by Nic Saint
Roland held the door for her, his face inscrutable, and when she found Will seated at a table in the corner of his office, she was glad to find at least one friendly soul present.
Roland pointed to a chair at the other end of the table. “Sit,” he ordered, and she sat.
Then he walked round the table and took a seat next to his brother, casually flipping his leg over his knee and eyeing her darkly without a word.
She swallowed convulsively as her eyes darted from brother to brother. “What’s going on?” she finally managed to say. The words came out strangled, as a cold fear had taken hold of her. Even though Will seemed friendly enough, his brother stared at her as if ready to lock her up in the deepest darkest dungeon of Thornton Tower and throw away the key.
“Kelley Casey,” Roland suddenly intoned.
She licked her lips nervously. “Yep. That’s me.”
He slid a document across the table in her direction. She stopped it with her hand and found herself staring down at a very unflattering mugshot of herself. In spite of her nervousness, she grinned. She remembered that day. She’d taken a swing at a cop trying to choke one of her colleagues to death at a demonstration in Wall Street. The cop hadn’t appreciated the attention and had taken her into custody.
“You think this is funny?” Roland’s voice shot out. “This is but one of a whole collection I have in my possession.” He opened a file folder and shoved it at Will. As the latter leafed through the documents, she saw Roland had apparently gotten hold of her police record. She winced as she watched Will’s frown deepen.
“You’re quite the agitator, aren’t you?” Roland resumed. “And one very proficient hacker, I might add.”
“I can explain all this,” she feebly began, but then Will looked up with so much disappointment in his eyes that she knew better than to continue. Deflated, she sat back in her chair, her shirt sticking to her sweaty back.
“Can you explain what you were doing in Thornton’s department store the day before yesterday? When you tried to kill my brother and missed?”
She sat up. “Wait a minute. You make it sound as if I tried to hit him!”
“That’s exactly what I’m implying,” Roland snarled. “You should probably stick to hacking, Miss Casey, because your shooting skills are abominable.”
“That’s probably because I’ve never fired a gun before,” she shot back. “And I probably never will again.”
“Why? Because you’ve found a better way to destroy my brother?”
“Now wait a minute, Ro,” began Will. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this.”
Kelley, seething with anger now, said, “Because I hate guns, Mr. Thornton. The only reason I had one that day was because my uncle gave it to me.”
He studied the file. “Oh, yes,” he murmured. “Jonas Casey. Head of security and your uncle. He gave you that job, right?”
“He did. Out of the goodness of his heart, he—“
“Well, he won’t repeat the same mistake twice. As of this morning, his contract is terminated.”
Horrified, she yelled, “What? You can’t do that!”
“I just did.”
“But he did nothing wrong!”
“He hired you, didn’t he? And under false pretenses as well.” He picked up another piece of paper. “Your résumé. A fabrication.”
“I just needed a job,” she cried. “Uncle Jonas just wanted to help me out.”
She yelped when he pounded the table hard. “You’re working for Harlan de Montesquieu, aren’t you, you little bitch!” He rose to his feet, and his voice echoed through the room as he hollered at the top of his lungs, “Tell me the truth!”
Chapter 13
“Roland!” thundered Will, also rising. “You’re out of line, bro. Kelley has nothing whatsoever to do with Harlan.” His eyes shot to the girl on the other side of the table. “Tell him, Kelley,” he urged.
“I—“ Kelley opened and closed her mouth, her face even paler than usual, all the blood drained and her eyes wide and pleading.
“Tell him you’ve got nothing to do with HdM.” When Kelley didn’t speak, he slowly sank onto his chair again, the truth hitting him like a hammer to the solar plexus. “Don’t tell me you know the man?” he said in a low voice.
Kelley wrung her hands, visibly greatly disturbed. “I—look, I never intended for this to get out of hand the way it did, Will. I never thought—“ She swallowed. “I never met Harlan personally. My contact’s name is…”
Will watched her with numbed senses. It couldn’t be. Kelley? His Kelley? A pawn in Harlan’s employ? How could he have been so stupid? So gullible?
