by Cari Z.
“So!” Elliot clapped his hands together. “Last week I talked about letting people go, now I’m talking about bringing people back in. Out with the bad, in with the good. If you have a strategy for attracting the right kind of people to your life, share it on the forums, unless it involves drugs, blackmail, or bribery, in which case.” Elliot shrugged. “You’ve got bigger problems to be working on, my friend. Good luck this weekend, and may the best team win.”
“Aaand . . . done.”
“What do you think?” he asked Ted, who gave his usual one-shouldered shrug.
“Pretty good. We’ve probably got enough footage to put together something nice. You want it out tomorrow?”
“With the newsletter,” Elliot confirmed. “Send it to Samar by this afternoon so he has enough time to do all the formatting.”
Ted nodded. “I know the drill.”
“I don’t mean to sound like I’m doubting you. I just want everything to go smoothly for this weekend.”
“What could go wrong?”
Elliot grinned at him. “Let’s not tempt fate, shall we? Thanks, Ted.” He headed upstairs and toward his office, but Serena intercepted him before he could get through the foyer.
“Lennox is back.”
“Good, I wanted to talk to him about his suit situation.”
“No,” Serena hissed, somehow making it simultaneously stern and surreptitious. “He’s here and he is pissed. He didn’t say anything, but the last time I saw that face on him, Gaby had run his old car into a fire hydrant. He said he needed to talk to you and slammed the door to your office behind him before I could ask why. What’s he been doing?”
“Something for work, he said.” But that didn’t seem to have been the truth. “Well. I guess I’d better see what’s up.”
“I hear screaming, I’m calling the cops.”
“If things get that far, it’ll be too late for me,” Elliot joked, but he was uncomfortably aware that his joke was probably right on. Disregarding Lennox’s gun and the knives, the man likely knew a dozen ways to kill him with his bare hands.
But now he was just being dramatic. Elliot rolled his eyes at himself as he turned to the door of his office. Everything was going to be fine.
He walked in, shut the door behind himself, and stopped dead in the face of a man he’d never seen before. It was Lennox, but this was a Lennox that Elliot didn’t know. He stood stock-still against the far wall, his expression so hard it could have polished diamonds. There was no feeling in his eyes, no hint of shifting or movement to give away his state of mind. All Elliot could read was a cold, fierce fury, and he swallowed nervously.
“Lennox,” Elliot said cautiously. “What’s wrong?”
“What’s the Singularity project?”
Elliot’s mind exploded in a hundred different directions. How had Lennox learned about Singularity? Who had he been talking to? Had he gone to Pullman, had he— Oh, of course.
“You talked to Sheridan.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you insane?”
“I don’t think you’re in a position to be asking that question,” Lennox said softly. The quietness of his voice was worse than any of the yelling he’d done so far. This was a guy who’d seen the sign for angry and driven straight past it to incensed. “Not when you’ve done such a good job diggin’ your own grave.”
“Wait, no,” Elliot snapped, because he was guilty of a lot of things but not this. “Are you taking his word for this? Sheridan Pullman is the kind of man who hires assassins to intimidate people into doing what he wants. He’s not exactly a moral authority in this situation. He sent Lehrer after people before and now he’s doing it again—”
“He isn’t.”
Elliot paused, his momentum derailed. “What?”
“Jonathan Lehrer is in Russia. St. Petersburg, to be precise. Oliver texted and let me know.”
Well, that was a missing cog in the clockwork of Elliot’s hypothesis, but he could handle that. “He might be gone, but there’s no surety that Pullman didn’t hire someone else to do his dirty work.”
“Because there are a lot of left-handed, gun-wielding hitmen for hire in the area.”
Elliot’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, ‘gun-wielding hitmen’?”
Lennox shook his head. “Don’t worry about that―get back to the issue at hand. Did you steal from him?”
“No.”
Lennox pushed off the wall and walked toward Elliot, every step slow and controlled. It wasn’t a walk, it was a stalk, and Elliot couldn’t move. “Did you steal from him?”
