Dark Secret - Avelyn Paige Page 0,12
to have a little faith. Let’s try her laptop.”
My attention goes immediately to the device. I flip it open and the screen lights up. Dozens of strings of green code, like a science fiction movie, cover her home screen, not all that unsimilar to my own setup. “Shit,” I mutter, glancing up at Shelby just as the log-in screen pops up with the password box.
“She knows her computers,” she confesses with admiration. “Do you think you can get into it?”
“Let me think.”
She wasn’t kidding. This girl knows her way around a computer and back again. Hayden is definitely not your ordinary twelve-year-old. A strange sense of pride tingles deep in my gut at the realization that I have a daughter who can set up a system like this.
But that means I have to break into it, and there’s only two ways I can go about it. The easy way, with Shelby giving me enough information about her for me to crack it, or the hard way, by powering it off and using command prompts to back door my way in, risking the possibility of triggering an internal hard drive wipe, taking everything I’d need with it.
“Tell me something she likes. Television shows, movies, names of her pets, anything you think she would use as a password.” My fingers dance over the keyboard, waiting for an answer.
Shelby’s lips twist to the side as she thinks. “Oh! We watch The Bachelor together.”
My head falls. “She’s twelve, and she watches that kind of shit? I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. What else?”
“Marvel movies. She really likes Iron Man.”
I try a couple of things: Tony Stark, Iron Man, Jarvis, Happy. I get nothing, except for a warning after the last try. We’ve only got a couple more tries before it locks me out. Shooting in the dark is now just as risky as trying to back door my way in.
“I’m going to have to try to do this a different way. It’ll take time.” Shelby’s face falls. “I wish I had a magic wand, but I don’t. If I rush this, the hard drive will be wiped, and we’ll be up shit’s creek.”
She tries to hide how anxious she is, but fails. “How long?”
“I should be able to get in there by morning. You can swing back by…” I try to get out before two of the club girls come crashing into my room.
“Hey, Hashy,” one of them coos. “You wanna party?” Both of them are drunk as hell, barely able to hold themselves up. Shelby looks between me and the girls with disgust and pain. I start to tell them to leave, but Shelby cuts me off.
“I can’t do this. I thought I could for Hayden’s sake, but I can’t.” She bolts for the door, and I try to catch up with her, but the club girls are in the fucking way. I zig and they zag in an attempt to trap me in here with them.
“Move your asses!” I snarl. They jump at the volume of my voice, and scatter from my room like mice running from an exterminator.
By the time I get around them, she’s already out the door.
“Haven’t seen a piece of ass run away from you that fast in a long time,” Karma yells out from across the room. “What did you do? Try that nerdy cosplay out as foreplay?”
“Shut up, asshole. Where’s Judge?”
“Something wrong?”
“Yeah, man. My kid’s missing.”
Karma tilts his head to the side. “You don’t have a kid.”
“An hour ago, I’d have said the same thing, but shit’s changed.”
No truer words have I ever spoken. Shit had definitely changed, and I don’t know how I feel about that.
Shelby
The tears are dried on my cheeks by the time I pull into the house I’d grown up in. No more, I scold myself. You’ve given that bastard enough of your tears.
But seeing those girls burst into Wyatt’s room was a sharp reminder of why I’d left him in the first place. Of why I couldn’t have my daughter anywhere near that kind of lifestyle. The club has been in the news enough as of late, proving that I’d made the right decision for me and my daughter. The reporters never mention them by name, but their calling card is evident. Once you’ve been on the cusp of their lifestyle, you know exactly who’s behind the mayhem.
The look in Wyatt’s eyes when I’d told him about Hayden, though… that had just about broken my heart. Such pain, anger,