The bad boy and me

Lucas Sacul

River's POV
I watched as Cove slept, her chest rising and falling as she took soft breaths.

For the past 30 minutes, she's been sleeping next to me with her head leaning against my shoulder. We were cuddling, but then she rolled over in her sleep and now she's laying on her back.

My fingers soothing stroked her hair, which she seemed to like since a small smile appeared on her face.

I let out a sigh and slowly got up, moving her head to rest comfortably on a pillow instead. My dad is going to be here any minute now.

After pulling another blanket over Cove and kissing her cheek, I went into the living room. Not even a second later, there was a knock on the door.

I double checked who it was before opening the door for my dad. Even though it's past 3am, he looks perfectly awake as always.

"Hey dad, how was your flight?" I tried to be polite since he flew all the way here just to help me, even though he only came because my mom forced him.

"It was fine, let's get this over with." He walked straight inside and shut the door behind him. I noticed that he didn't bring a bag, he must not be planning on staying long.

"On the plane I went ahead and traced back the website that they used to chat on. It was created only 2 months ago and only had around 400 visits before it got deleted. The person who created that website goes by 'Lucas Sacul' which is most likely not his real name."

While catching me up, he set down his computer and opened it up to a browser I don't recognize.

"That's as far as I got, but our next step is to figure out who this Lucas Sacul guy actually is."

I nodded and sat down next my dad as he searched the name. A bunch of results quickly popped up.

"This will take a while to look through, go make we a cup of coffee in the meantime, will you?"

Again, I nodded before standing up and heading to the kitchen. While waiting for the coffee machine to heat up, I searched through the cupboards for any kind of dark roast. Personally, I find dark roast very gross and plain but it's the only kind my dad likes.

Heading back to the table with a steaming cup of coffee in my hand, I noticed how my dad scrolled down a long list of websites before clicking on a seemingly random one.

An article written 9 years ago popped up with the heading "Popular twitter user Lucas Sacul banned."

Taking a seat next to my dad, I started reading. "At 156k followers, twitter user Lucas Sacul, better known as Lucas Bates was banned after a series of disturbing tweets. The first one was posted last Friday.." I quickly stopped reading once I realized how off topic it was.

"This one isn't helpful, dad." I noted as he took a long sip of coffee. His face twisted into one of annoyance and he shook his head.

"Don't be foolish, son. I know exactly what I'm doing. Read it again and tell me what you notice."

With a frown, I skimmed over the text again and shook my head. Nothing about this seems out of the ordinary and it definitely will not help our case.

My dad sighed disappointedly and highlighted the word 'Bates' with his cursor. "Don't you recognize this last name? Think closely."

Recognization crossed my face. Bates, as in Damien Bates. I swear if that guy did anything to Cove-

"River, relax. You can't get mad just yet, we still need to figure this out."

I sighed and nodded, forcing myself to calm down. "You're right, what now?"

Dad exited out of that tab and opened one of his bookmarked pages. When it loaded, it showed a black screen. He then typed in a code on his keyboard, and moments later something new popped up.