by Jess Bentley
“Absolutely.”
20
Raleigh
When my cellphone buzzes on the nightstand, I instantly wake up, grabbing it and sliding carefully from the bed. I thumb the connect button to get it to stop ringing but I don't say anything until I'm a safe distance away. Jordan is sleeping so peacefully, I don't want to disturb her. After all the fretful nights she spent, I figure solid sleep is the least I can offer her.
“Hello? King?”
“Reggie,” I finally answer. “I'm here. What have you got for me?”
I hear him swallow and imagine the thirty-ounce coffee he traditionally keeps no more than three inches away from his face. It's the middle of the morning in New York, and I'm expecting good things from him. It's amazing to me that I can hear somebody swallow a half a world away.
“Well, boss, I’m not sure you're gonna like all of this.”
I scrub my hand over my face and fall into the sofa.
“I figure if it's important you will just put it in the report.”
“Yeah, it is,” he says.
“So just tell me, Reggie. Spit it out.”
“Okay. The site is registered to an LLC under the name ‘Head Monster.’ I checked the LLC filings and there's nothing there. Bunch of dead ends.”
“So keep digging,” I tell him, even though I don't have to. Nobody put their personal information in LLC filings. That’s why we have LLC filings, to conceal identities when the situation is sensitive.
“Yeah, of course. I'll get it, I just need to keep pinging every resource I can find until somebody cracks. Obviously they don't want us finding out who they are.”
I stifle a yawn. “Obviously.”
“But I got a lead on a couple of things…” he says.
I knew this part was coming. Reggie always likes to give me a little dollop of bad news at the beginning, to bring up the drama. That way, he thinks that when he gives me a little bit of good news, I am going to be super impressed. I'm impressed, but not super impressed. I figure this is what I'm paying him for, and he really needs to get on with the show here.
“What did you find out, Reggie?” I ask him, letting my irritation edge into my voice.
“See, all these streams that are coming from Head Monster’s site used to be in different places, on different sites. But the funny thing is, they're not that far apart. Like, geographically not that far apart. I tracked some of the IPs and they’re right in her back yard.”
“Really,” I scoff. Now, that is interesting.
“And always girls about the same age. So I started to wonder, do they maybe know each other? And after poking around a bit, asking around a bit, I got my answer. They all went to high school together. Maybe college too. But at least three of them went to high school together.
“So… are you saying that you think Kelsey set up a successor? She tapped somebody to run the site after she was gone?”
I can almost hear Reggie shrug, way on the other side of the world.
“Yeah, that's a possibility. Definitely. But every time I try to find out who it might be, I'm in a dead-end, boss. I don’t know what to tell you there.”
“Yeah okay, just keep at it… I'll talk to you later —”
“— wait, there's more.”
“Oh?”
Another huge gulp. I can almost see him rubbing the stubble on his weather-cracked cheeks. Reggie has been with me a long time, maybe twenty years.
“Yeah… the site is making a lot of money, see? I mean a lot of money. More than it was before. But there are also clones. Maybe a dozen I found so far.”
“What you mean by clones?”
“I mean, the content that's being streamed out of the site is also being licensed to other sites. Couple of those just take the whole thing, but others are using one feed, maybe three feeds. Licensing is making things complicated.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah… I mean, if you are thinking about shutting this whole thing down, you gotta move fast. Thing’s like an octopus. Every time I follow one tentacle, it splits off into two or three more tentacles. Unless you get, you know, the head of the octopus…”
“All right, that's enough,” I growl, cutting him off. This is not the way I want to start the morning.
“Okay, okay,” he backs off. He knows me well enough to know when I have hit my limit. He'll write a report, shoot it to me via email. Jordan and I can go over it and see what we can thread out.
I thumb the face of the phone to disconnect the call and let it drop to the rug underneath the couch. Already the sky is getting light. Dawn is here.
Another day of trying to juggle this mystery, that mystery, and the actual empire I'm supposed to be running while I'm here. If I'm honest, I haven't been doing my absolute best with King Enterprises. Jordan's justice has been at the forefront of my thoughts and I've been distracted, much less than effective in my responsibilities.
I get up and go to work into the dining room, swiping my laptop from the side table and opening it up. The screen flickers immediately to life and I run through my emails as the room slowly brightens. Through the thin, antique glass, I can hear the sounds of the street below coming to life. Minutes fly past as Paris wakes up, more or less all at once.
The bedroom door opens behind me and I hear Jordan padding in her bare feet to the kitchen. She leans on her elbows on the countertop, squinting at me over the top of a coffee cup.
“So? How's your day running the Empire so far?” she says cheerfully. I smirk but don't look up, narrowing down a list of emails I probably should have responded to before now. Luckily I have a fabulous team in place and nothing has gone completely sideways.
“Want me to go?” she asks.
“Um,” I start, but then realize there actually is a thread of emails that I need to take care of. Needed to take care of, past tense. Probably last week. Dammit.
I start a new conversation of email, attaching quarterly reports from a different business I run so that these newbies can get an idea of the kind of excellence I expect.
