Hour by Hour (Games & Diversions #2)

by Natalie E. Wrye

  “Yeah, sure, everything’s fine. We figured some things out.”

  He gives me a pointed look that I hope Ana doesn’t catch. She shrugs her shoulders.

  “Well, that’s good,” she says casually. “I just came back because I left my phone.”

  She peeks her hazel eyes over my shoulder, and I pivot towards the desk, scanning its surface with my eyes and hands.

  Ana steps closer. “Oh! Here it is…” She bends down. “On the floor…” She flips it over, checking for cracks.

  “That’s funny…” she states absently. “I thought I left it on the desk.”

  I nearly swallow my tongue.

  “Well, at least it’s not broken.” She slips the phone into her purse, strutting calmly to the door.

  “By the way, Elle…” She keeps her fingers on the doorknob. “You’ve got a Post-It note stuck to your ass.”

  She tilts her head mockingly before shutting the door on us.

  The Wild Card

  A player surprised is half beaten. - Proverb

  LUKAS

  The slam of the heavy wood door knocks me out of my daydream.

  One minute, I’m reminiscing about laying Elena down on Foxx’s office desk just one short week ago—the next minute, I’m sitting behind my own—alone.

  Well, not exactly alone.

  Ana’s just stepped in, and as she usually does when she gets too excited, she bangs my office door behind her, scaring half of the Tripping Out! employees.

  And, as usual, she barely notices.

  She melodramatically sits a piece of paper on my desk before taking a step back. She is brimming with barely contained energy.

  She waits until I look up at her from my seat before speaking.

  “Griff, I’ve got some news. Big news. Are you ready for this?”

  I sigh heavily. “No… not really.”

  She rolls her caramel-colored eyes. “Well, I’m going to tell you, anyway. I just came from Chris’s office, and he agrees with me.” She takes a deep breath. “I’ve done it.”

  My eyes narrow at her. “Done what?”

  “I’ve narrowed down a profile for the hacker.”

  I lean back in my office chair. “Jesus Christ, Ana…”

  “Jesus has nothing to do with it this time.” She flashes a devilish smile. “We’ve got a situation on our hands right now…”

  “Our hands…?”

  “And,” she interrupts, “the only way we’re going to make any leeway is if we can narrow down our suspects.”

  I pick up the paper she’s placed on the desk. “Suspects? Like a police lineup?”

  “One and the same. Take a look at the list of descriptors.”

  I read aloud from the list. “Between the ages of eighteen to thirty-five, familiar with Tripping Out!, knowledgeable with computers, bitter…”

  I sit the paper down. “Bitter?”

  “Yes, bitter. This wasn’t a professional attack. It wasn’t financial; it was personal. And this person is playing shadow games—diversions.

  “They wouldn’t have to be a whiz or anything, but they’d have to be knowledgeable enough about computers to pull it off and young enough to be familiar with the ‘mirror’ technique.”

  I look down again at the profile. I nod… reluctantly. “This isn’t too far off the mark.”

  “I know.” She grins broadly. “And when I help you solve this hack, you are going to make me an intern.”

  “I’m going to make you a what now?”

  She approaches the desk, planting her hands on its surface.

  “Oh, come on, Griff,” she whines. “I’m perfectly capable. I love Tripping Out! I’m loyal to the company. I graduated at the top of my class, and… I’m the only other real computer scientist you’ve got.”

  I start to shake my head, but she holds up a hand to stop me.

  “Just… think about it. I’ll give you a week.”

  She’ll give me a week?

  I stand up.

  “Ana…”

  But she turns toward the door.

  “Ana.”

  She grabs the doorknob.

  “Ana!”

  She opens the door, turning innocently toward me.

  “Yes?” she blinks sweetly.

  I hesitate. I start to protest, but what would be the point? Ana’s been pressuring me for the past week, ever since her graduation party.

  And no one, including my suddenly softy ass, has had the gumption to stop her.

