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ability is supernatural.”
    “I’m done with school and I need privacy.  I don’t like scaring Maggie and I work weird hours.  The other businesses run themselves but my side work is pretty time-consuming.”  Considering, she asked, “The celibacy thing…is that about your dissertation?” 
    “I need certain data.  This is a four-year span that has a lot of moving pieces.  There are some parts that aren’t solid in my mind yet.  It’s all going to be surveys and stuff so I need a real world test as well.  I’m using myself as the control subject.”  Then she added, “I need privacy to do everything without Dad looking over my shoulder.”
    They talked for hours and Tawny wondered if Riya knew the scope of her idea as well as she thought. 
    She figured it would keep her mind interested, give her more writing material for the dirty books she liked to write, and maybe she’d accidentally meet someone. Stranger things had happened.  No one deserved romantic love more than her closest friend.
    Riya yawned.  “I’m crashing.  We can talk tomorrow.  I want to go running in the morning before the rain.” 
    Leaning in her direction, Tawny gave her a smacking kiss on the cheek.  “Get your beauty sleep.  I, on the other hand, am naturally stunning and require little rest.”
    “Working again?”
    “Always.  I love it.  Go to bed.  Enjoy your run .”  She said the word as if referring to maggots, the grossest thing on the planet, in her opinion.  “Wake me up with that morning chipper shit and you get sliced.”
    “I’ll bake early.  Food always wakes you up.”  A few seconds later, Riya disappeared down the hall.
    
    Hollow kept her busy. 
    He scoured the web for kidnappings, missing persons, unsolved murders, rapes, and domestic cases that meant an adult or child was in danger.
    It seemed there was no end to the scumbags that populated the earth, breathing the same air as the rest of civilization.
    They built their own investigations. 
    Some of the work was the stuff of nightmares.  It didn’t make her love what she did, or the difference she made, any less.
    Their team operated outside the law. 
    The boundaries that prevented the police from making arrests and the district attorneys from getting convictions didn’t impede Hollow’s enterprise. 
    She’d been working for him more than a year when he brought up her own night of violence.  He gave her the files on the men who’d killed Arnie and raped her. 
    As she suspected, it hadn’t been their first taste of crime.  The only reason she hadn’t been killed as well was due to a nightclub across the street closing.  Within minutes, the street was flooded with milling patrons. 
    She imagined that the men had been concerned with getting their clothes fastened and getting away from the scene.  Unconscious, she didn’t present much of a threat. 
    Most of her day had been spent going through their arrest records and cross-referencing their victims. 
    Finally, Hollow had rested his hands over hers, kissed her cheek, and whispered, “Enough.  Now you move on.  They took enough.”
    He’d held her while she cried and then he’d kissed her until she was moaning in his arms. 
    He took her to his bed.  For hours, he loved her body and soothed her spirit.  “Remember who you are, Tawny.  Remember who you are and then let it go.”
    She had done as he told her and the slow-bleeding wound inside was finally able to scab over. 
    Tawny owed Hollow for many things but, to her, the night he gave her back who she was symbolized the greatest of them. 

Chapter Eight
     
    May 2010
    Tawny rolled over in the middle of the night and watched Hollow work in silence for several minutes. 
    The pale light from his computer reflected off his glasses and in his blue-black hair.  He was naked from the waist up, sitting at his massive workstation.  His body was corded and sinewy. 
    It was a body she openly and unashamedly lusted