Acceptable Risks

by Natalie J. Damschroder

  His eyes narrowed at her for a minute, then he nodded. “Okay. I guess I have to accept that.”

  “So you’re going to run a background check.”

  He gave her a “well, duh” look. But again, the light moment didn’t last. Lark watched the cloud settle over him again, and her eyes prickled. With nothing else she could think to do, she opened her mouth to offer to fix him a dinner plate, but he spoke first.

  “If you’re okay here for a few hours, I’m going to go to the office for a while.”

  “But you shut down today,” she said, “for the funeral. You’ve got to be exhausted.”

  He shook his head and pushed to his feet. “Not nearly enough. I need to keep my mind busy. Plus, there are things…”

  She hugged him, understanding. Fallout from the explosion had been swift, with canceled contracts and long-time clients questioning Hummingbird’s effectiveness. If anyone could hold the business together and salvage his powerful reputation, it was her father. But the man who’d helped him build both was gone, and she was worried he would never recover.

  “Dad, it’s okay to take some time off. One day won’t—”

  “Yes, it will.” He kissed the top of her head. “Don’t wait up, I might be late.”

  She watched him go, an awful foreboding sinking into her.

  The next two days were no different. Lark struggled to find ways to help him. She made his favorite foods, brought meals to the office, tried to get him to talk to her by opening up herself. Nothing seemed to work. He grew more despondent, until she got Caitlyn to cancel a meeting, trying to force her father to come home early. When he realized what she’d done, however, he just put on a mask and pretended he was fine.

  The only reason Lark left was because Ralph refused to let her take any more time off. She was in the middle of too many promising projects that BotMed claimed ownership of, or she’d have considered quitting and moving back to DC. So she went home and launched into plan B. Which, of course, was just as unsuccessful as plan A. Weeks went by, and her father refused every request to come visit. After a few months, he’d stopped returning her calls. He left messages on her home machine when she was at work, false-cheery updates that didn’t fool her. And he knew it, or he wouldn’t be afraid to talk to her directly.

  Lark talked to Caitlyn, his assistant, a lot. She gave Lark all the details her father left out of his messages. He was fighting hard to hold on to the business, and things were getting worse, with competitors circling Hummingbird like wolves. Lark hadn’t felt so helpless since she watched her mother getting sicker every day.

  On the six-month anniversary of Jason’s death, Caitlyn tricked Matthew into taking Lark’s call. Lark didn’t like the subterfuge, but she wanted to hear her father’s unguarded voice for herself. She made the call right before she left work for the day.

  “Madrassa,” he answered. His tone was brisk, almost impatient.

  “I’m told your company is the best. I’d like to give you a chance to prove it.”

  Silence. Then, “What are you doing, Lark?”

  She sighed. “Finally. You’re talking to me. Don’t even try to deny it,” she added when he started to lie. “I’m coming down there if you can’t convince me you don’t need me.”

  “Don’t ever doubt that I need you, Lark.”

  She had to choke back a sob of relief. “Then why all the avoidance? The stupid voice mails where you pat me on the head and tell me not to worry?”

  He chuckled. “That’s why. I knew you’d see through me. I can’t hide anything from you.”

  “So it’s been bad.” Her throat tightened, and she decided she had to fly back down there.

  “Yeah, it has been. But it’s getting easier. We picked up a few new contracts, and a couple of clients have come back.” Papers rustled in the background, followed by the clack of keyboard keys. “If you knew all the details of this stuff, you’d worry, but you can’t do anything about it. Why put you through that?”

  “How about because I love you?”

  “Good. So you see my point.”

  Lark had to laugh now, and the fact that he could joke made her feel a lot better. “I miss you, Dad. Stop hiding from me.”

  “I promise.” The noise on his end picked up. “I have to go, I have a meeting. We’ll talk this weekend, okay?”

  Lark let him go and locked up her office before heading out, finally relieved that he might be pulling out of the funk. A little while later, she walked in the front door of her apartment building.

  “Evening, Miss Madrassa.” The guard at the desk in the lobby tipped his hat to her, but barely glanced away from the monitors on his desk.

  “Hi, Bill.” She leaned over the counter a little, curious about his uncharacteristic focus. “Problem?”

  “Nope.”

  She shook her head. He wouldn’t tell her the truth. He’d met her father the day he helped her move in and assured him that Lark couldn’t live in a safer building. In his mind, that meant making sure she felt safe, too.

