“He wanted to use me too. Just like the rest of them. When he got back, the night he copied all the files . . . he was ecstatic. He thought he was fucking Einstein and James Bond rolled into one. She walked in on him right as he finished. It was so close. And then he came back to the apartment and told me he didn’t like my plan.” A wild, frustrated sob caught in Matty’s throat. “It was all supposed to be so simple: copy the videos, delete Regina’s files, and ransom them back. We couldn’t be sure she didn’t have backups, but the threat of other copies floating around, that would have been enough to make the old bitch pay. But Mark thought he was so smart. Mark had to hide the flash drive. Mark had to get big ideas. He wanted to run the blackmail game. He wanted to make the money. It didn’t matter what I told him, how much I explained that it wouldn’t work like that.” Matty seemed to consider something. “You know what I called him after I realized what he was really like? The disappearing faggot. You know, like a magic trick. You could look right at Mark and not see him. The disappearing faggot. He wanted to be anybody else but who he was.” Matty shook his head, working his jaw; the point of the knife dipped in his hand, and Shaw tensed, trying again at the ropes around his wrists. Matty fixed Shaw with an eerily knowing look. “Is that all?”

“You fought with Mark. You wanted to stick to the plan; he didn’t. He wouldn’t tell you where he’d hidden the drive.” Shaw’s fingers tore at ropes, but he couldn’t reach the knots, and all he was doing was giving himself a bad case of rope burn. “We saw the signs of a fight at the apartment.”

“Keep going.”

“You were in trouble. Things were over with Mark, but you’d gambled everything on that flash drive. You couldn’t go back to the old arrangement with Regina; Regina must have known you were involved as soon as the recordings were stolen. If you didn’t get those recordings, you’d be back hustling on the street again. And Regina had to destroy that flash drive. She knew that copies would dilute the value of her blackmail—it might even make it worthless. So she had to find you as soon as she could, which meant you weren’t safe, not until you had something to bargain with. Or until you had money so you could make a break for it. But both of you were stuck because Mark had hidden the drive, and neither you nor Regina could find it.”

“You’re so close. Keep going.”

“Were the attacks on you real? The men following you, was that real? Or were those just to play on my sympathy?”

“I want to hear your version.”

“Brueckmann’s timeline didn’t make sense. Everybody else had been blackmailed for months, years. Long enough, in fact, that the cops got wind of it and decided to get involved. Everybody except Brueckmann, who told us that someone had contacted him only a few weeks ago. I should have realized how far-fetched the story sounded: someone showing up years later to blackmail him with video from a single night? Brueckmann hadn’t seen any proof and refused to pay. That was you, wasn’t it? Test-driving your plan with Mark.”