His eyes go wide, and he nearly chokes on his own spittle. I smile at him sweetly. Picture that, asshole. I hope the image is burned into his brain permanently, like an ugly black scar made with a branding iron.
Jeremy finally regains his composure and narrows his eyes, but just as he opens his mouth, the Ice Queen flicks her hand at him and gives him a sharp look.
“Enough,” she barks. She turns to me as Jeremy snaps his lips shut and practically cowers like a whipped puppy. Her expression is full of feigned pity. “You still think you have a bargaining chip, Emma. You don’t. You have nothing. This isn’t a negotiation. We’ll do what we want, and you’ll go along with it. We own you.”
I got a jab in at Jeremy, but now that the Ice Queen is back in charge, my resolution shakes. I’ve been in over my head since this has begun. The last residue of confidence I had earlier wanes. They’ve wrecked my plan to hand over the code and be done with them. But it doesn’t matter, does it? If I don’t go along with this, if I don’t submit to this fucking atrocity of signing on with them publicly, then they’ll just make it worse. BHC has no morals. No ethics. No line they won’t cross. I know they won’t stop at just destroying Pentabyte — they’ll destroy the guys’ lives, too, even if that means literally, as punishment to me. My hands shake, and my stomach rolls at the thought. I hate myself for even considering going forward with this, but it’s better than the alternative.
Beside me, Jeremy’s watching me carefully, taking pleasure in the wave of emotions crossing my face. He places his forearms on his knees, and he leans toward me again.
“So sorry, cupcake,” he whispers, his face twisted with delight. “Those pretty boys of yours — their nightmare is just getting started. But maybe you’ll be able to console them. That’s what whores are good at, right?”
“Go to hell,” I hiss.
“Hey, at least you’ll finally be able to cash in on all your hard work when you sign on with BHC.” He grins. “I insisted they give you a little something — out of the kindness of my heart — since we’ll be making a killing off your software. Way more than the drone program, and you know, that made me filthy fucking rich.”
“Filthy is too nice a word to describe you.” I sneer at him then turn to the Ice Queen. “Are we done here?”
She tilts her head, and I see a hint of something in her eyes — anticipation. It makes my stomach churn. Anything that gets her excited is probably something I’m going to deeply dislike. “Almost,” she says. “You have your orders, but I’m going to spell it out for you one more time so there’s no confusion.”
The Ice Queen stares hard at me as she runs through the list. “Finish the code and be ready to jump when we tell you. In the meantime, continue your life as usual. We’ll let you know when it’s time to go public with your sad little breakup with Pentabyte and announce our partnership. Until then, don’t do anything out of the ordinary. If the competition thinks you’re up for grabs, they just move in closer and that, my dear, will only cause us to tighten the noose around your neck. We’ll be watching. And finally, just in case you get any lofty ideas about hatching an escape plan with those pathetic men of yours, we have a little something to share with you.”
The Ice Queen nods to Jeremy, and he digs out a thick manilla folder from the bag at his feet. He holds it in front of him like his hands are clutched around a trophy, and he closes his eyes as though he’s savoring the moment. When he opens them, he looks at me with a wide smile, and I immediately feel nauseous from the amount of delight in his expression.
“This is my favorite part,” he says, opening the folder.
8
Jude
The goddamn SEC is still camped out in the building.
At least the atmosphere calmed down once those fuckers were no longer prowling the hallways. After giving them an overly-generous period of time, during which they’d continued barking threats in every direction and demanding access to the file room and our offices, they still couldn’t produce the warrants they’d boasted about having.
So, I gleefully escorted every one of those assholes back to the elevator and smiled as I pressed the down arrow like it was a goddamn rocket ejector button. Have a nice trip, motherfuckers.
They haven’t gone far, though.
My eyes and ears at the front desk in the main building lobby downstairs report that the men with the IRS gave up and went home, their tails tucked between their legs. But the SEC suits are determined bastards. They’re circling the lobby like a swarm of wasps, still waiting on the all-important paperwork to show up so they can rip through our files and seize our computers.
The fact that the warrants haven’t materialized didn’t keep our stock from getting pounded into dust. Or from having to field a holy, hot mess of panicked questions from our employees. And it sure as hell didn’t keep the press from reporting every stupid fucking speculation they could pull out of their asses.
Most of our employees have packed up and called it a day, but every one of our department heads and secretaries are still here, acting like they’re settling in for the long haul. I haven’t pulled an all-nighter since my earliest days with Pentabyte, back when we were first getting this company off the ground. I never thought I’d be doing it again, and certainly not under circumstances like this.
It is definitely going to be an all-night affair. Our lawyers, as well as a team from our PR firm, are on their way over here to discuss legalities and strategies. Together, we’ll try to come up with a plan to manage this shitstorm. Meeting with either of them on a good day under normal circumstances takes ages. But now? I have a feeling the sun will be threatening the sky by the time we wrap up.
And Daniel has called some friends of his to come in and sweep the entire office with next-gen equipment. They’ll be checking every speck of dust for bugs, cameras, or anything else the suits might have planted while they were poking around. That’s going to take hours.