Casting down her eyes, Kelley started speaking in a soft, monotonous voice. “One of my friends approached me last week. Said he wanted to launch a campaign against Thornton.”
Before Roland could interfere, Will asked, “What campaign?”
She shrugged. “The usual. Launch a media campaign. Drive the store out of business by scaring away the customers.”
“What was your role?”
“Getting the lay of the land. Target spotting. Making sure our people got away clean.”
Will groaned. Oh, God.
Roland eyed her intently. “Was killing my brother part of the plan?”
“What? No! Of course not!”
Will looked up. Either she was a very good actress, or she was telling the truth. “Then why did you shoot at me?”
She rolled her eyes. “I told you already. I don’t know the first thing about guns. The thing went off by accident.” She threw him a pleading look. “I never tried to shoot at you, Will. You’ve got to believe me. I would never hurt you.”
“And yet you came to the store with the express purpose of driving us out of business. What do you call that, then?”
She groaned. “So you lost a couple thousand dollars. Big deal. You’ve got billions left. All we wanted to do was teach you people a lesson.”
“You people?” echoed Will softly, and the hurt in his eyes must have shown, for she grimaced. “Is that all I am to you, Kelley? A fat cat you can attack?”
“You were,” she agreed. “To me you were just another rich asshole.” She shook her head adamantly, her black strands loosely falling across her brow. “But not anymore, Will. Not anymore.”
“Don’t listen to the witch,” growled Roland. “She’s just telling you what you want to hear.”
“No,” she whispered, biting her lip. “I never wanted you to get hurt, Will.”
He wanted to believe her, but knew that he couldn’t, so he turned his eyes away from her. “How much?”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“How much did Harlan pay you for this campaign?”
“I—I don’t know. Turtu handled the money. I never saw a cent. It all went to the cause.”
“The cause,” repeated Roland angrily.
“Yes, the cause!” she suddenly yelled, and he looked up. “Because there’s a lot more people out there suffering misery and starvation on a daily basis than there are assholes like you, who sit around in offices like this devising ways to milk us even more!”
In spite of the allegations just leveled against Kelley, Will had to admire her fire and conviction. She really believed in what she fought for, and he could see that Harlan had probably taken advantage of that to further his own private war. Kelley, he realized, was simply a pawn in this game.
“Look, Kelley,” he began, and placed a hand on Ro’s arm when the latter tried to intervene. “Are you telling me you didn’t do this for the money?”
“Of course not,” she spat. “I would never work for money. You know that.”
“So you didn’t try to seduce my brother so you could later blackmail him?” returned Roland.
“Seduce—of course not!” she exclaimed, visibly shaken by this allegation. She blinked. “What happened this morning… It just, you know, happened.”
Roland tapped th
e table. “You weren’t paid to have sex with Will, is that what you’re saying? You’re not…” He grinned. “How shall I put it in layman’s terms?” His grin disappeared, and his eyes shot fire. “You’re not Harlan’s whore?”
“Roland!” boomed Will, even more shocked than Kelley. “Don’t talk to her like that!”
“I’ll talk to the bitch any way I see fit,” countered Roland. “It is my duty to protect this family, and I will do whatever it takes to accomplish that task.” Then he stabbed his finger in Will’s chest. “And if you would have kept your pecker in your pants, none of this would have happened.”
Will eyed him icily. “Out,” he growled. “Get the fuck out of my office now.”
“No way,” riposted Roland, and settled himself deeper in his chair. “You know the drill, little brother. This is what I do, and if you don’t like it, take it up with Dad.”
Will shook his head. “Don’t think I won’t, Ro. You’ve gone too far this time.”
“Just think about it, Will! She seduced you so she could tear you down! Tear us down!”