“Hello?”
“Just one sec.”
I fire that email off, then another, but another, just real quick…
“Hey, are you listening to me?”
I stop what I am doing, looking at her as though she just showed up. She knuckles her hip and scowls at me, shifting her weight to one side. Even in the nearly sheer cotton nightgown, she looks fierce and determined. She's definitely not the shrinking violet she was months ago.
“I'm sorry, Jordan,” I sigh sincerely. “I could stop for a bit. Please tell me what you are saying?”
“I was just telling you, I think there might be a way that we could figure out where some of these girls are. I mean, if we went back and looked at the oldest videos, the old timestamps, we could maybe find out a location? Like they do in television shows, look at the backgrounds and see if there's some common place?”
I shrug. “Oh, there is. Some of the girls who are in the streams now apparently are connected to you somehow…”
Her mouth drops open. “What are you talking about? How do you know that?”
“Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you… Reggie called me this morning.”
She pulls out a chair and drops into it. The way that she's crossing her arms, it doesn't seem this news is getting as much of an excited reception as I would've hoped.
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“You were asleep,” I explain. “I didn’t want to wake you. It was like the middle of the night.”
“This is my life we’re talking about, R,” she reminds me, as though I need reminding. “If Reggie calls with some important detail like that, you can definitely wake me up.”
“Duly noted,” I say softly. “It won't happen again.”
“We’re a team,” she insists. I feel like I'm in a performance review, getting a run down of my responsibilities.
“We are definitely a team,” I agree.
“Ok
ay… Now that that's settled. What did Reggie say?”
I take a deep breath, trying to gather it all into sense. Somehow my emails jumbled up the events as Reggie told them to me and it takes a few seconds to get it all sorted.
“Okay so… the site is live, as you know. There are more streams, as you also know. But, what's new is it seems as though the streams are being licensed to other websites. Once they are licensed, the original copyright holder starts collecting revenue from lots of different places. they’re making a lot more money, which should be more traceable, but it's a lot harder to shut down. We need to get on that, but I am not entirely certain how.”
“What makes you think they’re connected with me? Why can’t they just be, you know, spread out?”
“Reggie was able to track down a couple of the girls, I guess… Or people who recognized them. It's beginning to look as though you maybe know each other? Or perhaps you're affiliated somehow through high school… Through college… But this ‘Head Monster’ is really good at keeping their tracks covered —”
“—excuse me, what?”
I pause for a beat, remembering I didn't tell her that anything about the LLC. How am I supposed to explain corporate law to her in a nutshell?
“Well, you see, LLCs are set up in such a way that —”
“—I know how LLCs are set up, R,” she rolls her eyes. “I went to college. I'm not a moron. Please don't speak to me like I am a child.”
Dammit. I'm doing it again. I try to remind myself that helping her sometimes borders on controlling her. I don't want to tip over to the side of just controlling her, at least not when we’re out of bed, but it's a struggle. I admit it.
“I mean,” she starts again, spreading her hands out into stars on her knees, “did you say head monster?”
“Um, yes… Reggie said that's the name of the LLC that's running the main site.”
She begins to laugh. It's a full throated, heavy laugh that starts at her belly and tips her head back. Pretty soon she's shaking, filling the room with the sound. I’m not sure what's going on, exactly. Has she finally snapped?
“Does that mean something to you?” I ask her. “Is someone trying to send you a message? Some kind of monster?”
She laughs for a little while longer, obviously trying to control herself. As she finishes, her cheeks are flushed and she sighs, wiping tears from where they’ve rolled down to her jawline.
“Not some kind of monster,” she giggles. “Some kind of head monster. It's a nickname. I mean, it's actually kind of an insult. And I think I know who would have the balls to name an LLC that.”
I smile at her, watching how her demeanor has changed from just that small piece of news. I can see hope flickering in her, maybe even the seeds of triumph. She looks stronger.
And for a second, it occurs to me I maybe should have woken her up. Instead of trying to manage everything myself, I should have given her the information, assumed that she had something worthwhile to contribute to this. Again, I've underestimated her. I silently vow that will be the last time. From now on, we’re partners. Equal partners.
She stands up, bouncing lightly on her toes and smiles with real happiness.
“Why are you so happy?”
“Because I'm almost certain that I know who this is,” she said slyly, winking at me. “How do you feel about a trip to back to the States? Maybe a legal battle or two? Do you have some kind of shark lawyer we could get to beat the snot out of this woman, the way she so richly deserves?”
I glance at my laptop, thinking about how my teams are quickly falling into disarray without my attention.
But then I snap the laptop close. It's time to get serious about one thing, really focus my energies on it.
“Just let me make a phone call,” I suggest, already scrolling in my phone for Richard Branson's number. “We can be back in New York in no time.”
21
Jordan
Head monster. What a completely ironic way for her to name her company. I mean, it's a clue, certainly. She knew that if I ever heard the name, I would know it was her. And I would know why. Even better, I'd know Kelsey was still behind it.
