Power Players Box Set- The Complete Series

by Cassia Leo

  I rolled my eyes at her attempt to placate me. “Okay, sure, I believe you. If you say it, it must be true.”

  “Don’t pull that shit on me, Brina,” she retaliated.

  “No, don’t you pull that shit on me,” I shot back. “You’re the last person I would expect a lecture from. You have no idea, no fucking clue what it is like…living with this.” I slid off the counter and down to the floor, where I buried my face in my knees.

  “I’m sorry,” she said as she knelt next to me and grabbed my hand. “I’m only saying this because it’s killing me to watch you fall deeper into this hole. Honey, you have to stop this. You are allowed to be happy.”

  I wiped my face on my sleeve and looked her in the eye. “I was happy.”

  “I know.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered before I stood up. “But I can’t go to that conference.”

  Jill shook her head as she went back to sorting through my junk drawer. A few minutes later, she held up a small purple box of pills. “Do you need this?”

  “Not anymore. You can’t get pregnant from a vibrator.”

  She chucked the box at me, and Milo’s eye twitched. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but you’re making a big mistake. And I’m willing to help you fix it.”

  I let out a shrill laugh as I wrapped another glass in newspaper. “You’re going to help me?”

  “I’ll take you to the conference to talk to Luke.”

  I laughed even harder this time. “You’re even less likely to get in than I am. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s over.”

  “It’s so obviously not over,” Jill replied, throwing me a deadly look.

  “Yeah, Brina, it’s obvious there’s something…special between you two.” The injured expression on Milo’s face when he spoke the word ‘special’ made me think that maybe he truly believed that.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you both, but there is nothing special between us. We were two people who happened to have amazing sex. That’s it.”

  “Okay, I didn’t need to hear that,” Milo replied as he grabbed a glass vase off the top shelf and placed it on the counter. “Is this…?”

  I snatched the vase off the counter and hastily wrapped it up. “Yes. It’s the vase that came with the flowers you gave me. It felt like a waste to toss it in the dumpster.”

  “Brina, you need to go to that conference,” Jill interrupted as she pulled a stack of unpaid bills out of a drawer and slapped them on the countertop. “You’re the one who fucked up. You need to make the grand gesture.”

  “He probably has a new girlfriend by now.” Just thinking of this made my chest ache. “Oh, God. What if he has a new girlfriend? Oh, this is just too depressing.”

  And suddenly I couldn’t stop imagining Luke’s mouth on someone else’s lips.

  Milo grabbed my arms and looked me in the eye. “Stop torturing yourself. He does not have another girlfriend. I’ll bet anything that when he’s not at work, the guy is holed up in his mansion, sucking down bottles of whiskey while watching Howard Hughes flicks.”

  “He doesn’t have a mansion,” I corrected him.

  He rolled his eyes. “I know he doesn’t have a mansion.”

  “And he drinks bourbon.”

  Milo grabbed my arms tighter and shook me. “Listen to me, Brina. I am making us a couple of fake press passes and we’re getting into that conference on Monday. You are going to this thing, and you are going to pull out every last bit of charm, so help me.”

  I looked him in the eye, a bit frightened by the intensity of his glare. “Fine, but we’re going separately. I don’t want Luke to see me with you, which is assuming we’ll even get in. You know it’s invitation only, and there’s a barcode on the invitations.”

  Milo let go of my arms and leaned against the counter as the smug expression returned to his face. “Come on, Brina. You think I can’t get past a fucking barcode?”

  “The barcode isn’t used to get in,” I replied. “When you scan the barcode with an app released only to those who received invites, the barcode reveals a password that attendees give at the door. The app is programmed to work for two hours right before the conference begins, and that’s it.”

  Milo’s smug grin disappeared. “Well, I’m always up for a challenge,” he replied as he climbed over a cardboard box and made his way toward the open front door. “I guess I’d better go. I have a lot of work to do. Goodbye, ladies.”

