by Leigh James
Of course, I got instantly hard, but I pulled back, not wanting to freak her out.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I pointed at myself, sighing. “It’s my dick. It’s hard again.”
She giggled. “Um, I’m right here—I know.”
I willed it to go down.
She tilted her head, watching me. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, of course. I just don’t want you to be upset.”
“Honey, I’m not upset.” She reached out and stroked my face. “I mean, I do get upset that you’re hurt. And I also know you’re frustrated right now because you can’t do all the things you normally do. Like…me.”
We both laughed, breaking the tension a little.
I shrugged. “It’s my issue, and I’m handling it.”
“It’s our issue. I don’t want you to resent me.”
She didn’t say it, but there was an unspoken resent me more than you already do hanging around, invisible but palpable.
I laced my fingers through hers. “I could never resent you.”
She sighed. “I don’t see why not—you did get shot because of me. And get put in a medically induced coma. And now you’re being forced to use a wheelchair that you hate.”
I straightened. “Babe, we’ve had this conversation. I’m over it. I was shot on assignment, and it was part of my job. Even if it wasn’t, I would have done anything I could to protect you. Because that’s my real job. And if I remember correctly, I failed. You still got kidnapped…the other guards were shot…” I cut myself off. I couldn’t bear to think about that night, about the friends I’d lost.
Hannah bit her lip, as if attempting to keep her objections inside.
“So—you feel guilty, I feel guilty.” I squeezed her hand, trying to stay in the moment. “I think we’re even.”
There was a knock on the door, and we both jumped.
“Hannah?” Lauren called from the other side of the door. “Can you come out here? I need to talk to you—there’s something going on at Paragon.”
Hannah sprang from the bed, opening the door. “What is it?”
I caught a glimpse of Lauren’s pale face. “It’s bad.”
I didn’t have to hear more. I felt it in my gut. Li Na’s back—and she’s not taking no for an answer.
That was fine by me. This time, I’d be ready. This time, I’d keep Hannah safe.
This time, I’d end it.
Chapter 4
Li Na
People, even smart people, fail to recognize the finite nature of time. There are limits. The limits need to be observed carefully, because otherwise, one day you’ll wake up old and blindsided, on the other side of a life that had no meaning.
I’d gotten married in my twenties because my parents expected me to. Before I blinked, I’d wasted ten years trying to figure out if my husband was happy with me or not. Then I woke up one morning and realized I didn’t care. Why should I? My husband had been a distraction, something I put in my own way to keep myself from my true potential. I would never get those ten years back. Ten years of dinners. Ten years of leaving the office to go home. Ten years of being a dutiful wife and daughter.
Such a waste.
I stood at my desk, examining the latest testing results from Protocol Therapeutics. But my thoughts kept going back to those ten years. I hated it when my mind wandered, but I’d noticed it did so for a reason, connecting dots I’d assumed were unrelated.
When I’d gotten divorced, I moved to an apartment. I bought a coffeemaker, a couch, and a bed, knowing guests and entertaining wouldn’t be an issue. My parents were dead. My husband had remarried. I didn’t bother socializing with friends—I just got to work.
It was the happiest I’d ever been.
Cutting things out of my life, even things that others deemed important, like relationships, remained one of the smartest things I’d ever done. I’d acted like a heart surgeon with a scalpel, trimming the unwanted growth from my heart. All that remained was me. Me and my commitment.
I pulled up Protocol’s website. The remarkable people at the company had developed a groundbreaking antibody therapy to treat cancer. The technology was amazing, faster and more promising than anything that had come before it. The problem, as I saw it, was Protocol’s CEO, Fiona Pace. Her vision remained too narrow. She was bending over backward conducting clinical trials, when the reports from the last round conclusively showed the technology worked.
What Fiona Pace didn’t realize was the same thing Lauren Taylor hadn’t realized: time waits for no one. Ultimately, I was on their side. I might not be able to organically recreate the level of innovation either woman had achieved, but I had the vision and the international business acumen to bring each of their technologies to full realization. I planned to take over the global healthcare market by assembling an arsenal of the most groundbreaking technology in existence.
It didn’t matter who invented it. It didn’t matter how I acquired it. What mattered was the outcome.
I’d assembled a world-class team here in Shenzhen. My company was poised to launch a broad range of technologies and services to providers all over the world. What my enemies didn’t understand, what they failed to see in their panicked, emotional reactions, was that providing a unified approach to the market was the best thing for everyone. And I didn’t just mean for the CEOs—I meant for every citizen of the world.
But Fiona and Lauren were too invested to see the big picture. Yet another reason I wished they were from any country other than America. As a rule, American women annoyed me. Fiona Pace’s book about American women in the workplace really annoyed me. In it, she discussed at length how lots of women she knew withdrew from their careers because of guilt about their families and the competitive, demanding nature of corporate America. She suggested ways to remedy this so that women stayed in the workforce and achieved more senior and management positions.