“No.”
“This man threatened me. He threatened my daughter.” Lennox was within an arm’s length now, close enough to touch. He stopped, but neither of them reached out. “He had plenty of things to say about you, and none of them were nice, and I’m pretty sure some of them were true.” Lennox’s eyes pinned Elliot in place, the hypnotic gaze of a cobra right before it struck. “I’m going to ask you one more time, and I want the truth. Otherwise I will walk out that door and you can handle this on your own.”
Elliot hadn’t realized just how badly the idea of facing this weekend’s maelstrom without Lennox’s backup would distress him: his throat tightened so fast he almost choked. His eyes roved over Lennox’s face, looking for any hint of sympathy, but there was nothing. Nothing of his lover, his friend.
“Did you,” Lennox asked slowly, “steal the data for a project called Singularity from Sheridan Pullman?”
“No,” Elliot whispered. His eyes were watering, and he wanted to blink but didn’t dare. “Lennox, no, I swear.”
Lennox stared at him for a long moment, then finally nodded. “Then you’d better explain why he thinks you did.”
“Can I sit down to do it?” Elliot smiled shakily. “I think my knees are about to give out.”
“Of course you can sit.”
Elliot flopped into the beanbag chair with a loud sigh. Lennox sat across from him. “Holy shit, you frightened me.”
Lennox made a face. “I wasn’t going to hurt you.”
“You looked like you were going to rip my heart straight out of my chest if I lied to you.”
Lennox shook his head. “I might have wanted to if you’d lied, but I wouldn’t have laid a finger on you. I swear. I would have just . . .” He shrugged. “Left.”
And left behind a gaping, bleeding wound in Elliot’s psyche, but he didn’t want to think about that right now, and he certainly didn’t want to share. “How are you so sure that I’m not lying? Not that I am!” Elliot added, sitting up straighter to accentuate the point. “But how do you know that?”
“Call it a gut feeling. So. Explain why Pullman thinks you’re a thief.”
Now things got complicated. Elliot tried to keep his thoughts clear. As long as he didn’t stray from exactly the truth as he knew it, he should be fine. “When Pullman was first arrested, all of his hard copy files were being stored onsite at Redback Industries. The police, and I think the FBI at one point, issued a massive search warrant for Redback’s files, phone records, visitor logs, payroll records, the works. Sheridan was paranoid about his research, but too egotistical to hide any of it. He kept a meticulous inventory of everything, backups of everything digital, multiple copies of hard files. After he was sentenced and his company was being broken up and sold off, all of his personal copies of the files were moved from headquarters to his home. Apparently Singularity is missing from the pile.”
“Why point the finger at you?”
“Because I was free by then, and he thinks I’m motivated by revenge. As his attorney, I had access to the company intranet. He must assume I copied the files during the chaos. Which I didn’t,” Elliot emphasized. “I have no use for something like Project Singularity, believe me.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t actually know much about it. From what I understand, it has to do with a method for manufacturing designer viruses and infecting specific targets
with them. Basically, it’s finding a way to kill someone with a personal plague rather than a gun.” Elliot shuddered. “I’d rather not think about it either, to be honest.”
Lennox looked troubled. “And he thinks you’re selling this at your Black Box meeting?”
“I guess so. That’s all I was told.”
The troubled expression changed to annoyance. “When were you told this?”
“On the phone, before he wrecked my car. Which I did tell you about!” Elliot added defensively. “I told you he made some threats!”
“You didn’t say they were about returning something that you didn’t even steal. It would have been nice to know that before I went and met with the guy this afternoon.”
Elliot scoffed. “Well, I didn’t know you were going to lose your mind and do that.”
“It was logical to try and get a handle on him.”
“He’s a mafioso-style bully with an overdeveloped sense of vengeance! What is there to try and handle?”
Lennox tilted his head. “Did you just quote The Princess Bride at me?”
Elliot thought about it. “Maybe? But the vengeance line is a good one; it’s topical. Does it matter if I stole it from a movie?”