  Once he was gone, Jill grinned at me. “Is he single?”

  I crumpled the sheet of newspaper in my hands and hurled it at her. “Don’t even think about it.”

  Part 4

  Password

  Chapter 1

  Brina

  My father set the brown paper bag of groceries on the counter, and I immediately began pulling out the contents: Fiber One cereal, Metamucil powder, Activia yogurt.

  “Geez, is it going to be one of those ‘stay away from the downstairs bathroom’ kind of days?” I asked as I opened the refrigerator to put away the yogurt.

  My dad grabbed the box of cereal off the counter and opened the cupboard. “Hey, don’t blame me; blame the lab. They botched that biopsy and literally scared the shit out of me.”

  “Gross, Dad.” I pulled a head of lettuce out of another bag. “You don’t have cancer. There is no need to torture us with this new fiber regiment. Trust me, this will not end well.”

  He chuckled as he grabbed my arm and planted a kiss on my cheek. “It’s great having you back, pumpkin.”

  He left the kitchen to get more bags of groceries from the car and I sighed. Of course my dad loved having me here. I was unemployed, and I would no longer be assaulting his pride with my monthly parental support checks. I couldn’t afford to help them anymore. I had to save up my unemployment income to put down the first and last month’s rent on an apartment as soon as I found a job. My dad might be glad to have me back, but I needed out of this house pronto before the memories, and the fiber, smothered me.

  I finished putting away the groceries and raced upstairs to call my best friend Jill Ramirez. My fiery Filipino friend (that was what I called her in private, though it made her inordinately angry) promised she wouldn’t allow the receptionist at the travel agency to leave me on hold for days the way she normally did. Jill’s family’s travel agency was way understaffed, ever since Jill took over when her mother got sick. They couldn’t afford to hire anyone other than a receptionist, so Jill literally spent ten hours a day on the telephone talking to clients. Her phone never stopped ringing.

  I didn’t even bother calling her office phone anymore. I usually just texted her, and she’d respond within a few minutes, but today, I needed to talk to her. I needed her moral support.

  “K&R Travel. Jill speaking. How may I help you?”

  “You can start by telling me I’m not about to make a huge ass out of myself.”

  Jill sighed. “Oh, thank God it’s you. I’m about to slice my throat with one of these shiny new brochures. Unless you’re looking for a deal on a trip to Ireland then I guess I’d better use the letter opener.”

  I couldn’t respond. Jokes about committing suicide with a brochure would have been at least somewhat amusing to me eight months ago. But when you’ve been friends as long as Jill and I have, it’s hard to remember the topics that are off-limits. I wasn’t angry with her. I just didn’t know what to say.

  “Fuck. I’m sorry,” she said, and I could imagine her eyebrows scrunched together between her shiny black eyes.

  “Sorry for what? You made a joke. It was funny.”

  “Obviously, I mean, just listen to all that rip-roaring laughter.” She paused, probably waiting for me to respond, but I wasn’t in the mood to dwell on my brother’s suicide. “I’m a jerk. Just tell me I’m a jerk and we can move on.”

  “You’re a jerk.”

  “Good. Now, you are not going to make an ass out of yourself. You are going to that conference today in your best t-shirt and jeans
, and you’re going to plant a big, delicious kiss on that perfect mouth.”

  “Jill.”

  “You get the point. He won’t be able to resist you. For Christ’s sake, Brina, he loved you.”

  I rolled my eyes. “The keyword being ‘loved’ not ‘loves’. Am I making a huge mistake? What if he’s already moved on? A lot can happen in five weeks.”

  “You are not backing out of this. Milo went to a lot of trouble to get you in there.”

  I could hear the sound of shuffling papers, and I felt the need to wrap up the conversation to let her get back to work. We couldn’t all sit at home discussing our father’s bowel movements.

  “You don’t even know what Milo did to get us in, but I get it. You know, if this were you, you’d never do it.”

