Page 14 of A Heart as Black as Cole

They looked happy, silently laughing and smiling beyond the glass doors. The cat was soon forgotten, left to laze in the winter sun when a tickle fight broke out, quickly becoming heated.

Not wanting to impose on their private moment, my eyes moved back to something more appealing—the filled coffee cup with its steam rising.

“Thank you!” I shouted, partly through gratefulness, more so to be an ass and interrupt.

I crept back to my room, closing myself in the darkness. I settled at my computer, adjusting my chair to today’s preferred position.

I double-clicked the mouse, and the screen lit up. A sketch honored my background, one that had taken me years to perfect—a red-haired warrior, covered in ruin but surviving, her crown still atop her beautiful head.

Since completing the artwork, I’d convinced myself that it wasn’t Cat, but the resemblance was uncanny.

Deep down, I knew I was fucking lying. And lying still when I convinced myself I didn’t think of her through my waking hours because that obviously wasn’t true.

Noise came from the room next door, from the woman we knew nothing about.

I figured a little snooping on her background wouldn’t hurt.

I clicked on our webpage, saved and open but always hidden with advanced incognito technology, a masquerade of pretty colors.

My fingers turned down my speaker and muted the song playing in the background. Only because it was one of mine. And I fucking hated hearing them.

After clicking some icons, a password box popped into the center of the screen. I input the details I’d typed so many times over the last eight years. Many of those occasions were work-related, some of them, back in the earlier years, not.

I’d been hunting someone.

A search feature appeared, a basic box standing over hundreds of names.

I had no idea what the girl next door’s story was. I didn’t really care to know, but Ollie had other issues to deal with. More pressing issues, like whether my head would be wanted on a plate with a side of fries and light mayonnaise.

I could weed through some locals and find out where this girl came from. Find out if a psychopathic owner would be hunting her down. Of course, we’d have to intervene.

Like I needed another name on my kill list.

I would definitely be dead.

I searched my address using our zip code and a ten-mile radius.

Bingo.

Three properties came up.

One was Heaven Manor—the destroyed Victorian beauty that flames had eaten before being rebuilt as a safe haven for our broken girls and boys, overlooking a pretty stream where wild rabbits liked to play.

That needed deleting from the system.

My eyes rolled, wondering why Ollie hadn’t done it already.

Time. Everything came down to time.

My search took a detour, and I logged out using my creds and signed back in with Ollie’s, as he had more control.

I could remove it from the system with his account.

“You’re welcome, big brother.” I took a sip of coffee, returning to my search.

Upon entering the zip code, only two properties came up this time. One was close, so close it was practically on our fucking doorstep. The other was close to eight miles away, and seeing how deeply that girl slept, not even waking through her nightmares, it was a possibility she’d run that fucking far.

I clicked that property first, quickly detouring when I realized it was the wrong house, as all the slaves living there were named things that hinted they weren’t the female gender.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com