“— 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?”