I slump into my desk chair, wondering if Jax still has that bottle of whiskey in his office. The good shit.
Running my fingers through my hair, I contemplate going back to a buzz cut. It’s been a long time since I had one — back then I could just blow stuff up and call it good. I never thought I’d ever look back on my military days as simpler times, but there it is.
The door to my office opens, and I jolt upright. Daniel lifts one hand toward me and shuts the door behind him with the other. “Just me. How are you holding up?”
“Thinking about rummaging through Jax’s office for that bottle of Irish whiskey he has stashed somewhere. How’s your secretary?”
“She’s doing better now. Your talk really helped calm everyone’s nerves. They trust you.”
I run my palms over my eyes. How fucked up is it that I’m the one with the soothing words today? “Tell her she doesn’t have to stay.”
“I did. But she wants to.”
I scratch at the back of my head. Yeah, definitely need to just shave this off. “If you don’t give that woman a raise when this is all over—”
“Oh, she’s due,” he agrees with a hearty nod.
“Speaking of getting one’s dues,” I say, “it looks like Jax will, indeed, be spending the night in lockup. His handlers were pissed, but they’re going to take care of it first thing tomorrow morning. I called the precinct chief to let him know. That made him happy. Said it would be bad for morale if Jax got out before he’d had at least one overnight.”
Daniel sinks into the chair opposite my desk. “Well, he did knock an officer out cold.”
“And nearly a second one,” I add.
The precinct chief, a guy I’ve been on friendly terms with for a few years — we both share the same taste in bars — gave me the run down. Jax was so revved up, they’d insisted on doing a tox screening on him and couldn’t believe it when he came back clean. I still haven’t heard Jax’s side of the story, but I did get to talk to him for about thirty seconds on the phone. His first question was about Emma.
Once I cleared up that worry, he calmed down and accepted his overnight stay without argument. He told me not to bother coming down there at all, to just focus on what needs done here. Which is exactly what I’m doing.
Sometimes, I want to strangle my twin. But most of the time, I don’t know what I’d do without him. Like right now. He’d know exactly what to do next. And I’d damn sure already have a glass of whiskey in my hands if he were here.
“Have you heard from Trigg?” Daniel asks.
I stand up and move to look out the large floor-to-ceiling window of my office. “Yeah,” I tell Daniel as I stare out over the city. Something about the glow of the thousands of lights — golds, yellows, reds — against the dark sky is calming. The colors kind of remind me of that painting of Jax’s that Emma keeps going on about. Redemption, I think. Well, let’s fucking hope that name applies to this situation, too. At least the world looks normal out there, even if it’s all to shit inside here.
“He’s supervising the security sweep of the apartment building,” I say, turning back to Daniel. “It’s slow going, but there’s no sign of a physical breach yet.”
“Good,” Daniel says, a strained smile appearing on his face. “And at least we know Emma’s safe. Has she called you again?”
I shake my head. “No. You?” I’ve had my phone on the loudest setting, and still I’ve been checking the screen every few minutes.
He sighs. “No. Just a text with the next codeword, assuring us all is well.”
“Well, that’s to be expected, I guess. Who knows what channels BHC is scanning or where they have access to. I’m sure Desmond had everything secured before she called us earlier, but the less communication, the better. It lowers the risk of her being located.”
Daniel purses his lips and nods silently, swiveling in his chair back and forth a few inches, a nervous habit. I don’t have to tell him any of that about Emma; he knows. But we’ve been repeating platitudes to one another for the past several hours to bolster our confidence, to have something certain to say when there’s so much we still don’t have answers to.
We all went over this plan half a dozen times with her security team — each of us even contributed to the series of codewords they’d use to indicate her status during regular intervals. The plan was only ever meant to be used during a worst-case contingency. A failsafe in the unlikely scenario that all hell broke loose. We never hoped to need it. But, sure as shit, no sooner did we have the plan in place than all hell broke loose. Knowing Emma is safe is a Godsend, but being out of contact with her is fraying the edges of my composure — not being able to touch her and comfort her and know with my own eyes that she’s okay.
“Gunner texted me right before I came in,” Daniel says. “He finished up the dinner with Carmine Industries, and he’s headed back to the office.”
“That man has one hell of a poker face,” I admit, admiration in my voice. “He’s a team player all the way.”
“Sure,” Daniel’s smile is easier this time. “Just be ready for him to be sitting next to Jax tonight if any of those government prigs down in the lobby mouths off to him. I’m pretty sure he’s on his last string of sanity. He’s been putting on the nothing’s-wrong show for our clients all day.”
I pull out my phone. “I’ll have some of those brownies from that place on Monroe delivered.”
“The ones with the powdered sugar on top and the white chocolate chips inside?”
“Yeah, he loves those.”
“Andres Bakery.”
I snap my finger and point at him while starting a search for the bakery. “That’s it, Andres.”
“Those are delicious, don’t get me wrong,” Daniel says. “But I think we’re past the point of fancy brownies. At least, I know I am.”