Fiona’s book pinpointed exactly what annoyed me most about American women. There was too much guilt. Always with the guilt, and the overanalyzing. They would tweet, whine, and workshop about the “hows” and the “whys” of women in the workplace, the existence of the glass ceiling and what to do about it, the existence of their guilt and what to do about it, when they should just shut up and keep working. If there was a glass ceiling, why not shatter it and grab a shard as a weapon? And if someone was in your way—like your boss or your husband? Wield the shard, elbow them out of the picture, then step on them with your high heel.
Otherwise, what were high heels for?
Despite their brilliance and their access to heels, I’d watched both Lauren and Fiona hesitate. In the current healthcare market, hesitation translated into death. Lauren had come to her senses and stopped sitting on her technology, but only after I’d threatened her. That seemed to have woken her up. But since she’d launched the patch, what else had she accomplished?
Nothing. And Fiona Pace was busy following suit. She’d conducted clinical trial after clinical trial, money and influence slipping through her fingers as she chased her tail. I’d offered her the opportunity to position her technology globally, to launch it as aggressively as possible.
And she’d turned me down.
I looked out the window at the bustling streets of Shenzhen. It was less foggy here than in Beijing, a fact I relished. They called my city the Silicon Valley of China, but soon, the titles would be reversed. That was on my short list of goals. I’d promised the people who worked for me and my government that Jiàn Innovations would deliver. We would put Shenzhen on the map, in the center of technological and global influence. In return, they’d promised their loyalty and unwavering support.
They were believers. And maybe, if I wasn’t imagining it, they were a little afraid of me.
I thought about my apartment again, the bare walls and the bed I rarely slept in. I loved my home. I’d traded my boring, traditional life for the promise of my own mind. It was the same promise I’d made to
my people, the same promise they saw in me.
Seeing was believing.
I’d failed to deliver Paragon and the patch, but I understood the power of failure. Now that I knew what didn’t work, I would utilize what remained.
Because I knew the hard truth. Time wouldn’t wait, and neither would I.
Chapter 5
Hannah
Lauren hung up her cell phone and grabbed her laptop, shoving it into her bag.
Gabe watched her, a deep v between his brows. “Babe?”
Lauren sighed. “That was Dave again. He said Li Na’s team tried to hack us multiple times tonight. I’m going in.”
I jumped up. “I’m coming with you.”
Then I leaned down and kissed Wes good-bye quickly, before he could object.
“Want me to come, too?” Gabe asked.
“No, thanks. I can handle it.” Lauren turned to me. “You don’t need to go back to the office tonight—I can handle this. I just wanted you to know what was going on.”
“I understand.” I grabbed my tote anyway. “But I’m still coming.”
We were quiet on the car ride to the lab. “Did you talk to Fiona again?”
I motioned with my phone. “She texted me a few minutes ago. She called the FBI and was wrapping some stuff up at the office. She’s going to call Levi.”
“Anything else?”
I shrugged. “She said she hadn’t heard anything else from Li Na.”
“That’s because Li Na’s busy hacking us.” Lauren closed her eyes and shook her head. “She is an ever-loving pain in my ass.”
I would’ve laughed—my sister rarely swore—but my nerves were too shot.
Our security guards, Timmy and Brian, hustled us into Paragon’s lobby.
“What do you think she was trying to do?”
She sighed. “I don’t know yet. But it’s probably business as usual—she’s trying to steal my technology.”
I followed her down the hall to Dave and Leo’s office. “You think she’d find a better way to spend her time.”
“Well, she has, remember? She’s hacking Fiona Pace now, too.”
I shook my head. “With all the time she spends hacking and threatening, she could probably make some headway with research and development.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think that’s her business model. Now that I know she’s going after Fiona, it looks like Li Na is more interested in acquisition by force.”
I shuddered as we reached the office. “It would be better if she could find a willing partner.”
“Agreed.” Lauren paused before going in. “Listen, I appreciate you coming in and all, but you should probably go home. It’s late, and honestly, you look tired. I don’t need you coming back and working crazy hours right away. You need to take it easy.”
“I need to find out what this bitch is doing inside our system again!”
She sighed. “Fine. I knew you were going to say that—even the ‘bitch’ part—but I was just doing my big-sister due diligence.”
I raised my hands. “Just stop. Between you and Wes, I’m feeling over-diligenced.”
“What do you mean? Is Wes worried about you, too? Because—”
“Lauren,” Leo called from inside the office, “We need to show you something.”
Lauren gave me one last suspicious look as we headed in. Leo and Dave’s office was its characteristic mess, with empty takeout containers and candy bar wrappers littering every available surface. Both of them lived here. Like, literally. Dave had proudly told me at a meeting earlier in the day that he hadn’t been home for three weeks.
Silicon Valley was like that. We wore our nonstop-work dark circles like badges of honor. Well, I used high-end concealer to cover up mine.
I cleared some empty coconut-water containers from a portion of the couch and warily sat down next to Dave, who wore scuffed Vans sneakers and a hoodie that looked as if he’d owned it since ninth grade. I hoped there weren’t M&M’s stuffed into the cushions like the last time I’d visited the guys. They’d stained my favorite skirt.