  Damn Lexington women.

  I ask the second question on my mind.

  “If you had to guess… who do you think would be bitter enough to hack our company?”

  She looks down momentarily, seemingly pondering the question.

  “I don’t know quite yet… Maybe a disgruntled employee, a jealous competitor…”

  I swallow roughly.

  “Or maybe even a scorned ex…”

  ***

  Three hours later, I sit at the nearby Starbucks, pen and paper in hand, thinking about Ana’s profile.

  Thinking… about Gregory Sears.

  I must admit…

  It was a damn good point that Ana made.

  Sears wasn’t just a disgruntled employee… or a tragically scorned ex. He was both—a former manager of Foxx’s father’s company, Foxxhole Publishing, and… Kat’s collegiate ex-boyfriend.

  He was a snake—one whom we’d all believed had shed his skin (and dignity) and hightailed it back to some fallback, publishing job in his home state of Tennessee.

  We’d heard he used his connections to land some cushiony spot, smack in some remedial outdoors magazine that couldn’t tell you the meaning of “out” or “doors.”

  Something his dear old hick of a dad had secured for him back in the Vanderbilt University area.

  Nobody was sad to see him go—least of all Foxx, who had knocked the dickhead flat on his ass after finding out that he had Kat fired from her journalistic job.

  What the hell was Sears really up to these days, anyway?

  His name is still on my mind when Chris walks through the door. His hair is windswept, and his look is eager as he waves quickly at me before heading to the counter to place an order.

  He waits impatiently by the barista, checking his watch for the next two minutes until the employee places the latte in his hand.

  He sits beside me, and I wait for him to take his edge off with the coffee. I calmly read the newspaper while he downs nearly half of his coffee cup, hoping to calm his caffeine jitters.

  I look up from my paper as soon as his legs stops shaking underneath the table.

  He reaches toward me. “Hey, I’ve got a question for you.”

  I know he’s going to ask about this “internship” and Ana. I look down into my own cup of java before tilting it to my mouth.

  “Shoot.”

  “What the hell is going on between you and Elena?”

  I nearly cough up my sip of coffee, but I manage to push it back down. I swallow the gulp as calmly as I can before responding to Chris.

  “What do you mean, ‘going on between me and Elena’?”

  “I mean, “ he stresses. “Are. You. Screwing her?”

  I lie. Blatantly. “No,” I say, staring him down.

  “You sure about that?” He raises an eyebrow.

  “I think I’d be sure if I was putting my cock inside of Elena, Chris. Yes, I’m sure.”

  He shrugs on a laugh. “Wouldn’t be the first time you weren’t sure about putting your cock in someone…”

  “Hey. Not remembering their names isn’t the same as not remembering their faces. And I know the faces of all the women that I’ve slept with.”

  “I’m surprised,” Chris quips. “I thought there might be too many to count.”

  I glower at him over my Starbucks cup. “Just finish your goddamned Chai tea or whatever you’re having so we can head back to work.”

  “Fine. Sure,” he responds flippantly.

&n
bsp; I dismiss him with a cutting glance, returning my attention back to the newspaper on the table.

  He leans in suddenly, making the table scrape across the floor, catching the attention of a few nearby customers.

  He’s relentless today. He talks fast.

  “I’m just saying… you disappeared early at Foxx’s engagement party, right?”

  “I was tired and drunk and went to sleep in my room.”

  “And,” he emphasizes. “Elena disappeared as well. It seems around the same time that night. Nobody saw the two of you for the rest of the evening.”

  I sit my cup down, folding my arms on top of the table.

  “Like I said, I went to my room that night and passed out. Alone.

  “And just because you didn’t see Elena for the rest of the night doesn’t mean she wasn’t there. She organized the damn thing. I’m sure she had much more important things to do other than hitting on random floozies all night—unlike someone else at this table.”

  “Which brings me to my next point…” he says, tapping on the table. “You didn’t hit on one woman ALL. NIGHT.”