  “I know,” she replied sheepishly. “I live vicariously through you. Don’t judge me.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Go get him.”

  I hung up the phone and immediately dialed Milo’s phone number. I had never actually called Milo in the two years I’d known him. He was always the one to call me to talk about work or, occasionally, when he was feeling extra confident or a little buzzed, to ask me out. He had texted me last night just before midnight to tell me he had found us a way into the developers’ conference. He refused to tell me how he had gotten ahold of the password to enter the conference and, truthfully, I didn’t care.

  Milo picked up on the second ring. “It’s all set up. I have to pick up your invitation and the phone you’re going to use to get in.”

  “I need a phone to get in?”

  “Yeah, the app that releases the password to get into the conference is only installed on the phones that were sent out with the invitations. He fucking thought of everything. Well, except one thing. He forgot that human’s are inherently greedy.”

  “You paid someone to give us their phone?”

  “Hey, there are some things that can’t be hacked. Humans, on the other hand, are nothing but walking bags of corruptible code.”

  I tried not to imagine he was talking about me and how I had almost betrayed Luke in the worst way imaginable.

  “Hey,” he interrupted my thoughts. “Put on your best come-hither expression. I’m picking you up in an hour.”

  One hour and thirteen minutes later, Milo picked me up from my parents’ house in his silver Prius.

  I slid into the passenger seat and my gaze skated over his outfit. Other than the other day when he wore a NeoSys t-shirt, I’d never seen Milo in anything but his usual Armani suits. Today he wore carefully distressed jeans and a faded t-shirt bearing the name of an indie band Ryan brought to my attention last year. He had switched out his contacts for square hipster glasses, and his watch was missing.

  I inhaled the new car smell as I gawked at him. “Did you buy a new car after you got fired from NeoSys?”

  “I got tired of the Lexus,” he replied casually.

  My mouth dropped. “What kind of severance did they give you?”

  He rolled his eyes as he turned onto Pike Street. “Your phone is under the seat.”

  I slid the box out from underneath the seat and removed the phone from the box. I was accustomed to changing phones every time I started a new project for NeoSys, but this time was different. It felt wrong, holding a phone that didn’t belong to me.

  “How much did you have to pay for this?” I asked as I turned on the phone and was prompted for a pin number.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “You’re really pissing me off, Milo. Do you know how much severance Kip gave me? Five thousand dollars. He told me I was lucky to get that. How much did they give you?”

  “I signed an NDA. I can’t talk about it.”

  “Don’t you dare pull that on me. Don’t forget that you royally screwed me on this assignment.”

  He stopped at a red light and glanced at me then stared straight ahead as he muttered, “Ten million.”

  “Fuck!”

  “Settle down. They only gave me that because they’re still afraid of me.”

  I huffed. “No wonder you haven’t bothered getting a job.”

  “Hey, I have a job. I’m working from home now, doing network security consulting.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” I wanted to strangle Kip.

  “You’re the one who brought it up.”

  Milo parked on the fourth level of the parking garage on 8th, and we sat in the Prius in silence as I stared at the phone in my hand.

  “I’m sorry. I should have negotiated a better severance for you.”

  “They probably would have given you the same bullshit excuse they gave me about seniority. You don’t have to apologize.” I turned to him and his face looked different, softer. With his button nose and his brown eyes staring back at me all wide-eyed, he appeared way too young to be sitting on so much cash. “How much did this phone cost you?”

  He sighed. “Twenty-five grand.”

  I clutched at the ache in my chest. “Ugh. You could have lied to me that time.”

  “I did,” he said sheepishly. “It was actually forty grand.”

  “Oh, just stop it,” I pled. “I can’t take anymore.”

  He reached over and squeezed my knee and I froze. “Sorry,” he said as he pulled his hand away. “Just a reflex.”

  “All right,” I said, eager to change the subject. “What do I do with this phone?”

