30

LORENZO

There was nothing that could have dampened my mood that Sunday. Never before had I experienced such lightness in my heart. As Ophelia and I sat on the park bench watching Cecilia play, there were no words to describe the happiness settling inside me.

Maybe it was the crisp blue skies, the orange leaves falling around us, the easy breeze...or maybe it was Cecilia's excitement in discovering I was her father. My hand was draped across Ophelia's shoulder, my hand twirling her hair, tickling the back of her neck. She sighed, leaning against me, and the sound warmed my heart.

Had I ever felt this comfortable with a woman before? I didn't think so. Silence in my previous relationships were always tense and awkward. It never felt this comfortable. I had never imagined I could feel like this before.

The happiness in my chest was vast and expansive, a warm hug I was falling into. Falling. I looked at Ophelia, smiling as I watched her eyes light up as they followed Cecilia across the park. Was it possible that I was falling for her?

My gaze lifted above her head, and a flash of sunlight reflected off the lens of a camera. But it wasn't the camera I was looking at. It was the man holding it. Mother fucker. I'd recognize that balding ginger from anywhere, his beady eyes bulging out of his round head.

I pretended to glance at my phone. "Ah, Jonathan's calling. Probably about the press conference. I should take this."

She smiled, her chin resting in the palm of her hands. "Kay, baby."

I stood up and squeezed Ophelia's shoulder.

Kyle, the bodyguard I'd hired to protect Ophelia and Cecilia from houndingreporters, perked up. I nodded at him, giving him the signal to stay with Ophelia.

When I reached the gate to the park, Jaxon Hall was already outside, waiting for me. Of course, he'd seen me coming. He snapped three photos and grinned. "Lorenzo, how's it going?"

"You sleazy fuck. Don't you have anything better to do?" I stepped toward him, and he lifted his camera like a shield.

"Come any closer and that's assault. And I'll have photos to prove it."

I rolled my eyes. "Can you just give us some fucking privacy for once?"

"Lorenzo, you know this is my job. And I'm good at it since I'm the only one here."

"Or maybe real reporters have something better to do with their time?"

Jaxon snickered. "You don't think I'm a real reporter, huh?"

"The definition of a paparazzi is closer to stalker than reporter. We both know that."

"That's funny. Especially considering I happened to get a call from an anonymous source about some interesting stuff from your past."

I hesitated but didn't let my face break. "Right, I'm sure that's the case. That you're not just fishing for information."

Jaxon snickered. "We'll see." He snapped two more pictures. "Anything else you want to say before the article comes out?"

I really couldn't tell if he was bluffing, but I refused to give him any satisfaction. I slid my hands in my pocket. "Go fuck yourself, Jaxon."

The rest of the day unfolded in a bit of a haze. I did my best to keep up with Cecilia, to show Ophelia affection—those were effortless things I didn't have to think about doing—but other thoughts kept shoving themselves in my mind.

What did Jaxon Hall have on my past?

Probably nothing. I'd gotten threats from reporters and paparazzi in the past, but nothing had ever come of it. Coming from a family in the public eye and then building my own wealth had meant that I'd gone above and beyond to scrub my name clean. It wasn't like I'd been planning a career in the politics for the last decade, but it had been something that had crossed my mind.

Other than Alistair lying to me about Ophelia being pregnant when we were in college, I really couldn't fathom what Jaxon was referring to. And while that scandal wouldn't be big enough to throw us off the political wheel, if we gave a press conference and Jonathan mentioned something other than what was in the article, it might make some people suspicious. At the worst, it would make our voters question our reliability.

My only hope was that whatever article Jaxon was referring to would come out before the scheduled press conference later this week. Then we'd have a chance to either adjust things or recreate the story accordingly.

Either way, as we wound down at the apartment that evening, I figured I needed to do some work. I still had the USB Jonathan had given me, and the sooner I fixed the problem of the hacker who had broken into my cyber security system, the faster Jonathan's faith in my capabilities would be one hundred percent restored, and we could move forward, focusing purely on politics.

With Ophelia and Cecilia curled on the couch watching a Disney movie, I excused myself and retreated to the back of the Penthouse where my office was located. It was a side room off the front hall with a desk and six computer screens set up side by side. There were two separate hard drives, and on days I couldn't go into my actual office, I worked here.