There it was, finally: a smile, which was as good as a laugh from Lennox and meant that Elliot had been forgiven, at least for this. “You’re ridiculous.”
Elliot shook his head. “No, and don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re the ridiculous one. How could you go and speak to him like that? He might have had you killed!”
“I don’t think so. But,” Lennox held up a hand, “he does have a woman on staff who’s well armed and not disposed to like strangers. She’s left-handed too, which means it could have been her this morning.”
Now Elliot was completely lost. “Her where this morning?”
Did Lennox actually look a little sheepish? “Outside your house. I chased someone through the woods. Turns out they were armed. And the shooter was a lefty, so . . . you know. It’s topical.”
“Oh my God, you idiot!”
The end of the working week was a frenzy of checking, double-checking, reassurance, and focused effort. Elliot hardly had time to look at Lennox, much less talk to him, which was fine because Lennox seemed similarly disinclined to get into another discussion that could so easily turn into an argument.
Not that the original had been all that much of an argument. Lennox had taken Elliot’s rant about being a “stupid, secretive asshole” stoically, and then countered with, “Either you come up with an actual plan for getting out of whatever trap Pullman’s set or you’re not going to your Black Box meeting.” At that point, Serena had banged on the door and reminded them she was perfectly willing to file a noise complaint against the two of them, which made Elliot back down. He was going through all of this to avoid calling the police.
The special election for district attorney would be over by Saturday night, and then he could contact the police without worrying for Vanessa. Unfortunately Saturday night was also the Meetup, right when he needed the police’s help. But he could use more time to put his side of the story together anyway. He still had the dongle, but would it be enough to put suspicion on Pullman? And, irritating as it was, Lennox had a point: he had to get through both of his meetings without being shot, kidnapped, or otherwise displaced before he could get his point across.
Friday night ended up being spent with Lee. Lennox had sounded reluctant to take her when Gaby had called, the threat from Pullman obviously still weighing on his mind. Gaby had been on the verge of a meltdown, however, so insistent that her declarations of impending doom through Lennox’s phone had been loud and clear to the whole office. “—has just had his tonsils out, and Marcus isn’t here and his ex is gone for the weekend, and there’s no way I can run Lee around to all her appointments, much less get her to that ridiculous party you and Serena insisted on, while I’ve got to take care of the twins.”
Lennox had sighed. “Gaby . . .”
“And don’t tell me again that she can’t stay at your place, I’m sick of it! You’re a grown man and you need to work on these problems, and your daughter needs to be accommodated because she—”
Serena plucked the phone from Lennox’s hand. “Are you crazy? She’s staying with me tonight! We have to go shopping for the right dress tomorrow, and if she wants to wear toeless shoes, then we’re going to need pedicures.”
“Why would you let her wear toeless shoes in the middle of February? Have you seen outside lately?”
“We’re going to be inside 99.9 percent of the time! What, you think I’m going to make my niece walk through snow drifts in her gorgeous, stylish shoes?” Serena demanded.
Elliot and Lennox shared a bemused look as they let the sisters hash out Lee’s schedule. Five minutes of arguing later, Serena finally handed the phone back.
“She wants to go boxing with you tonight, and then you’re dropping her off with me. I’ll bring her to the Meetup tomorrow, and I’ll take her Saturday night too, so Gaby can stay at home with the twins and not worry.”
“She always worries,” Lennox drawled.
Serena rolled her eyes. “Worry less, then. I swear she’s going to fret herself into an early grave if she’s not careful. It’s getting worse the more Marcus is away.”
“Am I going to pick Lee up?”
“Yes, she expects you in half an hour. As for you,” Serena turned to Elliot, “everything is ready for tomorrow, all the notices have gone out in the forums, and Stuart has called probably a dozen times today asking whether you’ve got plans for tonight. I’d love to be able to give him a real reason that you’re not available.” She smiled sweetly. “Like that you’re out on a date with your boyfriend and his kid.”
