Page 8 of Silent Wolf
"No." She shook her head. "I stopped using the shared account. I use cash now."
He wrote that down too. "Does he have any legal claim to your car?"
"No." Her fingers tightened briefly around the bottle. "It's mine. I bought it before him."
"Who knows you're in Fate Mountain?" Axel asked.
"No one from my old life in Spokane." She held his gaze across the table.
"If he was trying to find you, who would he ask first?"
"My mother. Maybe a few friends he never liked me having." Her mouth tightened. "They don't know where I am either."
Axel wrote it down. New prepaid phone, no carrier account. Shared bank account abandoned. Cash use. Car titled to client before marriage. No one from Spokane knew her location. Likely contact attempts through mother and former friends.
"Tell me about him."
She kept her voice even. "His name is Wade Sutton. He's thirty-five years old. He owns a contracting company in Spokane. He has money, a flexible schedule, and he doesn't quit. If he finds me, he'll drag me back... or worse. That's why I need to be impossible to find."
Axel's wolf was growling, the sound low and threatening, like the inner beast might spring up and drive to Spokane to end the man before his next breath. Axel forced himself to keep his hands still on the pad. She hadn't come here for an unhinged wolf, threatening to murder her ex. She'd come for his expertise, and he'd give it to her.
"Okay." He clicked the pen closed. "I can do two things. First, I can pull your information off the data broker sites and keep checking when they repost it. Second, I can reroute the records that still need an address, so they point somewhere that isn't your current residence."
She nodded once. "Show me."
He turned the legal pad toward her and drew a box, then a line running away from it.
"Your name is here." He tapped the box. "Lease, utilities, car registration, anything official. Right now, if one of those records prints your real address, it can lead him to your door."
Her thumb went still on the bottle cap.
"And the rest?" She nodded at the line running off the box.
"That's the fix." He marked points along the line as he went. "I move those records to a safer mailing address, then forward the mail to you without your real address appearing anywhere he can search. After I clear you from the data sites, I keep monitoring them — they'll try to add you back when new records show up. It never really ends. I just stay on top of it."
"And if he follows the mailing address?"
"He gets a box in another county. Not your current residence." He set the pen down. "The point is to make every trail end somewhere you aren't."
She turned the bottle a quarter turn and stopped. "Could he still find me? Even if you do all of it?"
He didn't soften it. "Anything he found before today, I can't change. What I can promise is that after today, your data will be off the internet. And I'll keep it that way." He held her eyes, desperate to make her feel safe.
She was quiet for a moment, considering it. Then she nodded. "Okay. Do it."
"Then I need one more thing today. The names he'd search." He flipped to a clean page. "You gave me Walker, and Sutton?"
"Walker's my maiden name." Her jaw set. "Sutton is my married name."
"I'll run both."
She watched him. "How much does it cost?"
He'd already decided he was covering the cost himself. He knew she'd want to pay, so he gave her a number she could afford without thinking he was giving her a discount. "Two hundred covers the sweep, the box, the reroute, and the rechecks for as long as you need them."
Her shoulders came down a fraction. Two hundred was a relief for her. She pulled out a stack of twenties and counted them out on the table before passing them over to him.
He opened a release form from a second stack and filled out the boxes and passed it across to her to sign. She read it carefully and then signed with her maiden name at the bottom.
