And theywere.
The AI that Kairo and I built had scanned thousands of media articles and publicly-available records when she uploaded her daughter’s case details to our site, and it found a possible link between the car crash and a group of teenage boys from a little town several states away. Those boys were in prison awaiting trial on a separate road incident case at this stage, as they’d been caught by local law enforcement playing a ‘game’—one they’d apparently been playing for a fewyears.
Their game entailed them getting into two or three cars, finding a random driver on a desolate road and purposefully distracting them by flashing their lights, tailgating them in a threatening manner, and then weaving all over the road in front of them until the victim swerved and crashed. The sociopathic little pricks thought it was hilarious, but the state prosecutor rightfully thought it wasmurder.
Even though they’d been caught in their home state of Kentucky, it turned out that the boys had all been on a spring break trip to Florida in 2017—the same year the thirty-year-old woman died in the ravine… in Florida. There were publicly available social media records showing that. Also, traffic light cameras and other street surveillance devices had captured the boys and the woman in the same town at the exact same time. When the AI made those connections, we looked closer and found that the boys had even driven out of town in the same direction as the woman at the sametime.
That wassuspicious.
We shared our information with law enforcement in Kentucky, and they agreed to interview the boys about it. One of them eventually cracked and admitted that they’d played their ‘game’ in Florida during that spring break trip, and he described the car and the womanperfectly.
Her mother was right after all—she wasmurdered.
Without our AI creation making those connections for us, the case might’ve been considered a tragic accident forever, and no one would’ve ever known the truth. So that was the whole point of it. We wanted to help people when every other avenue of help seemed to have closed off on them and they didn’t know where else to turn, because no one in their lives believed them and figured they were just losing their shit due to thegrief.
We knewbetter.
It wasn’t that we didn’t trust law enforcement at all. It was just that we knew they weren’t perfect, and cases could be hindered by all of the aforementioned issues, so we wanted to provide a resource to complement their work and help people when they felt utterlyhopeless.
Laney had always been supportive of my ambition. She knew better than anyone how important communication could be in supposed cold cases. There was always someone who knew something, or some little unknown piece of data that could illuminate everything, and sometimes there were people who didn’t evenknowthat they knew somethinguseful.
Just like her and her mother with Lindsay’s necklace all those yearsago.
“Do you want to try your stuff on?” she asked, looking over at the cap and gown boxagain.
I pulled her into another hug and slid my hand inside her gown, squeezing her chest. “Later,” I said. “I’ve got other plans rightnow.”
She arched a brow. “Likewhat?”
“Like this.” I grabbed the edges of the black gown and tore the thing right offher.
Some of the fabric ripped, and she gasped. “Hunter!”
“I’ll get you another one,” I murmured before grabbing her hips roughly and leaning down to kissher.
The minute my mouth slammed down on hers, she moaned and melted against my chest. The sweet taste of her lips and the vanilla scent of her hair invaded every inch of my pores, making me rock-hard within seconds. I opened her mouth with my tongue and devoured her like she was my last meal, swallowing her needy, breathy moans as my hands dug into her perky ass cheeks, pulling her against my raging hard-on.
She rubbed herself on me shamelessly, hands roaming inside my T-shirt. Every cell in my body ached and sizzled, demanding more, and I picked her up and threw her on the bed. She gasped as she fell back on the softmattress.
“Fuck me,” she said breathlessly, slipping out of her clothes at record speed. Her chest was heaving, and her cheeks were tinted with a bright red hue. “Now.”
I slipped my shirt over my head and unzipped my pants. Then I pounced on her. I loved it when she demanded pleasure from me. Turned me on more than anythingelse.
Her arms looped around my neck and her smooth legs wrapped around my waist. My lips crashed down on hers in another savage kiss, and I groaned into her mouth as her hands reached for my cock. I’d been craving this all fucking day. Starving forher.
One hand went beneath her ass to lift her up a few inches, and then I rammed into her, finding her soaking-wetalready.
“Oh, fuck,” she moaned. Her legs gripped my waist like a vise, and she bit her lip and then cried out, already begging me to go deeper and faster. Harder, morebrutal.
She loved it like that, and I loved giving it to her. Loved claiming her and possessing her, knowing I was the only one who evercould.
My muscles tightened with effort at each ruthless thrust inside her tight pussy, and she gasped and whimpered beneath me, biting down on my neck and earlobes every few seconds to soften what I could only presume was a series of loud-as-fuckscreams.
After all this time together, I knew every inch of her body, and I knew exactly what she wanted and when she wanted it. Within minutes she was shuddering with an orgasm, walls clamping around my cock and squeezing it until I felt like I’d explode, and seconds later she fell apart again, not even trying to silence her cries anymore as her fingernails dug into myback.
I kept going until I knew she was spent, and then I came deep inside her with a groan and collapsed onto the bed beside her. Our foreheads were coated with perspiration, and our bodies radiated so much heat that the bedroom felt like a fuckingfurnace.
“Get dressed,” I said, playfully smacking Laney on the ass. “We’re goingout.”