“What's up?” I asked, noticing her dropped shoulders.

She shrugged. “I've been on my own since I was seventeen,” she admitted, her voice far away. “And still... everything I own can be thrown into two moving boxes with five minutes notice.”

Jesus. She was jealous of my house. Small and simple as it was. Her life was even more empty than mine.

I walked up behind her, watching her fingers trace the spines of the DVD boxes. My hand landed on her hip from behind, for once, not sexual. Just a touch. “You gotta put roots down sometime, Alex.”

“Yeah, maybe once Lex is out of the picture once and for all,” she said, pulling away from me. “So where's your laptop?”

The moment was gone. Her shields were back up.

“How about you get yourself a shower? I'll make coffee and some food and then we can get to work.”

She turned back to me, shaking her head. “You need to like... brush up on your kidnapping lessons. I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to offer me showers and food.”

“How 'bout we pretend I ain't your kidnapper from here on out? We're working together unless we have to pretend otherwise.”

To this, I got a shrug. “Alright. I could use a shower. That train floor was filthy.”

I nodded, leading her down the hall to the bathroom, leaving her for a second so I could go grab her a t-shirt to put on. Pants would be useless, she was too small for my stuff to stay up without her holding them in place.

And I was trying real hard to not think about her being without panties or a bra underneath one of my t-shirts as I went to the kitchen and started throwing together some breakfast.

I could cook. When the occasion called for it. Being up on the outskirts of civilization made the lure of takeaway less tempting. So I figured out how to throw some stuff together to feed myself.

I settled on omelets, breakfast potatoes, and toast and set to work as the coffee dripped.

The bathroom door opened as I reached for the plates.

And out she walked.

In nothing but my tee.

It was wide on her, her thinness something like half my size. But it wasn't long. Maybe mid-thigh. Giving me a nice view of her long legs.

“I can't believe you cook,” she commented, coming into the kitchen and reaching for the pot of coffee- pouring into the two cups I had left out in front of it.

“Why?”

“I don't know. I guess because I've never known anyone who could cook.”

“Not even your mom?”

“No. I mean... not unless things like spaghetti and frozen pizza counts.”

“They don't,” I clarified.

“Then no.”

“Well, this ain't anything special,” I said as she leaned around my arm to peek at the food on the stove, “but it ain't bad.”

“Smells good,” she allowed, then moved back. Thankfully because the smell of my soap was all over her and it was a little too intimate. “Where's your laptop? I can show you some stuff while we eat.”

“Drawer under the TV,” I said, scooping food onto plates.

I set the food on the coffee table, went back to get the cups of coffee, and when I got there, she had already gotten into my computer. And I mean... into it. As in... past the password protection.

“The fuck?”

“You're supposed to use words and numbers, you know. I mean... not that it would help, but still...”

I shook my head, handing her a fork and watching her put the laptop on her lap and balance a plate on the arm of the couch like it was something she had done a thousand times before.

“So what do you got?”

She reached into the box, pulling a USB out by random and slipping it into the drive. I watched as she punched in a passcode that seemed to have at least thirty digits, her fingers moving over the keys so fast there was no way I could even catch two of them put together.

The screen popped up. And there were folders upon folders, each locked individually. And even when she opened one, they were coded. She was careful. I appreciated that kind of attention to detail.

“Just have to... oh my god,” she groaned, her head going backward, her eyes closing. “This is nothing special?” she asked, chewing her food, rolling her eyes at me. “What the hell did you put in the potatoes?”

“Just onions and spices, doll,” I said, shrugging.

“If I live through this, I need to learn to cook.”

“We live through this, I'll teach you.”

Whoa.

What the fuck?

I'll teach her to cook?

What the hell was that?

I didn't teach anyone anything.

I certainly didn't let women hang around and chop onions with me.

Jesus Christ.

“I might take you up on that,” she said almost shyly as she turned her attention back to her computer, brought up some kind of box and typed rapidly until the page suddenly refreshed and the code was gone.

“Holy shit,” I said, dropping my plate back onto the coffee table and leaning closer. “Is that what I think it is?”

“I released a nasty little bug on his cell and computer a while back. But not before I did some digging around myself. This is a list of the dirt he has on all the organizations in the area. This is how he keeps them under his thumb.”

“How the fuck did you get into his system?”

At this, she snorted, shaking her head. “I sent him an email from an address that was one letter away from one of his usual contacts so he wouldn't be suspicious of it. And I sent him a link to a snuff film.”

“A snuff film?” I asked, my brows lowering.

“Yeah you know... like a porn where they kill a girl at the end. But it isn't porn. It's real.”

“Al, I know what a snuff film is, doll. I just didn't think they actually existed.”

“Oh, they exist,” she said with such authority that there was no question in my mind about the topic anymore. “Incidentally, I wasn't sending him to a real one. All he had to do was click the link and the bug was in his system. It actually sent him to a video about ending sexual assault.”

“So this is what you got from him?”

“This,” she agreed, throwing the lock back onto the files and ejecting the USB, “along with financial records and pictures.”

“Pictures?”

As soon as I pressed the point, she looked pale. She reached for her plate and set it on the coffee table only half eaten like she had lost her appetite.

“Yeah, pictures,” she said, digging around for the USB. When she found it, she held it up toward me, but she didn't plug it in.

“What are the pictures of, Alex?”

She swallowed hard. “Women.”

I was pretty sure I knew where that information was heading, but I needed confirmation. “Doll...”

She took a deep breath, looking down at the keyboard, typing into it.

“Pictures of women in varying forms of undress. Enduring varying forms of torture. Most prominently, women in the act of being raped.”

“Jesus fuckin' Christ.”

“Yeah.”

“What can we do with this kind of information?” I wondered allowed.

“I was thinking that while I was showering,” she admitted and an image of her naked flashed into my mind before I very deliberately pushed it away.

“Come to any conclusions?”

“I could put this out there.”

She said 'out there' in a way that implied it had a meaning. Just one I didn't understand. “Out where?”

“The dark net. Deep web. Whatever you want to call it.”

I'd heard of it. Anyone who did anything illegal in their lives probably had. It was a place for people like Alex. Hackers. People who did shit they wouldn't be able to do on normal browsers. And other small time crimes- endless pirated material. Porn. Government documents. But also, it was for other things. The bad shit. Gun running. Drug selling. Skin trading. Pedophilia. Fuck, even to get yourself black market organs.

“How would that help?”

At this, she shrugged. “It could incense the right people. You'd be surprised. There's a lot of people out there who actively try to shut down things like this. Operations other people are too scared to take on. In the grand scheme of things... I'm a nobody. My skills are pathetic compared to what some of these people can do. And some of them aren't just freaks behind a computer screen. They're people who... do shit. If I can ferret them out, get them interested, maybe they will take action into their own hands.”