Neon Red [Order The eBook] [Zayn]

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(DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. It's important to remember this is all totally fabricated, embellished, and exaggerated for entertainment purposes.)

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I can't be there with you, but I can dream

I can't be there with you, but I can dream

I can't be there with you, but I can dream

Frank Ocean | There Will Be Tears

January 2018

New York, New York

"Youh know you're being childish right?" I was unable to calm down. Why couldn't I stop calling? It was the day after my birthday, and I should've still been focused on celebrating me, not ringing him back-to-back for days on end because he'd blocked my number. I supposed I was just shocked. I had been certain that by my birthday he'd be over it and would reach out. I couldn't have been more wrong. Who would've thought a stupid fucking tattoo would set him off again? Even after Paris? Even after surviving the extortion? Even after us going rogue and breaking into some guy's place together? Our love was cinematic as fuck now. Was he really still getting caught up on the petty shit? The minutia of the day-to-day? Was he really still that sensitive?

Granted, this was a massive fucking tattoo. I didn't think it would look as dramatic as it did until it was finished and I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. That's when I knew I'd fucking up. If it made me wince to look at it, I should've known it would devastate him. "What is wrong with you?" he'd asked me plainly over the phone when I finally found the balls to tell him about it. "How can you not understand how fucked up this was for you to do? You genuinely don't care how much you are hurting me? Hurting us? Diminishing us? Are you just mocking me now?"

We had been doing well for the remainder of 2017, so I wanted to run out the clock. I didn't want anything to change or worsen, but knowing he was off in LA dating someone new set me off a bit, despite me flying back home after Robin's death to be with G. She and I weren't getting on too well, though, and this tattoo had been my way of letting her know I was still in it if she was down. She'd been flattered at first, but ultimately still decided we should keep things strictly business, which left me between a rock and hard place. And by hard place I meant on my own and resorting to copious amounts of porn to keep me sated. Not that it hadn't been my go-to before, it's just that without her to break up the monotony, I was rapidly running out of good videos. 

Elsewhere, things were quiet for a while. We hadn't gotten a lead on the data we stole from the motel manager's apartment in Paris, except that it was likely a part of a global identity theft ring to which he regularly sold the information over the dark web. Still nothing to tie him to our extortions in the long run. Thank fuck for Tobias though. He and his high-level connects in France were able to trace a few forensic trails back to a crypto blockchain, following which their hackers eventually tracked several transactions to an unlucky bastard in Romania. He was interrogated and gave up a few names within the hour; that is, after his family put at stake. That led us all the way back to Western Europe to a man named Matthias in Belgium. He was a massive pedo with a stash of illegal porn on his hard drive deep enough and violent enough to send him to prison for the rest of his life. Following that discovery, it wasn't difficult for the hackers to obtain a guarantee from him that the extortion would end. They'd spelled out in no uncertain terms that he would take the fall if any our photos or videos ever saw the light of day, regardless of whether he'd a hand in releasing them or not. It had been months now and we hadn't heard a peep from any of them, neither had anymore photos surface online. I was given a copy of Matthias' most incriminating information, as well as the bastard in Romania who'd helped launder the crypto, and I had Taryn put the intel away in a safety deposit box at the nearest bank. That way if a crisis ever ensued, it wouldn't take much for us to get our hands on it.