Sitting in my chair, I grabbed the USB drive Jonathan had given me earlier in the day and stuck it into the hard drive. With something like this—security footage that covered the entire house—it was easier to turn on all six monitors.

On top of the camera footage from the prior month, there was a folder on the hard drive with a list of every guest who'd entered his property from thirty days up until the night of the masquerade ball.

I had no idea what I was looking for.

While I had created a cyber security company, I wasn't exactly a Private Investigator. In fact, I'd hired one to investigate this completely separately. I guess I was just going to be a separate set of eyes to check if I noticed anything out of the ordinary in the footage.

I set the video to twice the normal speed, leaned back into my chair, and got comfortable.

My main focus was comparing the list of names Jonathan had given me to anyone I'd seen in the footage and keep track of which areas of the house they visited. I also intended to cross reference any issues with security footage to suspicious activity.

Jonathan had hosted three events in the last month—a fundraiser, a black tie charity raffle, and the masquerade ball. The fundraiser and the black tie charity raffle took the longest to sort through, mainly because they were nearly triple the size of the masquerade ball. By midnight, I'd only gotten half way through the second event when there was a knock on the office door.

Yawning, I stretched and opened the door.

Ophelia was in her pajamas—my shirt, again.

"Hey," she smiled.

"Hey you," I sighed, sliding my hand under the shirt and around her waist. "I'm starting to like the look of you in my clothes."

She leaned into the door frame. "Maybe you can see me getting out of it too."

I sighed, my dick throbbing just at the thought. "Fuck. I want that so much. But I'm going to be late tonight because I need to catch up on some work stuff."

She peered past me, but since my computers were set in the back of office, she couldn't see anything. Not that I really cared. There was nothing there that she would have been interested in. But I'd still signed a privacy contract with all my clients, so it was out of habit that I kept the door mostly closed.

"Okay." She stood on her tip toes and kissed me. Her nipples hardened as her chest pressed against mine. She took my hand in hers and pressed it against her crotch. I could feel the moisture in her panties, and my dick throbbed at the coy smile on her face."Just don't stay up too late."

As she turned around, I slapped her ass. "I might have to wake you up either way."

She chuckled and trotted off toward the master bedroom.

It took another hour before I finished the footage of the black tie charity. There wasn't much else to look at in the week leading up to the masquerade ball. Jonathan and his wife were living their normal day-to-day lives, and watching them felt a bit like peering into something I shouldn't be privy to.Either way, based on our contract and my NDA, Jonathan knew I was bound to secrecy.

However, a day before the masquerade ball, a visitor appeared. Senator Marco. I paused the footage and double checked the list of guests Jonathan had given me. He'd listed every guest for the big events, but also guests who'd stopped by on specific days.

Marco had appeared on the list in previous weeks—even outside of big events—but Jonathan hadn't listed this visit. The footage was still moving in fast forward, but even then, I could tell that this wasn't a welcomed drop in.

Senator Marco stumbled in through the front door, his hands raised in the air. Jonathan walked up to where he was standing and started trying to shove him into the back hall.

This wasn't part of what I'd been requested to do, but I couldn't help myself. I already knew that Marco and Jonathan were involved in this video they feared was stolen, but I didn't know the depth of it.

Sliding on my headphones, I rewinded the video and played it in regular motion right to the point where Marco stumbled inside.

"We need to talk!" Marco shouted, his voice slurring. Marco liked to drink—that was no secret—but this was something else all together. He was wasted.

Jonathan grabbed his shoulders, shoving him into the back hall. "Keep it down."

I glanced at the footage in the top corner, where the camera pointed at the back hall as Jonathan and Marco appeared there. "I told you to keep it together," Jonathan said. "We're going to figure this out."

Marco blinked. "You're going to do this? You're going to let them blackmail us? They filmed us, man. They filmed us."

"Yeah," Jonathan hissed. "And we're going to pay them off, get all the copies of the video, and then we won't have to worry about this again."

"You're not going to go after them?" Marco asked. "That's bullshit! We need to go after them!"

"We need to keep them quiet first," Jonathan said.

"Wait," Marco mumbled. "So you know who that bitch is working with? She said she had a partner, man."

