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* The Night Before *
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WHAT WAS THE point of having skills if I didn’t use them?
I knew how to create magic with computers.
I barely used those talents anymore unless hacking into a client’s bank account to ensure he had the funds before agreeing to do business with him.
But Pim...shit, I'd do anything to find her—including illegal things.
In the time it took for me to stalk back to the hotel, crack open my laptop, and log onto the secure server so my IP and other activity would be hidden, I’d already formulated a code that would work.
The Monaco police firewall wasn’t nearly as impenetrable as a lot of the high-level criminals I designed yachts for, and I found it a simple matter of cracking open a back door, creating a patch, and firing off the search alert under the name I had never used but belonged to the woman I’d come back for.
Tasmin Blythe.
While I waited, I opened as many news sites and historical links attached to Pim’s disappearance as I could find. I skimmed the headlines all over again of what her mother had done, the murder she’d committed, the unapologetic way she confessed, and the pride in which she served time.
I could understand Sonya Blythe.
She’d done the right thing when others had failed. She would rot in jail, but at least her conscience would be clear.
I subscribed to the same rule of thinking.
I might be doing illegal shit to find Pimlico, but at least I could fix the wrongs I’d done. I could continue my promise to keep her safe. And that was all I cared about.
I didn’t have a Facebook account but quickly created a fake profile in order to track her down and stalk the sporadic and uninteresting posts Tasmin had shared before she was sold.
There were a few tags with her barely smiling with bitchy looking girls and another with her fists curled as a boy draped his arm over her shoulders.
She was younger.
Less damaged.
She’d had a life before me, but it didn’t look like a happy one.
Not that the life with me had been happy, either.
I would do everything in my power to change that when I found her.
Twenty minutes after I cast out my fishing line, dangling her name as bait, something latched on, and my computer pinged.
Closing my web browser, I scanned the code that gave me everything I needed to know.
Pim had been caught for thievery. She wasn’t stealthy enough, quick enough, corrupt enough. She’d stolen before she was ready, and whose fucking fault was that?
Mine.
All goddamn mine.
My heart cramped at the thought of her in captivity yet again. Shackled behind bars. Interrogated and ridiculed.
Alone.
Goddammit, Pim.
At least, I knew where she was now.
And I wouldn’t fucking stop until she was mine again.