  “Then you must be watching the game,” she teased. He snorted his response, but still didn’t look away.

  “You have a good night,” he called after her as she headed for the elevator bank.

  “You, too.” She used her key card to activate the car, whose doors opened immediately.

  “Hang on! Hold the elevator!”

  Lark rolled her eyes and reluctantly hit the “door open” button as it glided closed. A hand slid between the panels, and Carl grinned at her as he squeezed through. He wore a suit and carried a briefcase, apparently coming home from working late.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” She pressed the button for her floor and spared him a smile. He beamed back. Surprised and a little disconcerted, she pressed twelve for his floor. “You look happy.”

  “I’m always glad to see you.”

  “O-kay…” They’d broken up three months ago by mutual agreement, and the few times they’d run into each other since, Carl had been coolly polite.

  “I’ve missed you.” He shifted to face her, raising his arm to brace it on the wall. He obviously thought it showed off his body better. It did, but the calculation killed the effect.

  “Carl—”

  “No, wait. I think we made a mistake. I mean, I think about you all the time. We have so much in common. How about I come up and we can talk about it?”

  She stared at him, willing the elevator to climb faster. “No, I’m sorry. You can’t come up to talk about it. There was no mistake. We’re wrong for each other. We agreed.”

  “We had chemistry.” He eased closer and stroked the backs of his fingers down her cheek. “That doesn’t disappear with logic, you know.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” She laughed and nudged him back. “We don’t have any chemistry.”

  Carl frowned and tucked his dress shirt more securely into his suit pants. “Then maybe we can be friends. I miss talking to you about stuff.”

  Lark shook her head as he rambled on about being more interested in her work and sharing more important things than sex. They had no more to offer each other as friends than they had as lovers. She had no idea what was going on with him, but hoped it was temporary. He’d never made her want to call him an idiot before, but he sure did now.

  “Goodbye, Carl.” She shook her head when he looked perplexed at the open doors. “This is your floor,” she prompted.

  “Oh, right. Okay, then I’ll call you.”

  The doors closed, and she sagged against the back wall. “That was weird.”

  She shook it off and went through her evening routine, her mind back on her conversation with her father. She slept better than she had in a while and woke feeling rested and determined, and actually positive for once.

  The feeling lasted until she was in the shower. Then hair on the back of her neck started to prickle—or the wet approximation of a prickle—and she found herself peering around the curtain to make sure no o
ne was in her bathroom. Which was ridiculous, given all the security in the building. And the alarm system and locks her father had had installed when she moved in.

  The bathroom had no window anyone could look through. The door was closed, and the steam lay heavy on the air, undisturbed. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling, and she rushed through the rest of her shower and got out of the bathroom as soon as she could.

  Once she did, the feeling faded. She didn’t brush it off—she put more stock in her instincts than that—but she didn’t fret over it, either. She’d ask the guys down front to review their guest sheets and the video footage in her hall for anything suspicious, and she’d take extra care when she was alone in the apartment.

  She did allow herself to be a few minutes late for work, though, to check her tiny greenhouse on the roof. Very few people knew she kept any of her work at home, but all it took was one wrong person. Everything was intact and untouched, but she set up a few disturbance detectors along the lines of the tape-across-the-door trick, and double-checked the alarm.

  And hoped it was all unnecessary.

  Chapter Three

  Jason didn’t attend his funeral.

  In fact, he didn’t even know about it. Six months after he’d tumbled eight floors, shattering bones and bursting internal organs, someone finally mentioned the solemn, well-attended service.

  He should have been there, of course, and not alive. When he watched the DVD he imagined himself, rather than a hundred and eighty-five pounds of rocks, inside the satin-lined mahogany. Thinking about the fabric made his skin crawl. That brought on claustrophobia, so he shut off the DVD player and ran ten miles on the treadmill to banish the feeling.

  Sarah, his old girlfriend, had attended the funeral. He hadn’t seen her in nearly two years, since the day she’d told him that as happy as he made her, she didn’t love him. She’d wept when they lowered the coffin.

  He punched the speed up another couple of increments and increased the incline, but it didn’t help. Allison, the lead agent on the Kolanko job, had cried, too, and she was their toughest agent. Matthew had given the eulogy, and when he choked up, so did Jason. A decade of friendship, wrapped up in five minutes. Agent after agent filed past the closed casket, some touching it, others moving quickly past. Mourning someone who wasn’t gone. His parents hadn’t been there. He wondered what people thought about that. For damn sure not the truth—that his mother stayed away because she couldn’t act worth shit.

