—Tori
“Tori?” Cheyenne scrolled all the way to the bottom and found a picture of the girl with the half-shaved head in the email signature. “Huh. Touché.”
She kept scrolling and opened the massive compressed attachment. It took thirty seconds for her system to unzip the files, but then they opened one right after the other in overlapping boxes all over the screen.
Cheyenne’s eyes widened, and she grinned as the activator pulled up everything she wanted to know without her needing to read a single line of what was in the files. “Way to go, Tori.”
Chapter Fifty
“Nope. Nope. Interesting, but no.” Cheyenne clicked the boxes closed one by one, her eyes darting frantically back and forth as she picked up bits of information flagged by her activator, only to read the files and find them useless.
Come on, Tori. If you want those bonus points, you have to find something worth it.
A burst of green light flared when the activator illuminated a long line of code that didn’t match any of the open files. Squinting, Cheyenne clicked out of all of them until the screen flashed green again. Buried beneath everything else she’d wasted time reading was the only encrypted file in her student’s attachment. She ran her decryption program, which prompted her for a password.
The activator lined up the letters of the password superimposed in her vision over the prompt, and she snorted. “Oh, that’s cute.”
But of course, she typed in the password: Say_Please.
The contents of the encrypted file practically exploded all over her screen, and the activator flashed wildly to the pieces it knew she was looking for.
Gotta love tech synced with magic. This thing can literally read my mind.
Most of the decrypted files were images. Cheyenne flipped through them one by one. Matthew Thomas sitting at an executive desk, Matthew Thomas with a blonde woman, Matthew Thomas with a brunette woman, Matthew Thomas standing in front of a brand-new elementary school surrounded by hundreds of grinning kids.
She snorted. Close.
The next image made her freeze.
Her cyber-guru neighbor stood on the front steps of a huge stone house that rivaled Bianca Summerlin’s. Beside him stood a tall, thin man in military uniform, clean-shaven and at least twenty-five years older. Cheyenne’s gaze flicked at the caption: Matthew Thomas and his maternal uncle, Colonel Les Thomas, 2019.
But she didn’t need the caption to know who his uncle was. “No fucking way.”
Ember paused her show. “Oh, my God, is it Sir?”
“No. Oh, Jesus.”
“Cheyenne, you’re killin’ me.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna kill someone, all right.”
“Seriously.”
“Colonel Les Thomas.” Cheyenne shoved her chair away from her desk and leaped to her feet. “One of Major Sir Carson’s superior officers.”
“What?”
“Not a benefactor of the FRoE, Em. He’s running it.”
“Okay, wait.” With a flash of purple light, Ember swung her legs off the couch and floated off the cushions to hover in the living room, craning her neck up at the mini-loft. “Did you find a list of FRoE officers?”
“No, but I’ve seen this man before, in person.” Cheyenne stormed down the iron stairs, her drow magic flaring at the base of her spine and taking over a second before her feet reached the floor. I’m gonna wring that cursing bastard’s thick neck.
“What do you mean? Where?”
“When they interrogated me, Em. In front of Sir. The day everyone heard L’zar Verdys escaped from Chateau D’rahl again, and they thought it would be a great big help to ask his daughter where he is.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Ember floated after the halfling and pulled up short when Cheyenne reached the kitchen island and spun. “Matthew’s uncle interrogated you?”
“No, he didn’t say a word. I know that’s the same guy, Em. Plenty of officers in that meeting and one of them is the same asshole who’s been feeding the Crown loyalists all this—” She shook her fists and stormed across the apartment. “Goddammit!”
“Okay, don’t bite my head off or anything, but I’m still kinda lost.”
“They’ve been playing me this whole time!” Purple sparks crackled across Cheyenne’s fingertips. “They’ve been in on this deal between Combined Reality and the loyalists for years. Every single step, everything I’ve done, the FRoE’s been watching. Not to keep me in line, but to fucking help her!”
Ember bit her lip. “Her as in—”
“Ba’rael, Em!” Cheyenne whirled again and barely noticed her friend’s surprised gaze as Ember backed away. “No wonder those bulls-head assholes kept finding me everywhere. The FRoE had their eyes on me and fed everything back to the loyalists. They didn’t do a fucking thing to step in ‘cause they were in on it too!”
“That’s bad news.” Ember watched her friend pacing and eyed the purple sparks flaring across the halfling’s skin. “And you need to calm down.”
“I’m calm,” Cheyenne growled and paced away again.
“No, actually, you’re dripping drow sparks on the rug.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t see this!”
“Cheyenne.”
“I’m fucking calm!” A burst of crackling purple sprayed from Cheyenne’s hand when she whirled again. It smashed into the rug, consuming the black fibers along the entire edge in a puff of flame and producing an instant stink of burning fabric and plastic.
Ember reached toward the burning rug and clenched her fist. The fire snuffed out, but the burnt smell thickened with a few more wisps of black smoke. “Come on, Cheyenne.”
“Damnit.” The halfling stared at the rug and forced her loud, fast breathing into something resembling sanity. “Sorry.”
“I don’t give a shit about the rug.” Ember studied her friend’s face. “You’re paying for it. I’ll order a new one.”
Cheyenne snorted. “Okay.”
“Okay. You went revenge mode, and then you snapped out of it, so what’s next?”
With another snarl, Cheyenne clenched her fists. “I’m gonna cut out the rot.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Ember floated smoothly across the floor, took her friend by the shoulders, and shook her. “You. Can’t. Go. On. A. Killing. Spree. Do you understand me?”
“Let go.”
“No.”
A deep purple
