Page 38 of What We Become

“Handling his digital life?”

“Curating it.” I flick through the packet. “Deleting DMs. Managing backups. There are export logs from Brock’s cloud storage routed through a machine registered to a library in Tacoma, then later one here. Stephen had admin-level intimacy with Brock’s whole ecosystem. Photos, notes, location history, calendar. He probably knew every girl Brock talked to, every party he went to, every place he took them.”

Every place he took them.

The beach house stares back at us from the bluff.

“Did Sage tell you much about what happened? What Stephen said while he . . .” I nod toward the house. I don’t need to finish that line.

Holden shakes his head. “She hasn’t felt well enough for a full statement.”

“Okay. Then this is new information.” I scroll back through the device overlaps. “He wasn’t just aware of what Brock was doing. He was inside it. Deleting messages. Managing backups. Cleaning the trail before anyone knew there was one.”

Holden’s face hardens. “That’s how Brock kept getting away with it.”

“He had help. From Stephen.”

The realization settles between us.

Stephen wasn’t just Brock’s boyfriend.

He was infrastructure. The concierge for a serial rapist.

Holden drags a hand over his mouth. “Can you access that cloud archive?”

“Already trying.” I flick through another set of credentials, jaw tight. “He used mirrored authentication, which is either very romantic or extremely serial-killer admin assistant. Hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.”

“Don’t joke.”

“I’m not. That’s the upsetting part.”

I open a packet of recovered metadata and freeze.

“Oh, no.”

Holden’s head turns. “What.”

“There are folders.” My voice goes thin in a way I don’t like. “Private folders. Hidden behind mislabeled system files. He renamed them after firmware backups.” I swallow. “That’s cute. Evil, but cute.”

“Open them.”

My fingers hesitate for half a second. Just enough to register that I don’t want to. Then I do it anyway, because wanting has never once been the metric by which we survive.

The first file is a photo.

It’s not Brock.

It’s a girl.

Young—college-age maybe, dark hair stuck to her wet cheeks, mascara smeared into gray half-moons under her eyes. She’s on the floor in what looks like a bathroom, tile under her bare legs, one shoulder strap torn down her arm. Her face is turned toward the camera, and the expression on it is so nakedly terrified that my stomach drops straight through the floor of the car.

There’s a timestamp in the corner from eight months ago.

And a sneaker in frame. Men’s. White, expensive, Brock-coded as fuck.

I don’t breathe.

“Jesus Christ,” Holden says beside me, and I realize he’s leaning in close enough that his shoulder is braced against mine.