  Milo put on his business face and I almost smiled. He was a year younger than me, the same age as Ryan, and even though he could be a complete asshole at times, his serious business face sometimes made me want to giggle. It was like watching my little brother put on a suit to go to church on Easter Sunday.

  He explained the procedure for retrieving the password once I got inside the conference center then gave me a fake press pass bearing the name of the person who sold their phone to him for forty grand. Today, I would be Hilda Marin.

  “Hilda?” I muttered as I hung the pass around my neck.

  “Hey, we can’t all be Brina Kingston or Luke Maxwell. Many of us have to suffer with the names our parents gave us.”

  “Aw. Poor Milo.” I pinched his cheek and he batted my hand away.

  “Don’t do that,” he muttered angrily.

  “Ooh, here comes Angry Milo,” I teased.

  He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, maybe you should get going.”

  I punched him in the arm before I climbed out. “I owe you one.”

  The walk down 7th to Pike Street felt like a long walk down death row. I had been up until three in the morning obsessing over what I would say when I finally saw Luke, but I had a horrible feeling I was going to freeze and forget everything.

  I had never been in this position before—the one seeking forgiveness. My college boyfriend, Mike Herod, cheated on me twice. I’ve always believed everyone deserved a second chance. I had gone back and forth in my mind trying to decide if I actually deserved one from Luke. Though I never actually gave Milo the password to Luke’s mirror network, I thought about doing it—many, many times. I considered destroying all those years of hard work Luke spent on Blaze for my own gain. For a fucking promotion.

  I didn’t know if I deserved to be forgiven, but I knew I had to at least try.

  I queued up behind a group of twenty-some people lined up outside the entrance to the conference center. At the door, they would scan the barcode on my invitation and give me the pin code to unlock the phone. Once I unlocked the phone, I would gain access to an app called Blaze, which would display a password for me to provide at the entrance to the conference room.

  The young Asian girl at the door wore a silver headset that curled over her left ear, a plain black t-shirt, and jeans. I almost shook my head at the unofficial uniform of Maxwell Computers, the uniform that I had despised and complained about a million times. I would take back every complaint and wear that uniform every day if it meant Luke and I could go back to way things were six weeks ago.

/>   As it was, I was wearing a plain white t-shirt, plain skinny jeans, and silver flats. Jill had tried to convince me to wear something sexy, but she didn’t understand that, to Luke, this outfit was sexy.

  The girl scanned my invitation and turned the LCD screen on the scanner toward me. The number 1457 flashed on the screen then disappeared.

  “Thanks,” I said as I entered the lobby of the conference center.

  A second woman waved a metal detector wand over my body, searching for other communication and recording devices, then waved me forward. I pulled the phone out of my pocket and punched in the pin number. The screen unlocked and a few icons for native apps flashed on the screen lined up above an icon labeled Blaze. I touched the icon and a countdown clock filled the screen.

  11 min 18 sec

  until launch

  I stared at the seconds counting down for a moment before someone called my name—and they didn’t call me Hilda.

  “Brina, is that you?”

  Fuck! It was Jesse Niven, Ryan’s former best friend whom I had been dodging for months.

  I shook my head as he approached me looking very confused. “You can’t say my name here,” I whispered as he glanced at the press pass dangling around my neck.

  “What are you doing here…Hilda?”

  Jesse had just graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Washington a few weeks ago. I knew, because his sister had emailed me to give me the date and time of the ceremony and I ignored the email. I hadn’t seen Jesse since before Ryan’s death. Seeing him now made me want to turn around and leave.

  I glanced at his press pass and saw that he was there on behalf of The Seattle Times. The painful memories brought on by the sight of him were replaced with a swell of pride.

  I threw my arms around him. “You did it,” I whispered.

  He chuckled as he hugged me back. “Yeah, the business and tech section. Not sports like Ryan wanted, but I think he’d be proud.”