“She doesn’t like anyone else handling her guitars,” Emily said, chin lifted, arm firmly tucked through Cady’s.
Conn handed over Cady’s guitar without comment. For a brief moment their eyes met, hers filled with rueful amusement. Later, she mouthed.
He hesitated for only a second. Why not? Why not be her holiday fling? What did he have to lose?
Everything, a small voice at the back of his brain whispered. You could lose everything.
He gave her a small nod, then hoisted Emily’s suitcase and followed the sisters up the stairs. Emily was still chattering away. “Can you believe Eve wouldn’t let me in?”
“Yes,” Cady said bluntly. “It’s illegal for minors to be in a bar, and you’re not even eighteen yet.”
“I’m your sister, and it was just the patio. It was embarrassing.”
“Because you put yourself in that position,” Cady said as she unzipped her jacket. “Being my sister doesn’t change the law.”
Conn watched this byplay without seeming to watch it. “Where should I put this?”
“In my bedroom,” Cady said. She’d toed out of her boots and now stood in the kitchen in her stocking feet, running water into the steamer. “You’re in the spare room and I don’t have any furniture in the spare spare room.”
“He’s sleeping here?”
The whisper reached Conn’s ears in Cady’s bedroom, where he set the enormous suitcase on the floor nearest the window.
“He’s sleeping here,” Cady said, in a normal tone of voice. “He’s no different than Evan.”
“Evan didn’t sleep in your room!”
“No, he had the room next to mine, just like Conn does.”
“It’s different,” Emily said, still in that stage whisper. “It’s your house. It’s, like, intimate.”
Cady’s next reply was muffled, probably by the towel over her head as she breathed in steam, but Conn got the gist of it, the same calm, rational tone.
“Whatever,” Emily said. “Let’s order pizza!… Fine, I’ll ask him, but who doesn’t like pizza?”
Emily appeared in the doorway. She’d taken off her bright yellow wool coat and was dressed in jeans, ankle boots, and a hoodie that slipped off one shoulder. She had the long legs and slender bone structure of a model, but lacked her sister’s poise. She was a kid, trying on different brands of adult for size. “Is it all right with you if we order a pizza?”
“Sure. I’ll order it,” Conn said. That way he could keep Cady’s name off the order.
Emily didn’t seem interested in logistics of Cady’s privacy or safety, just bounded back into the main living area. She opened her laptop, then said, “Hey, Cady, is your website down for maintenance?”
“Maybe,” Cady said. “It would make sense for Bryan to take it down now but he usually tells me when he does it. I’ll call him and see.”
She pulled up the phone, then set it on the counter on speakerphone. It rang once. “I know. I’m on it.”
Apparently Bryan’s people skills weren’t all that great. “On what?” Cady asked. Emily was in the living room, surfing through social media faster than Conn could track.
“Your website’s been hacked,” Bryan said. Conn could just imagine him, beard stretching to his plaid shirt, jeans sagging on his narrow hips, surrounded by wrappers and bottles from the new age energy bars and high-octane drinks. “At first I thought the server was down, but the firewall state table has locked up. It’s a DDoS attack—.”
“A what?”
“Distributed denial of service. It’s when someone floods the site with requests, more than the server can handle, and it crashes. Give me a couple of hours and I’ll have it back up.”
“Em, can you bring me my laptop?”
Em hurried over, her open laptop in one hand and Cady’s MacBook Air in the other. For good measure Conn went into his room and grabbed his own laptop. A minute later they stood around the island, Cady’s cell on speakerphone in a cluster of laptops. Conn typed in Cady’s website. The screen came up with a white screen and a 404 error. Reading it was the extent of his ability to handle cyber crime. “You fucking motherfucker,” Bryan said. “You think you’re anonymous?”
“We’ve got backups, right?” Cady said. “You can restore it?”
“This doesn’t affect the site or the data. It’s just a way of taking your online presence offline.”
“Just great,” Cady said, scrolling over to her social media apps. “I’ll post something so fans know what’s going on. When will it be back up?”
“When it’s back up,” Bryan said, obviously distracted. Conn could hear keyboard clicks in the background.
“How did this happen?” Cady asked. Worry pinched the corners of her eyes.
“I don’t know, but I will,” Bryan said, grim. “I’m going to crawl so far up this guy’s ass I’ll be able to inspect his brain stem and figure out exactly where he and his deviant relatives branched off the tree.”
Emily’s eyes widened.