Leo, who looked more like a scruffy undergrad than a high-powered tech executive, hunched over his desk, tapping rapidly on his keyboard. Dave bounced his laptop on his bony knees. He held out a bag of Twizzlers to me.
I wrinkled my nose, disgusted by the unnaturally red candy. “No, thanks. And you should probably eat some real food—did you have dinner?”
Dave held up the Twizzlers, looking guilty.
“Ugh, how many times do I have to tell you two to eat normal meals? And to get outside and go for a walk? You’re both so pale and skinny—”
“There it is,” Leo said.
He pointed to the screen, and Lauren leaned over to see the piece of code.
“She put something in our firewall. I don’t understand what it is. It’s not a code I’ve seen before. And why would she do that?” Lauren asked, her brow furrowed. “As far as I know, she still wants my technology. She shouldn’t be trying to destroy my system.”
Leo scratched his patchy beard. “I’m not certain it’s a virus, but I also don’t understand what it’s doing in our firewall. I need to check it out further. Have you heard anything from her—has she been in touch over the last few weeks?”
“No, not recently.” Lauren’s phone buzzed. “It’s Gabe—I’ll just be a second.”
“Do you want me to order takeout for you?” I whispered to Dave. “I can get Japanese delivered. I can order you something with protein and vegetables—remember them?”
“But I like Twizzlers,” Dave whined.
“No—please tell me that isn’t true,” Lauren said into the phone, her voice too loud. Her shoulders shook.
I jumped up. “What is it?”
“I don’t…I can’t believe this is happening. I’ll call you back.” Lauren hung up and put her face in her hands. “That was Gabe. He just heard—Jim Pace was shot tonight. He’s dead.”
“Who’s Jim Pace?” Dave asked.
Lauren’s throat worked as she swallowed. “Fiona Pace’s husband. Fiona Pace, the Protocol Therapeutics CEO.”
Dave’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know who she is…”
Lauren’s face was a pale mask. “She’s Li Na Zhao’s latest target. And now her husband’s dead.”
Chapter 6
Wes
Gripping the kitchen island, I pulled myself up and pushed the wheelchair away—I hadn’t technically been cleared for long-term standing, but after hearing about Jim Pace, I no longer gave a shit. I grimaced for a moment, catching my breath.
Then Gabe came into the kitchen, and I straightened myself. I had no intention of letting my strain show.
“Are your brothers on their way back?” I asked.
“Yeah, they’re on the red-eye,” Gabe said. “Fiona had just contacted them and hired them for personal security—right before this happened.”
He was quiet for a long minute. “I can’t believe Jim’s dead. He and Fiona were college sweethearts. Jim was a great guy, brilliant—and he had a big heart. He loved his wife and his girls.”
“They shot him right outside his office?”
Gabe grimaced. “Yeah. From what I heard, Jim had a late board meeting, and the parking lot was dark. He didn’t have security—he’d never needed it. The shooter was waiting outside in a car. They used a silencer. One of the board members found Jim on the ground.”
I gripped the island. “Jesus.”
Gabe poured himself a drink. “They’re going back through the security tape to see if they can ID the shooter or find plate numbers, but I doubt it’ll help.”
“What did Agent Marks say?”
Gabe had called his FBI contact as soon as he’d heard the news.
“The usual—thanks for the lead, and they’re working on it.”
I grimaced. “I don’t have much use for Agent Marks.”
Gabe flopped down into an armchair. “Tell me about it.”
“What did Lauren
say?”
I’d tried to call Hannah, but she hadn’t picked up. They were still at Paragon.
“Not much. They’re probably coming home soon.” Gabe shook his head. “What a mess.”
“We’ve got to be able to go after Li Na—get her arrested,” I said. “She’s committed too many crimes at this point. She’s a freaking terrorist.”
“Agent Marks has assured us at every step that there’s nothing we can do because of jurisdiction.”
I scrubbed a hand across my face. “Murdering and kidnapping can’t get you incarcerated in China? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s a connectivity problem.” Gabe took a sip of bourbon. “We can’t actually prove that these thugs she’s hiring work for her. There’s no paper trail, no money trail, and there’s no testimony. It’s all circumstantial evidence, and that’s not good enough. Maybe now that she’s branched off and targeted another California company…maybe there’s something we can do. I’m going to call Kami.” He hopped up and headed for his office to call his lawyer. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Of course.”
I waited until he left the room, and then I called Hannah again.
“Hey—sorry I didn’t pick up before.” She sniffled.
“Are you coming home?”
I knew they’d taken security with them to Paragon, but I couldn’t help feeling panicked.
“We’re on our way. We’re fine. I’ll see you soon.”
But I could tell she was crying.
I hung up, and my mind raced, thoughts jumbling inside me. I knew Li Na was responsible for killing Jim Pace, but what was she thinking? What did she hope to accomplish with another round of violence? Apparently, losing Paragon hadn’t dampened her enthusiasm for thug-like tactics. Li Na wanted Fiona Pace’s company, but Fiona had said no.
And now Fiona’s husband was dead.
I breathed a huge sigh of relief twenty minutes later when I heard Lauren and Hannah talking in the entryway. Brian came around the corner first.