  I stiffen.

  “There’s always at least one woman,” he continues, “that catches your eye. And the only woman I saw you eyeing at all… was her. Elena.

  “Same thing at Foxx’s house. On the front porch—outside of the office… Something is going on. So, give it up, Griff. I know you were up to something.”

  I stare at the table, scrambling for an explanation. Chris is not going to give it up easily. He’s sniffed out the blood like a hound dog. I know he won’t relent until I give him some scraps.

  “Fine. Fine. If it will keep you off my back…”

  “It will…”

  “Then I’ll tell you…” I sigh deeply. “I was making out with Trin the night of the engagement party.”

  Chris’s mouth drops. “Trin? As in Trina?” His eyes shift aimlessly in confusion.

  “But she’s a Looney-Tune. You said so yourself.”

  I shrug, shaking my head. “Yeah, that’s why I got so mad. One minute, I’m shoving my tongue down her throat in the bathroom and the next minute, she’s laying into my car.”

  I take another sip out of my cup, staring straight into Chris’s eyes.

  I’m lying. I’m lying through my teeth so hard that I’m surprised they’re not chattering.

  I trust Chris. I trust him with my life. But with this information—with Elena?

  I can’t.

  It’s bad enough that Ana suspects—or knows. If Foxx knew, he’d try to put an end to it. He’d do anything not to upset the balance of his “newly minted family.”

  And that incudes not letting a fuck-up like me near his soon-to-be sister-in-law.

  I should be offended. I should… but I’ve done so many things to prove him right.

  Can I really blame him?

  I promised him I wouldn’t do anything with Elena. I promised not to touch her. But now, that’s impossible.

  I cannot not do anything with her. I cannot not touch her.

  She’s in my system now. She’s in my mind; she’s in my veins. And she’s most certainly in everything that moves below my belt.

  And it doesn’t make any sense. She infuriates the hell out of me! The only time we can even have a civil conversation is when we’re fucking.

  Even a week ago at the party—after Ana discovered us in the office—we verbally jousted for another twenty rounds.

  Floyd “Money” Mayweather couldn’t have lasted a second in that room with us.

  My thoughts flash back to last week, to that tiny office—and I feel Elena’s verbal slap as if it were right at the Starbucks table.

  “Great,” she started in on me after Ana left, brushing her blonde bangs backwards.

  “We might as well broadcast ourselves to the entire world.” She tugged on the sleeves of her sweater and pulled the Post-It note off her ass.

  I tried hard not to stare at it.

  I spoke to her turned back. “What were we supposed to do? Not let Ana in?”

  “Probably!” She huffed, rearranging the papers on the desk.

  “You gave me the go-ahead!”

  “I know…” she sighed. “But I don’t need people knowing about… this.”

  She spewed the last word with an undercurrent of disgust, and suddenly, I was inexplicably enraged.

  “What are you—ashamed of me?”

  “I thought you didn’t want anyone knowing about us!” she shouted, slamming a stapler down. “You made that very clear the night of the engagement party.”

  “I said a lot of things I didn’t mean the night of the engagement party.”

  “Right… like how you said it was a bad idea to have been with me all night.”

  I grew still, reaching a frustrated hand toward my face. Did I really say that? There’s no fucking way I would do that…

  Or maybe I did. Everything that happened after discovering my vandalized car became a blur.

  “Shit. Elle…” I grabbed her busy arm from behind. “Elena, you have to know that I didn’t mean that. My car had just gotten destroyed.” I hesitated. “I… I wasn’t thinking.”

  She stiffened, but didn’t face me.

  “It’s just a car,” she stated softly. “You call the police, they find out who did it and then they handle it.”

  “No.” The word came out as an unintended growl. “My car was practically pitted and filleted that night. And then they…” I trailed off, not wanting to say the rest.

  “I want retribution,” I said instead.

  Elena snorted, finally whirling towards me, her blonde hair whipping across her face.