It's Britt.
I sit behind her in the courtroom, staring daggers into the back of her head. She saw me when I came in but her eyes skated over the top of me as though magnetically repelled.
She's going to be sorry, I think to myself as we sit there on the long, church-like wooden benches of the courthouse. I can’t make Kelsey sorry, but Britt? No mercy for this one.
I'm going to make sure she's extremely sorry, if it takes every last penny I have got left.
The funny thing is, “head monster” was something nasty Kelsey had said about her. We were hanging out, sitting on top of the picnic benches outside the diner one summer and Kelsey had pointed her out. She was hanging half in and half out of some guy’s car across the parking lot, talking with him.
Britt didn't know we were there, and maybe that's what made Kelsey so snide. Maybe she felt that Britt should know exactly where Kelsey was at all times so that she could give Kelsey her undivided attention. I don't know. But she was suddenly angry at Britt for no reason I could ascertain.
“She should just lean right through that window and suck him off right there,” Kelsey spat.
I looked up from my French fries. “What are you talking about?”
Kelsey jerked her chin toward Britt's general direction. “That's Tony Delgado she's talking to. There in the Trans Am, leaning into his car like she’s some kind of… I don't know, hooker or something.”
I squinted, trying to make her out. I could only really see Britt’s bottom half, and I wasn't even really sure it was her.
“She does that, you know,” Kelsey sneered. “She loves it. She's probably sucked off half the guys we went to high school with. Total head monster.”
I chuckled, thinking that was such a stupid, middle school thing to say. Head monster. As if.
But the name kind of stuck, as names do. Kelsey started saying it in conversation to other people and eventually it sort of trickled back to Britt. That way Britt would know one day, without her knowledge, Kelsey had a vicious conversation about her for no reason.
That was sort of Kelsey's way, to make sure that you knew no matter what, she had an arsenal of weapons pointed right at you, for no other reason than the fact that she could.
And now, sitting behind her in the courthouse, I feel kind of bad for her. She got the same kind of shitty treatment that I did, but I didn't go so far as to masochistically name my company in honor of one of Kelsey's hissy fits.
Then again, I shouldn't feel bad for her. She's making a lot of money off me. A lot. And despite what people say, money is not the root of all evil. It actually makes a lot of things pretty okay. She’s probably doing fine.
The bailiff finally calls our case and we shuffle to the front of the courthouse, still not looking each other in the eye. R assured me that this was a fairly simple procedure, getting an injunction to force the website to cease operations.
But the judge doesn't seem to see it that way.
After only a few minutes’ worth of testimony, the judge looks at me over her glasses and clicks her pen several times.
“Ms. Burke, when did you grant Kelsey Rawlings permission to install recording devices in your home?"
“I never granted that permission,” I say loudly, shaking my head.
The judge just stares at me for several long seconds.
“I find that hard to believe, Ms. Burke,” she finally sighs.
My breath catches my throat. I can't believe she is saying that.
“I never granted permission! Not ever!” I blurt out.
“But you did accept money for this? After the fact?”
I shift from foot to foot. “Yes, I suppose I did… It was in Kelsey's will.”
“So you have already been compensated? For your… performance?”
My mouth is dry, my ears fi
lled with a rushing sound like wind or water.
“Listen… I don't… I mean, I never thought that I would —”
The judge coughs delicately to cut me off, her eyebrows raised imperiously. She is done with me, and I can tell. I've seen that expression so many times on Kelsey's face, I know exactly what it means.
“Ms. Burke, I would suggest that if you would like to seek an injunction against, um… Head Monster, LLC, that you secure appropriate counsel, and bring that case before the appropriate jurisdiction.”
“Um…”
I can't say anything else. The gavel bangs against her desk and that's it. Case dismissed. In addition, I'm supposed to pay Britt’s fucking court costs. Can you even believe that?
I stumble out of the courthouse, shading my eyes against the bright New York sunlight. The Town Car rolls against the sidewalk and the shaded window slides down. R smiles at me from the dark interior.
“How did it go?” he calls out. “Victory dinner? I've got champagne here, just let me—are you all right?”
I don't know what to say. My legs have stopped working and I just stand there, trembling. He flings open the door and rushes to me, wrapping his arms around me and holding my body still as my core shakes so hard I'm not sure if I'm supposed to cry or scream or shatter into a million pieces.
We stand there for a long time as people walk by us. I don't even care anymore. I have no sense of shame left, no sense of privacy or personal space. Everybody can stare at me all the time.
Then I realize, it's because he's here. Because the only person who makes me feel safe in the whole world is standing right in front of me.
“It's all right. It's not over yet,” he murmurs as he rocks me gently back and forth, swaying where we stand. “I've got about two hundred more lawyers that I can get on this. Everything I've got, we will throw at her. When we are done with her, she'll have to sell the fillings in her teeth.”
I almost want to chuckle at the ridiculousness of that threat. He is trying to make me laugh. I flatten my palms against his chest to push him away slightly so I can meet his eyes.