My phone drops to the desk, and I take a deep breath, sitting back down in the leather office chair, the same one I’d kicked against the wall earlier. He’s right. We are so fucking far past brownies. They’re not going to fix this shit even a little. But that’s all I’ve got. “Fucking brownies and speeches, Dan. I’m running on fumes here.”
He nods. “I know. Me, too.”
“I’ve been placing phone calls since those assholes walked in the door, and no one knows where the hell this came from,” I tell him. “Any of it. It takes years for those kinds of charges to be actionable. There should be miles of fucking paperwork and logs from one task force after another, but no one knows where the fuck this came from.”
“Do they have this much clout?” Daniel asks.
I reach my hands out to the sides in a futile gesture. “BHC’s a much older company than we are. I know they’ve had lobbyists in Washington for the last two decades, so who the hell knows how many pockets they’ve been able to line in that time. And that’s not even accounting for what they’re doing off the books.”
“Think they can make this stick?”
“The collapsed stock price or the investigations?” I ask with bitter laughter. “The investigations, fuck no. We both know there’s nothing for them to find.”
Daniel tips his head. “Unless there’s something we don’t know about. Maybe we should get a corporate forensic team in here to go through all our records — from every file on our computers to every last folder in the records’ room. See what’s been accessed, changed, or added over the last three months. I don’t put it past BHC to have either physically planted something or hacked into our system somehow. All it would take was someone ignoring policy and accessing the company intranet from their personal computer, or for someone to turn their back while a courier is in the building.”
“Fuck,” I say with a heavy sigh, sitting forward to grab the legal pad full of scribbled action items I’ve been making the last hour. “You’re right. Let’s add that to the list.”
The screen on my phone lights up with an incoming text, and a second later it’s vibrating across the desk as the loud alert tone plays. I snatch it up. “It’s the lobby,” I tell Daniel. “Gunner has arrived. And not quietly, apparently.”
Daniel is out of his chair in no time. “I’ll call for reinforcements if I need them.”
I curse under my breath as Daniel rushes out of my office. I use my palms to push off my desk and stand. He’s definitely gonna need reinforcements, who is he kidding?
If there is a force in this world with more destructive potential than my twin, it’s Gunner. The one time those two went on a bender together during Mardi Gras — well —I’m glad it only happened once, and so are the Louisiana State Police. How Gunner rode that far on a Harley in his condition, I have no clue.
I button my shirt collar and straighten my tie, determined to at least look more put together than I feel before I head downstairs to untangle the latest debacle in this never-ending day. I slip my phone in my pocket, wishing to God it would ring, with Emma on the other end. She could talk Gunner down. She could calm Daniel’s rattled nerves. She could make this rage inside me melt away, even if for only a little while. I could wrap my arms around her and breathe her in, and she would do that thing that makes the fist in my chest unclench.
9
Emma
I eye the manila folder on Jeremy’s lap as though he’s holding a cobra, ready to strike. Whatever’s in there isn’t good, that much I know already. He opens it and pulls out a thick sheath of papers and holds them out. I glance at his offering cautiously. “What is that?”
“A contract.”
Fuck. I let out a sigh, not even caring at this point that Jeremy is finding glee in every reaction he can provoke from me. My plans have been upended, and I’m already fucked nine ways to Sunday, so I might as well make it official. The sooner I sign it, the sooner I can leave this godforsaken bench. I grab the stack of papers from him and hold out my other hand. “Pen?”
“Oh, no,” he says with a sickening smile. “That’s not your contract. It’s mine. An older one.”
“What?” I glance at the top sheet, and the words Department of Defense
catch my eye. I scan down the page quickly, and my apprehension turns to anger as I see the grand total of what he was paid for the drone program. “What the fuck is this? You just want to rub it in my face?” I snap, slamming the papers down on my lap.
“Oh, sure, that too.” Jeremy’s smile is as big as ever, and I know he has something up his sleeve. “But you might want to look at the signatures on the last page of the fieldwork agreement — about halfway through the stack. Recognize the names?”
I flip through the papers as quickly as I can, seething inside. I wish he had handed me a pen — I’d be stabbing him in the goddamn eye with it right now. I find the fieldwork agreement detailing Jeremy’s responsibilities for flight testing the drone software under extreme conditions at remote locations. Asshole got to travel to the Middle East. I turn to the last page of the agreement and look down at the bottom of the page. At first, my mind just refuses to see it. I have to stare for a solid ten seconds before it finally registers, and as soon as it does, it’s like a cork has been placed in my throat. No air comes in or out, and my lungs start to burn.
There are two signatures. Jeremy signed his name sloppy as hell. But the neat letters on the next line, the space where the DoD field coordinator’s signature goes, those loops and dashes are unmistakable.
Daniel Kent.
Jackass must see my eyes widen, because his words are brimming with condescension. “What? He never told you?” He laughs and leans back on the park bench. “He was in it from the beginning. We worked side-by-side.”
Ignoring his vile cackling, I hold the papers closer and narrow in on the paragraph above the signatures. Dated mere weeks after Jeremy disappeared with the program, Daniel was named the field team coordinator for testing their new software acquisition.
I eye Jeremy suspiciously for several moments before speaking. “He knew the program is mine?”
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