Elliot’s stomach gave a little flutter when she said that, but he carefully kept any sign of it off his face. “Don’t rub it in. You know how petulant he can be. A petulant caterer is the last thing we need right before the Meetup.”
“I think he could use some stark truth, frankly. Stuart’s never going to understand social cues unless there are consequences for getting them wrong,” Serena argued, but she let it slide. “Well? Go get your girl!” She shooed them out of the office, and a minute later, Elliot waited patiently for Lennox to check the underside of his vehicle before they slid into the rental.
“Before you ask,” Elliot said when Lennox inhaled like he was about to speak, “no, of course I don’t mind having Lee along with us tonight. I recognize that I’m the one monopolizing your free time here, and it would be hypocritical of me to get upset when other people want to be with you. Especially your own kid.”
Lennox rubbed the back of his neck. “I didn’t mean for you to get drawn into my family’s drama.”
“I wouldn’t describe it as drama,” Elliot argued as he started the rental. The engine purred like a cougar, but he found he missed the sound of his poor Porsche. “I like spending time with both you and Lee, and she doesn’t seem to mind.”
“She’s crazy about you,” Lennox said, and Elliot smiled a little bit. Lee wasn’t his niece, but being around her eased the pang in his heart whenever he thought about his sister’s kids. “And she’s generally a good judge of character, so I guess you must be okay.”
“You’re being awfully complimentary.” Elliot turned onto the highway and headed toward Gaby’s subdivision. “Whatever did I do to deserve that?”
“I don’t know, maybe I’m getting soft.”
“Or maybe you like me.”
“Or that,” Lennox said. “That could definitely be it.”
Elliot didn’t reply, but he bet his smile gave him away. Whatever they were doing, it had gone beyond casual fucking and a twisted need to protect and be protected. No matter what they decided about each other in the end, though, it would have to wait until after tomorrow.
And for him to have a plan. Lennox had shot down everything he’d suggested so far as “too dangerous, unworkable, too reliant on ch
ance, and no, we don’t have a drone so that one’s not gonna work.”
Elliot’s rambling thoughts cut off abruptly when he turned onto the street that led to Lee’s cul-de-sac and saw her standing at the corner, a full backpack over one shoulder and a murderous expression on her face. He came to a quick stop next to her and put on his hazards.
“What the— What’s she doing over here?” Lennox opened his door and Lee unslung her backpack.
“Let’s go,” she announced. “Dad, I can’t get into the backseat unless you get out―move.”
“Why are you standing on the street corner in the cold?” he asked. “Why didn’t you meet us at the house?”
“Because Mom is being a complete bitch, and—”
“Ophelia Sky West,” Lennox interrupted her. “You do not call your mother by that word. Never. Do you understand me?”
Lee crossed her arms and glared at the ground. “Fine.”
“Do you need to go back and apologize to her?”
“No. We just had a fight, that’s all.” Lee sighed. “And it’s probably because she’s stressed out since Jerome is crying ’cause his throat hurts, and Khalil is mad because Marcus isn’t around, but she still started it!”
Lennox looked at his daughter for a long moment, then got out of the car. “In,” he said, motioning her to the back. “Give me a minute to call your mom.”
“I promise not to drive off without you,” Elliot said. Lennox gave him a little smile as Lee clambered into the tight backseat of the Camaro, then shut the door.
“She’s going to yell at him,” Lee said morosely. “She’s been angry all day.”
“He’ll get over it,” Elliot said. He took in Lee’s demeanor for a second, then added, “She brought me up, huh?”
Lee’s eyes went wide. “How did you know?”
“I’m good at reading people. So?”
Lee sighed. “Ugh, yes, it was kind of about you, but not really. Mom says dumb things sometimes when she gets worked up. She goes to therapy for it and everything. And she’ll feel bad tomorrow, but tonight she was being mean. She thinks you’re a bad influence and Dad shouldn’t be exposing me to you, and then she started talking about Aunt Serena and I told her I was going to wait for you outside.” She shrugged. “So I did.”