"Yeah," Jonathan growled. "I think it's a friend of hers. I did some digging. She's no prostitute. Her name is Helen Caldwell. She used to work at a bank with a guy named Quinton Zinger, a man whose been very vocal about my political positions. Written multiple op-eds about me. All slander. Hands down, I'd put him as the mastermind behind this. He's a hacker."

My heart skipped. This was the man Jonathan had said he suspected hacking the footage the night of the ball, the hacker he'd mentioned. Except Jonathan had said Quinton had never been at his house, which meant someone else had.

This could be a working theory. If that was the case, and this Quinton guy was behind it and working with Helen, then that meant they intended to blackmail Jonathan for the copy of the first video. And then Quinton intended to hire someone else to hack into the system to get a separate copy of the video.

It did make sense. I listened as Jonathan continued, "So we'll deal with the woman first. I'm going to pay her off before the masquerade ball. And then we'll track where the money goes. And if it ends up at Quinton's, we'll know he's involved.”

Jesus. It would have helped if Jonathan had filled me in up to this point. I suspected the money had already reached Quinton since Jonathan had made it clear he suspected him to be behind all this.

But then who had come into the house and made another copy of the video?

I fast forwarded to the night of the masquerade ball and took my time scouring every face, every camera angle, identifying every person on the list. It was nearly two AM, and I was getting close to pulling my hair out. None of this made any sense. Everyone was beyond vetted, and I'd kept track of everyone in all the angles.

I fast forward to the section of video that had gone black on the second floor, outside his office. It was definitely connected to this. That would have been the only time the suspect would have been able to copy the video.

Rubbing my face with my hands, I took a long swig of water and decided to restart the video to about fifteen minutes before the blackout. I paused the video and pressed the space bar one second a time to see where everyone moved.

Everyone was in the main room, except for two people in the bottom corner.

Me and Ophelia.

As I kept pressing the spacebar to move it forward slowly, Ophelia and I disappeared into a side hall toward the kitchen. Sliding across my desk, I focused on the camera in the kitchen. It only showed half the space, from the edge of the spiral staircase and the outside door behind it and across the room to the fridge.

I pressed play and watched the argument unfold between Ophelia and me. It was the disagreement we'd had about her using a fake name, Mallory. Biting my nails, I hit fast forward. Where was I going with this?

As I left the kitchen, I caught just the edge of Ophelia's dress as she disappeared up the spiral staircase. I checked the camera in the hall on the second floor. It was two minutes to the blackout. Moving it in slow motion, I waited, and half a second before the cameras went off, a light to a room in the right flicked on, and then everything went black.

This didn't mean anything. Yet, I needed to clear every person, every possibility. Pulling up the blueprints to Jonathan's house, I realized that the light in the door outside the hall was a second floor food cupboard, with a spiral staircase that connected to the living room.

It still didn't mean anything. Fast forwarding past the blackout, I scanned back toward the camera in the kitchen. Surely, Ophelia had just hung out in the cupboard to eat a snack and sober up. Any minute now, I would see her come back down the spiral staircase and out of the kitchen where I'd found her.

Except that's not what happened.

The power went out in the entire house. I remembered that. I'd been in the living room, wondering when Ophelia was coming back from the bathroom.

Squinting at the kitchen camera, I adjusted the brightness on my monitor and watched as the door behind the spiral staircase—the one that led outside—opened. A woman—Ophelia—walked in, barefoot. She paused to put on her heels, fixed her hair, and trotted back out into the living room.

My hands trembling, I leaned back in the chair, trying to process this. This couldn't be...no. There was no way Ophelia was a hacker. I'd have known that, wouldn't I?

Suddenly, my phone buzzed in my lap, and I jumped, grabbing it. There was a text from the Private Investigator I'd hired.

"I found him. Quinton Zinger. Have him in my care. Figured I'd text you before Jonathan. What do you want me to do?"

Quinton Zinger. The hacker who Helen had hired to blackmail them. And possibly the man who'd hired Ophelia?

If Ophelia was the hacker, then Quinton Zinger would know.

I texted back quickly.Do not contact anyone. What's your address?

He responded immediately, and my heart leapt. Was I really going to do this?

I'll be there in twenty.