches, though. The stress of it all was getting to her. She didn’t want to leave her apartment. At least, not because she was forced out to retreat somewhere safer. When they moved, she wanted it to be her and Frey’s decision, to find somewhere that worked for both of them.
As with most things, Anna didn’t appreciate being rushed or pushed.
Those kinds of thoughts tumbled through her mind on the spin cycle, whirling back to her worry that something would happen. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, just a bleak paranoia that warned her a big, heavy shoe was about to drop.
Hating feeling unprepared, Anna didn’t know what else to do other than hunker down, ride it out, and hope the surveillance ran out of funding.
It’s not like the Mona Lisa got stolen. Again.
Anna muffled her grumbling in her hand, fingers pressing hard circles into her temple. Just a few more hours and then she’d go home, take a long bath, let Frey do that massage he did on her neck and head, and then when she was feeling better, suck on his fantastically fat cock until he couldn’t remember his own name.The perfect evening.
A little heartened with the plan, Anna typed a quick message to Frey, letting him know exactly how the night would end with his cock in her mouth, and then braved the museum inbox.
The computer hadn’t been helping her headache either, little glitches causing the screen to jump or fade and her eyes to strain keeping up. Anna rubbed her eyes, careful of her mascara, and tried to focus on an inquiry from a local magazine to run an article on the collection. She’d already read the same line twice when the screen winked into mismatched horizontal bars.
Her grumbling wasn’t muffled this time.Fucking Dave. Said he fixed it, but did he? Of course not. If he actually did a good job, he wouldn’t have any work.
Anna tried running the few command prompt scans she knew and had seen Dave do while working on the computer. Seriously, how did this not happen to everyone? Dave was probably starting to think she did it on purpose to lure him out from his office.Ick.
Not in the mood to call for reinforcements, Anna did the next thing she knew to do—turn it off and on again.
Her growl of frustration echoed in the empty stone lobby when the login page came up in the same stratified bars. Chewing her cheek, she fantasized about throwing the tower into the water feature before instead giving it a firm, authoritative whack. The monitor got the same treatment.
Something rattled inside the monitor.
Uh-oh.
Panic sucked the bottom out of her stomach. Great, now she’d gone and broken company property.
Feeling with desperate fingers, Anna ignored her throbbing head as she probed all around the monitor. When she didn’t feel anything, she gave the monitor a gentler shake. Nothing. A harder shake, and there was the rattle again.
She traced slowly along the back of the monitor, running her nails down each vent hole. In the fourth gap, she felt something thin and metallic pressing against the plastic. Anna chipped more than one nail working the loose piece out from behind the plastic grate.
What fell into her hand wasn’t like any computer part she expected to see.
A small cylindrical piece, it was about the diameter of a quarter. One green light glowed on the rim, and a small yellow wire looped from the metallic bottom half into a mesh top half.
It…looked like a teeny-tiny speaker.
But the front desk computer didn’t have audio equipment. There was no need for it.
Glancing back at the computer, she saw the login screen had returned to normal, the layout looking exactly as it should. The cursor in the username text box blinked at her.
Her gaze fell back onto the little thing in her hand. Insides clenched with dread, Anna raised it to her face.
“So strange,” she muttered.
A crackle burst from the little device, and she heard the faint feedback of her own voice, tinny and faraway, on the other end of whatever the device transmitted to.
A listening device.