  “Slow it down, Jason.”

  Awareness clicked in and the sterile, glass-and-high-tech-plastic interior of the lab came into focus. He realized his finger was mashing down the speed button and his legs burned. He backed it down until it was slow enough to walk and accepted the towel Gabby handed him. “Thanks.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Head clear, no chest pain, resps high but in range, heart rate…” He put his hands on the grips and waited for the machine to register. “One sixty. No nausea. Sweating like a horse, though.” He mopped his face. “What brings you to the lab, Dr. Berwell?”

  She didn’t look up from her clipboard. “It’s not a lab, Jase.”

  “Looks like one.” He snorted. “I mean, could this whole situation be any more of a cliché?” He stopped the treadmill and grabbed a water bottle off the table next to it. “Bionic man comes back from his fake death, engineered to be better, stronger—”

  “Stop it.”

  Her sharp tone halted him mid-stride. She never lost her composure. “Stop what?”

  “That’s copyrighted material.”

  He stared at her, then laughed, the anger he hadn’t labeled finally fading.

  “Seriously, Jason, you’re not bionic. And I know you hate being cooped up in here, but you won’t talk to anyone.”

  “I talk to you. And Matt.” When Matt bothered to come down, into the bowels of Hummingbird’s headquarters on the outskirts of Washington, DC.

  But that wasn’t fair. In the aftermath of Hummingbird’s greatest failure, his friend had had his hands full. Kolanko and the kid were fine, and none of the Hummingbird team had been injured except Jason, but his own death had been spectacular enough without the explosion to compound it.

  He sat on one of the hard benches and rested his elbows on his knees. “I’m okay, Gabby. I just feel a little cooped up.”

  “I know. And I know telling you it’s not forever doesn’t help, but I have something that might.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “My final test results?”

  “Your final test results.”

  “All of them?”

  Her red-lipsticked mouth curved. Huh. He hadn’t noticed her lipstick before. She looked good with it on.

  “So tell me.” He was intimately familiar with the list of original damage. His spleen had taken the worst internally, and they’d removed it, which was part of the reason for his forced isolation. They’d repaired all his damaged bones with a gluelike compound that not only held them together to heal properly, but made them stronger. Enough of his two-hundred-six bones had been broken to make him wonder how much of his skeleton was now fake, but after three months floating in a special harness, it was solid enough to support his weight and the weight of the building besides.

  Okay, maybe not that strong.

  “Imaging shows that with one exception, your skeleton has fully solidified. Your white blood cell count is in a normal range, so the marrow is operational. Which, frankly,” she added, “we weren’t sure would happen.”

  “I know.” It was one thing he appreciated. They’d been completely open with him about his chances from the first day he was awake. He’d insisted on hearing every detail of what had been done to him and what the results were expected to be. Death had been a constant possibility. “What’s the exception?”

  “There’s a point in your sternum that’s not going to seal completely.”

  “I have a hole in my chest?” He rubbed the spot in question, but couldn’t feel anything.

  “Not a hole. Just a…thin spot, I guess you could say. It won’t interfere in anything day-to-day.”

  “But.”

  “But the original impact traumatized your heart, and it’s more sensitive to additional trauma. Another hit to the sternum, besides the possibility of splinters piercing your lung—unlikely, but possible—would induce ventricular tachycardia. Without immediate response you’d die.”

  Jason shrugged. “I’ll wear a vest to my next prizefight.”

  Gabby frowned at his attitude. “You need to take this seriously. The impact would only need to be less than half of what it would normally take to do damage.”

  “Is that a scientific calculation?” He waited a moment but she only glared at him. “Okay, sorry. Go on.”

  “If you go into arrhythmia, you’d need a defibrillator to shock the heart back into normal rhythm.”

  “All right.”

  Gabby consulted her clipboard again. “The muscles have developed beyond our expectations.” They’d used a compound that bonded to muscle cells to knit his shredded tissue back together. Healing had been a sonofabitch. Jason still cringed at the remembered agony. But he could bench press twice his former maximum. He wasn’t bulkier than he used to be, but his definition still made him stare at himself in the mirror, flexing like a seventeen-year-old.