Page 15 of Colt
Betty squeezed my shoulder as she passed, then slipped quietly out the back door.
I watched through the window as she approached Graham, saw him stand and pull her into a brief hug. They settled into the porch chairs, heads bent close in conversation. About me. About my past. About the man who’d grabbed me yesterday and the life I couldn’t remember.
My stomach churned, but I forced myself to turn back to my boys.
“All right,” I said, injecting brightness into my voice. “Who’s ready for blueberry pancakes?”
“Us!” they chorused.
I served them their breakfast and poured myself coffee, trying not to watch the porch. Trying not to imagine what Graham was telling Betty. Trying not to think about the moment when they’d come inside and I’d have to hear it too.
Whatever truths were waiting for me out there, I had this moment. My boys, happily eating pancakes. Normal kid stuff. Beautifully, wonderfully normal.
Chapter 7
?
— Colt —
Glitch had been at it for hours. The rest of us had come and gone—eating, drinking, trying to pretend like everything was normal—but he’d stayed glued to his laptop, digging deeper and deeper into the past I thought I understood.
When he finally looked up, his eyes went straight to Dutch. “Call a meeting.”
Now we were all at the table—Dutch at the head, Indira beside him, Holden and Handful opposite me, Glitch standing at the other end with his laptop connected to the big screen we used for planning operations.
“Your story doesn’t add up,” he said.
“What do you mean it doesn’t add up?” I asked.
“I mean everything your Death’s Head brothers told you was a lie.” Glitch pulled up a document on the screen. “You said Lilac was having an affair, right? That your brothers had proof she was seeing someone else?”
“That’s what they told me. Said they’d seen her with him. Multiple times.”
“Then where is he?” Glitch pulled up screen after screen—phone records, credit card statements, social media archives, witness statements. “I’ve gone through every piece of Lilac’s life from that time period. Every call, every text, every transaction, every movement I can track. There’s no other man, Colt. No secret meetings, no mysterious phone numbers, no unexplainedabsences. She went to work, she came home to your apartment, she went to the grocery store. That’s it.”
I stared at the data scrolling across the screen. “They could have met somewhere that didn’t leave a trail—”
“Not in this day and age.” Glitch shook his head. “Everyone leaves a digital footprint. Security cameras, transactions, cell tower pings. I found nothing. The only man in Lilac’s life was you.”
The words hung in the air. Indira leaned forward, studying the screens.
“But Scar showed me photos.” The words came out rough. “Lilac with another man. They had timestamps, locations—”
“Yeah, about those photos.” Glitch’s expression darkened. He pulled up a series of images on the big screen, and suddenly they were there—unavoidable, the images that had destroyed my world blown up for everyone to see.
Lilac. Smiling at a man in a coffee shop. Lilac, walking next to him on a street. Lilac, standing close to him outside what looked like a motel.
It hit me. Even knowing something was wrong, seeing them hurt.
“Look at this one first.” Glitch zoomed in on the coffee shop photo. “See the timestamp? Now look at this.” He pulled up another screen—a work schedule. “This is Lilac’s shift schedule from her job. She was at work when this photo was supposedly taken.”
He moved to the next image. “This one, outside the motel. See the problem?” He zoomed in on the background. “That’s a Starbucks logo. This specific design was only used in Japan. This photo couldn’t have been taken in Texas.”
My mouth went dry.
“And this one—” Glitch enhanced the street photo, zooming in on Lilac’s face. “Look at the edge of her hair here. See how it’sslightly blurred, how there’s a faint halo effect? That’s a classic sign of photo manipulation. Someone cut her from one image and pasted her into another. The lighting on her face doesn’t match the lighting on the street—it’s off by about fifteen degrees. And look at the shadow angle compared to the man’s shadow. They’re not consistent.”
He pulled up more screens, lines of metadata scrolling past. “I ran these through forensic analysis software. Every single photo has been doctored. Some are composite images—Lilac from one photo, the man from another, the background from a third. Some have edited timestamps. And this man—” He zoomed in on the guy’s face. “I ran facial recognition. His photo is from a stock photo library. Death’s Head paid for access to his images just hours before these photos were shown to you.”