“I—“ Will raked his fingers through his short hair. “I just don’t believe it.” His eyes darted across the table to Kelley, who sat looking forlorn. “Not Kelley.”
Had he been so wrong about her? It simply wasn’t possible. Roland was mistaken, and he would prove it.
Roland swung an arm in Kelley’s direction. “Just look at her. Look at her record. She’s Harlan’s tool. One of the many flunkies he’s got working for him.”
“I’m not one of Harlan’s flunkies,” she countered softly. “I didn’t even know I was working for him. I—Turtu never told me.”
“Then how did you know?” asked Will, adamant to give her the benefit of the doubt, no matter what.
She shrugged. “He sent me an email, and out of habit more than anything else, I decided to see where he’d sent it from. Turned out he sent it from an HdM server, which struck me as odd. Then I started going through his other emails as well. They all carried the HdM signature. So I figured Turtu was probably working for the man.”
“And still you continued taking his orders?”
“I was going to speak to him about it—but then this whole mess happened, and—“
“You met him on your lunch break. What did he tell you?”
Will frowned but knew better than to ask Roland where he got his information. The man was a walking and talking espionage agency.
“I—I—“ She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut. “I can’t tell you that.”
“You better. You’re not walking out of this building until you do.”
Will pursed his lips. He knew his brother wasn’t joking. Thornton Tower, where most of Thornton Enterprises and its subsidiaries were housed, had some scary nooks and crannies even he had never seen. “You better tell us,” he softly encouraged her.
She cast down her eyes, a blush mantling her cheeks. He thought she’d never looked prettier. “I wanted to ask him advice.”
“About what? How to bed a billionaire?” scoffed Roland.
Her eyes shot up, and that familiar defiance was back. “No, how to resist a seducing billionaire. Make no mistake, Mr. Thornton. It was your brother who seduced me, not the other way around.”
“That’s what all seductresses say. I don’t believe you.”
“I believe her,” said Will, and found that he did. “And what did this Turtu guy advise you?”
She blinked. “He told me to use my hacking skills to get out of this million dollar claim. Said I should… threaten to expose you if you didn’t drop the charge.”
“Expose me?”
“Hack into the Thornton mainframe and steal all the secret files I could lay my hands on, then threaten to leak them to the press if you didn’t sign a paper granting me immunity from liability.”
“Goddammit!” cried Roland. He turned to Will. “You see? Now you believe me?”
Will sat shaking his head, his eyes locked on Kelley’s, his face screwed up in anger and disappointment. So Roland was right, after all. This girl had set this all up. Had wormed her way into his life so she could destroy them all. And yet. He closed his eyes, trying to think. Something was eluding him. Something… Then he got it. The whole scheme was so clever—too clever. She could never have foreseen he would take her into his employ. That was the one thing that didn’t fit.
And when he finally spoke, it was with the conviction of a man who knows he’s right. “You’re wrong, Ro. All wrong.”
The look Kelley gave him took away the last slivers of doubt. It was a look of hope against hope—of a girl clinging to the final branch before plummeting into the abyss.
Chapter 14
Kelley felt a cold shiver run up and down her spine. She’d heard stories about Roland Thornton. The man was rumored to have killed people—enemies of his family. People had a tendency to disappear when he got involved. She desperately had to get out of this place—out of his reach.
She regretted ever having accepted this stupid assignment in the first place. It had brought her a lot more trouble than it was worth. But then again, it had also brought Will into her life. She glanced up at him, as he readied himself to defend her honor to his vicious brother like a knight of old. He was her knight, coming to her aid when all hope was lost.
“Trust me, bro. Kelley had nothing to do with all this. She simply couldn’t have. Yes, she coordinated this harassment campaign in our store, but firing that gun? That was an accident, as was the destruction of that display case. I was there, remember. I saw what happened. She couldn’t have anticipated the sequence of events that gun shot set in motion. No one could have. Not even Harlan.”
