had rebuilt the main pages, removing any code that would stream the internal cameras, then changing the passwords and security settings.
And it held.
Yet the women in the building weren't excited about that. Jason could see it on all of them. Someone knew where they lived, and KoG had made it clear that they were crazy enough to hurt them. He recommended that all the devs have the police keep a watch on their homes, but not even Rhaven was willing to risk that. It would convince KoG that they'd won, she said.
Unfortunately, she had a point. The Kings of Gaming wanted to scare these women - and had. If Soul Reaper knew just how much this bothered them, he'd call it a win. That would encourage him to try again and do something even worse. So, the women all stayed at the warehouse that night. Braden made a trip back to his place for clothes and Jason's laptop. A few of the guys decided to crash at each other's places so that no one was alone. Single men with those who had families, and so on.
It was just enough to mix things up, but not enough for the developers to feel like they were letting the enemy win. Just over twenty-six hours later, Jason managed to track the origin of the hack to a teenager in Missouri. The FBI were sent to arrest him, question him, and see if they could get anything out of it, but Jason wasn't about to hold his breath.
In the end, another new KoG recruit had been sacrificed for Soul Reaper's big plans. It was clear the leader of these terrorists thought of his followers as just cannon fodder, but what had initiated the attack this time? KoG usually struck at conventions, and the Columbus Expo wasn't for five more weeks! Why now?
Jason groaned. The answer was obvious. It was because Jason had pulled information on Arturo. There was enough time between when that had happened and the hack against Deviant for someone to have planned it all. Someone like Arturo, which meant he knew Jason had been checking up on him.
If the man was half as smart as Jason suspected, he'd have warnings up to let him know when he was being searched. Google Analytics made it easy. Searching his name - or any phrase he set - would send him an email. Alerts could be programmed to notify him of any access to his personal data. It wasn't even hard to do, just tedious, and required a whole lot of paranoia to go through that much work. Sadly, this guy was the type who would.
It also was one more piece of evidence that Arturo was the man behind the username Soul_Reaper. Why else would he be watching? And if he wasn't, then the attack on Deviant Games was one hell of a coincidence.
Then Soul Reaper vanished again. Over the next few days, while Deviant Games repaired the damage done to their reputation by going offline for a few hours, Jason dove into Arturo's file. He had everyone he could think of doing something to make all of this fit together, and still he was two steps behind the man. Three days after Deviant had been hacked, he convinced Braden and Rhaven to go home. They only agreed because he went with them.
Crysis was working overtime trying to keep all of the people around him happy. It wasn't fair to his dog, and he was supposed to only focus on Jason, but Crysis was the perfect match for him. When others were stressed or anxious, it made Jason even worse. Fixing them fixed himself. Or at least helped, because Jason was supposed to be the hero here. He'd been tasked with catching this guy, and so far, he was doing a piss-poor job of it.
Slowly but surely, he was spiraling, and he knew it. Every failure made him a little more frustrated, and that pulled his mind in the wrong direction. When he made the mistake of snapping at Zara for asking if he needed a coffee, Jason knew he was done. He went out of his way to apologize to her, and then headed into their bedroom to flop down on the bed.
Then he pulled out his phone and made the call he should've made two days ago. She answered almost immediately. "Jason?"
"Riley," he breathed. "I'm drowning, babe."
"No, you're not," she promised. "My house is proof of that. I've had this herd conscripting