Once she pushed her way into the great house, I turned and walked to mine.
The sweat from my run had cooled on my skin, but I felt overheated all the same.
She was here now. She’d invaded my sanctum, and shoved her way into my business, and….
What the hell did I do now?
She needed to go, that much was clear. For reasons that went beyond my intense dislike for people in general.
But she’d seemed hell-bent on staying. “There’s nothing you can do or say that will change that,” she’d informed me.
“Princess,” I muttered. “There’s a whole lot I can say, and do. Buckle up.”
I opened the door to my place, shut it behind me and locked it for the first time in the year I’d lived here. Mr. Dolan had no interest in what I did here. I trusted him.
I didn’t trust his granddaughter.
I showered off quickly and sat down at my laptop.
The next job was due from my employer within the week, and I needed to buckle down.
But all day long, the attention I was supposed to give to breaking into the employee records of a major defense contractor was fixed on the girl in the great house instead.
It was my fault she was here.
The old man always had some sort of grumpy complaint. He was an asshole, just like me. I liked to think that in hiring me, he was reaching out to a kindred soul.
But that last time he came over, Mr. Dolan wasn’t himself. He’d looked at me with watery eyes that made me uncomfortable with their vulnerability. “Do you remember my granddaughter?” he’d asked.
I’d chosen my words carefully. Given that she was underage when she skipped town, it wouldn’t do me any favors to reply, “I sure remember her ass,” the way I wanted to. He wouldn’t take too kindly to me saying she was a spoiled, ungrateful brat, either.
So I’d just nodded. “Sure do. Aria.”
“I need you to find her.”
So I got to work.
It wasn’t like Aria had been exactly hiding. Little Aria Jane Dolan left town at sixteen and transformed herself into a rockstar overnight. Everyone knew her face, everyone loved her voice and the loud, glitter-punk excesses of her band Wrecked.
The hard part was getting ahold of her.
Finding actual, unfiltered contact info that bypassed the grubby hands of her publicists was harder than it should have been. I usually charge big money for my work, but I had a soft spot for Mr. Dolan. He’d taken a chance on me last year, allowing a former alcoholic and semi-recluse to come live on his property. He’d done me a favor. So I kept digging around until I did it.
And then I dug some more.
The more I dug, the more I uncovered about him.
That creep.
She’d been so hard to track down because her life was completely tangled up with his.
Killian Varness.
I didn’t like him. I didn’t like his look, his pompous attitude towards the press or the overbearing way he treated Aria. Like she was some kind of puppet only he could control. He looked at her like he owned her.
And she looked at him like he was her only reason for existing.
It wigged me out.
So I started really digging.
Hacking is just a matter of jiggling locks. People leave the doors to their houses unlocked all the time. Same with their devices. I jiggled his cell phone records.
And I found out… plenty.
More, I now realized, than I wished I knew.
But I didn’t like him. Or her. So I made a judgment call. Hit a few keys, typed a few lines and meted out some justice.
And then I closed my laptop and didn’t give it a second thought.
After weeks spent buried in the job he’d put me to, I trudged up the hill to tell the old man I’d finished it.
Only to find him completely changed.
A hospital bed sat right in the middle of the living room. A visiting nurse checked the IV drip that hung next to the bed. And Mr. Dolan didn’t move a muscle when I walked in.
His eyes were closed and his mouth hung open, toothless and vulnerable like a baby bird. Seeing him like this felt obscene. And wrong.
I cleared my throat. “I found her.”
He didn’t say anything, but the papery skin around his eyes tightened a little, so I knew he’d heard me. I slapped my printouts onto the side table and hightailed it out of the great house.
He died three days later.
I’d granted his dying wish.
And, it turned out, he’d granted a wish for me.
His will explicitly stated that Derek Christopher Granger was allowed to remain in the carriage house “for as long as he sees fit.” And I didn’t forsee a time when I wouldn’t see fit to stay here. Over the past year I’d grown to love the solitude.
And now my work - my real work - depended on it.
I slid my hand under my desk, feeling around for the latch. The panel sprung free and I pulled the key out of the slot and walked to the back of the carriage house.
Back here, behind the old stable doors, was my real work. Locked up and away, safe from prying eyes. Even Mr. Dolan had no idea what I was doing back there, nor did he seem to care.
When I was little, we had an old Tom cat who was the terror of neighborhood birds. He had a particular taste for robins, and no matter what we tried - keeping him locked inside, tying a bell to his collar, running in front of him and shooing the doomed birds away ourselves - my brother and I would always find him hunched over a tiny carcass, licking his chops.
Aria had licked her lips just like that old Tom cat when she laid down the challenge. “We’ll see about that,” she’d told me.
After one last triple check that the doors to my workroom were locked tight, I checked the time. After ten at night. Up at the great house everything was dark.
I never would have pegged rockstar Aria as one for turning in early, but in a way I understood. Sometimes the silence up here made it all too easy to fall asleep.
As I dragged the first speaker out onto my porch, I couldn’t help but grin.
“We’ll see about that, Princess.”