“So he got lucky. Doesn’t mean he didn’t try to take advantage of the situation. Think about it, Will. He put one of his people in Thornton Tower, and not just anyone. A skilled hacker. This thing has Harlan written all over it.”
“No, it hasn’t,” Will said with quiet confidence, and her heart leaped. He was right. She would never have gone through with this. She would never have harmed him or his family this way. She was an activist—a campaigner for social justice, not a hired gun in a war between billionaires. That’s why Will’s next words struck her hard. “Which is not to say we can’t use her against Harlan.”
“What!” she cried, rising to her feet. “No, Will. You can’t make me fight your war for you. That’s not fair!”
She could see Will’s words hadn’t failed to interest his brother. “I see what you mean,” the latter mused. “Harlan thinks she’s working for him, so he would accept anything she feeds him hook, line and sinker.” He clapped Will on the shoulder. “Good thinking, bro. I like it.”
She stomped her foot. “I won’t do it. I won’t get involved in this dirty war your families are fighting.”
“Oh, yes, you will,” countered Will. “Or else you’ll face a long prison sentence.”
“Yeah. You might have your contacts with the press,” Roland added, “but I have my contacts with the police department and the DA’s office. If you don’t play along on this one, I’ll see to it you go away for a very long time, Kelley.” He grinned. “I bet by the time you get out, your hacking skills will have become quite obsolete.”
She shivered at the prospect of spending her life in jail. She locked eyes with Will. “You wouldn’t do that to me, would you, Will? Not after—“ She bit her lip, then darted her gaze to Roland, suddenly feeling embarrassed.
Roland studied his fingernails. “Don’t mind me. There’s really no part of your anatomy I haven’t laid eyes on, honey.” He flicked an eye at Will and said under his breath, “Or yours for that matter, bro.”
“Fuck, Ro,” growled Will. “Is nothing sacred for you?”
Roland shrugged. “Not where the safety of our family is concerned.” He grinned. “Gotta give you credit for technique, buddy. You’ve turned into quite the stallion.”
Eww, Kelley thought. What was wrong with these people?
<
br /> “So,” spoke Roland, dusting an imaginary speck from his suit. “What’ll it be, hon? Work for us or spend the rest of your miserable life in jail?”
“Mh,” riposted Kelley, fingering her chin. “Difficult choice.”
Roland pushed himself from the table and got up. “Great meeting, Will. Have to do this again sometime.” He gestured at Kelley. “Are you sure you can handle this wildcat?”
“I’m fine,” grunted Will, leveling a steady gaze at Kelley that shook her to the core. She had the feeling he had something in store for her that would make her regret ever to have laid eyes on him.
As Roland passed her by, he briefly bent over in passing and whispered, “Do anything to hurt my brother and I will kill you.”
And with that parting shot, he was gone, and it was only her and Will, who still sat staring daggers at her.
“So. You and Harlan, huh?”
“I—I never even met the guy. Like I said, my contact was always Turtu.”
He waved a deprecating hand. “Whatever. Now, what shall we do with you, mh? Not only do you still owe us a couple millions dollars, now it turns out you’ve been sleeping with the enemy.”
“Not… sleeping, exactly. And if I’d known what I was getting involved in, I would never even have agreed to any of it.”
He wagged his finger. “Ah-ah. You sleep with the dog, you catch its fleas. You should have thought of this before you got into bed with Harlan.”
“Like I said, I—“
He leaned back, his face a storm cloud. “Are you sleeping with this Turtu guy? Is he your boyfriend?”
She laughed. “What? Turtu? No way!” When his frown deepened, she repeated, “No way. I—I don’t actually have a boyfriend. At the moment.”
“I’ve heard about you anarchists,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “You all live in these squats together, sing songs and play the guitar—all have sex.”
“No, Will. It’s not like that.”
“Group sex,” he insisted. “Gangbangs. You into that kind of stuff, Kelley? You like being fucked by a dozen guys? Cause I could arrange that for you if you like. Anything to make you happy, right?”