  “You rich, snooty types. One car is not enough. You’ve got more money than the law should allow and anything less is not good enough.”

  My hand was still on her arm; I pulled her closer to me.

  “Don’t talk to me about wealth, Elena. You don’t know shit about what I had to do to make it.”

  She snatched her arm back, glaring up at me. Her blue eyes were ice-cold.

  “Oh, I’m sure riding Foxx’s coattails all the way to the top was tough.”

  Her words dripped with scathing hot sarcasm. I saw red.

  “I think you’ve got that backwards, Elena.”

  Her indignant expression dropped and was replaced with confusion. Her blonde brows furrowed.

  “What do you mean?”

  What do I mean?—I thought. I shouldn’t have said that. This wasn’t Elena’s business.

  “Forget it,” I snapped hastily. “It doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t understand anyway.”

  I turned my back on Elena, shutting the office door on her with a dull thud.

  The sound of a thud snaps me back to reality—snatching me out of my memory and dropping me right back into Starbucks. Chris’s hand lands with a smack against the table in front of me.

  His sea-green eyes are staring back at me, his brows twisted in a knot that looks almost comical.

  “Bro… what is going on? I don’t know how to talk to you these days. I swear you’re in another dimension.”

  I blink hard, shaking my head. “It feels like it sometimes…”

  I can tell Chris is still confused, but I can’t explain. Something is going on—not just with me, but also around me. Around all of us.

  I don’t know what it is… or who…

  I stand, crushing my now-empty cup. “Speaking of other dimensions, let’s get out of here and back to work. I need to check on something.”

  ***

  We leave the Starbucks in silence, each seemingly lost in our own thoughts as we head back to work.

  I glance at Chris out of the corner of my eye, wondering if maybe I could’ve picked a different woman to lie about.

  Chris has always had some sort of soft spot for Trina. In fact… he was the one that introduced us.

  She was his type: a beautiful, funny, slightly nerdy type of girl—a real square when I met her. />
  Until she fell hard for me…

  She wanted a taste of my lifestyle so I gave it to her. I was twenty-two at the time. How was I to know that she would tumble so far down the rabbit hole?

  I was a reformed drinker, not a drug user.

  Inside the café, Trina was the best substitute I could come up with for Elena. I figured maybe if Chris thought something was going on with Trina and me, he would let the Elena thing go.

  Maybe his attention would shift to that. Maybe he wouldn’t tell Foxx.

  But now I’ve fucked myself… because Chris is sulking, I feel guilty, and whoever’s behind these “attacks” on us lives another day incognito.

  Secrets beget more secrets.

  If it’s one thing that I know, it’s that.

  And ever since I’ve kept one monumental secret, everything surrounding it has started to unravel.

  I’ve emotionally abandoned Chris.

  I’ve alienated Elena.

  And now an assault that opened against me has started to spread to Tripping Out!... and I still haven’t told the truth.

  Nobody knows about the note but me.

  The note that some twisted sicko left to aggravate me after destroying my beloved car. A note that someone used to bait me—to let me know that they knew something I didn’t want revealed. Something they could hold over my head.

  At the time, I had believed that jealousy was the culprit—that an envious Trina took her frustrations out on the thing I treasured most.

  But when I saw the Tripping Out! hack, I knew it was just the beginning. Nothing’s happened since… but who knows how far this game will go?

  Whoever it is… he or she is clearly having fun at my expense.

  It’s all I can think about the entire way back.

  The weather is dreary as we traverse the few blocks to our office building. The front lobby that houses the security desk is virtually empty.

  Our shiny shoes echo loudly on the tiled floors, and Chris and I are staring so intently at them that we barely notice the unnatural solitude.

  Or the unseemly man that interrupts it…

  He walks quickly past us with his head down and if I wasn’t so intent on keeping my gaze on the floor, I might’ve missed his black sneakers crossing my path.

  Sneakers—running shoes. In an office building.