Flipping Through the Pages
Copyright© 2026 by Dragonpig
Chapter 42
The familiar ping of the facial recognition program cut through the warehouse’s ambient hum, pulling Selina’s attention away from the Volkov financial records she’d been cross-referencing. She glanced at the alert window, expecting another false positive—the system had been running for hours, scanning through thousands of images and video files across the darker corners of the internet.
But the confidence rating made her heart skip: 97.8% match.
Selina clicked on the alert, and Tammy’s face filled the screen. Not the smiling girl from the missing person photo, but the same distinctive reddish-blonde hair, the same bright eyes. Only now those eyes held something different—a mixture of nervousness and something else Selina could identify as she watched the preview frame of what was clearly a video.
Her finger hovered over the play button for a moment before she clicked it.
The video quality was professional, too professional for comfort. Tammy sat on a pink canopy bed next to another girl—dark-haired, maybe a year younger. Both were barely dressed, and within the first few seconds, Selina understood exactly what kind of production this was. Her stomach twisted as she watched Tammy respond to the other girl’s touch, the way she moved and reacted suggesting this wasn’t her first time being filmed.
Selina paused the video, her hands shaking slightly as she pulled up the file properties. The metadata showed it had been uploaded just hours ago to a private server, tagged with keywords that made her skin flush with warmth. But what caught her attention was the production company listed in the credits: “Hatter’s Productions.”
“Finally,” she whispered, immediately opening new search windows to dig deeper into the company.
The search results were frustratingly sparse. Hatter’s Productions had a minimal web presence—no official website, no business registration she could find in public records, just references scattered across forums and private servers where people discussed and traded content she didn’t want to think about too hard. But what she could find suggested they’d been operating for years, producing a steady stream of videos featuring young girls.
Selina’s programs continued running in the background as she manually searched, and within an hour, three more alerts chimed. Three more videos, all featuring Tammy. The timestamps showed they’d been created over the past several months, documenting what looked like a progression—Tammy becoming more comfortable, more practiced, in front of the camera.
Each video made Selina’s chest tighten with a mixture of anger and determination. This girl had been trapped in this system for months, being systematically exploited by people who knew exactly how to manipulate and control vulnerable teenagers. And somewhere out there, more girls were probably going through the same thing.
But where? Selina had the company name, but no physical address. No way to track down where these videos were being made.
She leaned back in her chair, staring at the screens full of data, and tried to think like 47 would. What patterns could she find? What connections existed that she hadn’t seen yet?
Her eyes drifted to the map display still showing the location of Scarface & Wesker’s diner. Tammy had last been seen there, talking to a man and a blonde woman who had convinced her to leave with them. That had to be connected to how she ended up making videos for Hatter’s Productions.
On impulse, Selina pulled up missing persons reports for the area around the diner, expanding the search radius to cover a few miles in each direction. The results made her breath catch—dozens of reports over the past three years, all teenage girls, all from the same general area of Gotham. Most had been classified as runaways, which meant minimal police investigation.
She refined the search, looking for patterns in the disappearances. Certain blocks seemed to be hotspots, areas where multiple girls had gone missing within months of each other. The pattern centered around a section of the East End known for cheap housing, homeless shelters, and the kind of desperation that made people vulnerable to promises of something better.
Selina stared at the map, watching as her program highlighted the locations with red dots. It looked like a hunting ground. Someone—probably working for Hatter’s Productions—was systematically targeting girls from this area, girls who were unlikely to be missed or aggressively searched for by authorities.
The realization hit her like a physical blow. This wasn’t just about Tammy. This was about dozens of girls, maybe more, who had been lured away from the streets and into whatever operation Hatter’s Productions was running. And if the pattern continued, there would be more victims.
Unless someone stopped it.
Selina pulled up street view images of the area, studying the layout. It was exactly the kind of neighborhood she’d grown up in—rundown buildings, scattered streetlights, plenty of places for vulnerable kids to sleep rough. If she went there, dressed down and looking desperate, she could probably blend in with the other street kids easily enough.
And if whoever was hunting for girls approached her, she could let them take her. Find out where they brought their victims. Maybe find Tammy and the others.
The plan formed in her mind, but she could already anticipate 47’s reaction. He’d been protective during their training session, reluctant to let her take risks even in a controlled environment. Asking him to let her walk into what was essentially a trap would require careful persuasion.
Selina minimized the video windows—she didn’t need to see those images again—and began organizing her research into a presentation that would be hard to argue with. She pulled up the missing persons statistics, created a timeline of disappearances, mapped out the hunting ground with all its red dots marking lost girls.
She needed to frame this not as a reckless gamble, but as the logical next step in their investigation. They had the pattern, they had the area, but they needed someone on the inside to find the actual location where these girls were being held. And she was the only one who could realistically pass for a vulnerable teenager on the streets.
The hard part would be convincing 47 that the risk was worth it. But as she looked at Tammy’s face in the paused video—still so young, still recognizably the girl from the missing person photo despite everything that had been done to her—Selina knew she had to try.
She started drafting her argument, organizing the evidence and rehearsing the points that would appeal to 47’s logical nature while addressing his protective instincts. This was their best chance to find Tammy and shut down an operation that had been destroying young lives for years.
Now she just had to convince 47 to let a fifteen-year-old girl walk into danger, alone, and hope the monsters would take the bait.
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