She needed to get some idea of how this guy had gotten to her. Maybe he played dumb online and really had some mad tech skills. She closed out Lenore’s page on the other screen and opened up Facebook. She searched for William’s name, found him easily enough, and opened his page. He hadn’t bothered to set up any privacy settings and he used the same password for that account—flag number one that he wasn’t some closet computer genius.
She clicked around to the About section and his timeline. He worked as the front-desk attendant at a local gym. Was a student at Dallas U. Used to play on the football team but got sidelined by an injury. He’d liked a few sports-related pages and local dance clubs. His Instagram feed looked to be nothing but photos of big plates of food and muscle-flexing selfies. He’d chatted with a few girls from his college, but all of it seemed pretty lighthearted. Nothing stood out.
She frowned and tapped her fingers on her desk. Weird. She closed out the page and went back to his Hayven profile. She clicked on his inbox. It wasn’t nearly as full as hers. A few requests to play. A few update emails from the game. But then a subject line caught her eye. Tired of being teased?
She opened the email and sucked in a breath.
Special alert. Lenore Lux wants to take this to the next level and is local to your area! She’s ready to play for real. Click the attachment for her information so you can set up some fun.
The words didn’t make sense to her at first. It was just too goddamned unbelievable, but then angry heat flooded her. With a shaking hand, she opened the attachment and there it was—a screenshot of the information she’d entered when she’d joined the site. Her name was listed as C. L. Benning, the name she used on her credit card. And her address was there plain as day. Luckily, because it was a screenshot, her credit card just showed up as dots in a jpeg, but what the fuck did it matter when someone was literally advertising her home address?
Her eyes skimmed to the bottom. Below all the information was a short list.
Safeword: Watermelon
Wrong.
Likes: Toys, Edge Play, Anal, Bondage, Rape Play
Scene request: I would love to be taken captive by surprise.
Her stomach dropped and her skin went cold.
That wasn’t her list or her request. She’d never filled out that portion. She wouldn’t have. Someone had doctored this and sent it out.
Christ.
BigMan had acted like a psycho, but he?
??d thought she’d been the one to initiate. He’d thought she’d made a goddamned request. Whoever had done this could’ve gotten her raped.
The back of her throat burned and she was trembling again. What if this note went out to other men? And what if she wasn’t the only one affected? Who the hell would do something so sick?
She scrolled up to see where the email had come from, but it was the admin address from within Hayven, the same one that announcements and updates came from—which was also the same address she was supposed to use to contact customer service to make a complaint.
Fuck. If she sent in a complaint, it’d go straight to whoever had hacked the damn thing in the first place. But someone needed to know what was going on. God only knew how many people had been doxxed and put at risk.
She hit Print on the email for evidence and then signed out of William’s account. She opened up the main site for Hayven and went to their Contact page, knowing she’d probably be led through some winding trail of customer service via some faraway country, but she was surprised to find the site was owned and operated by a company with a Dallas address—Restless Games, Inc.
She’d never heard of them, which was strange since they were local, but maybe it was a start-up. Knowing that the servers that held her private virtual world were housed that close by gave her a dart of anxiety, but if the company was in town that at least gave her hope that she’d actually be able to talk to someone who could get this fixed quickly.
Because this shit needed to get fixed. Now. The fact that a company that was responsible for such intensely private personal information hadn’t caught this yet pissed her off. The email had been sent to William days ago. How could the company not realize their system had been compromised?
She scrolled down. There was an eight-hundred number and the address. She jotted down both. It was just past four A.M. so she wouldn’t get an answer now, but at least she had a plan of attack.
Attack.
She rubbed the chill bumps from her arms.
Time to check the locks one more time.
FOUR
Thirty more reps. I can do thirty more.
Hayes Fox dropped into a one-arm push-up and breathed through the burn in his body. One. Two. Sweat dripped onto the mat he’d laid out in the garage. The temperature outside was already climbing into the eighties even though it was barely six in the morning. But the heat didn’t bother him. He’d grown accustomed to uncomfortable conditions a long time ago and relished the level of intensity it added to his workout. If he was thinking about the heat and the exhaustion in his body, he wasn’t thinking about other shit.
Seven. Eight.