by Lulu Pratt
A waitress made her way to the table and pointedly removed my empty coffee cup. I had clearly outstayed my welcome at Antoinette’s. I allowed myself to flick to the open browser and was greeted by images of rolling green fields. I was counting down the days to when I could make my escape from work. As if by magic, my phone began to ring. Without looking, I knew who it was. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to keep my voice as patient as I could manage.
“Where the fuck are you?” Sean’s voice instantly set me on edge.
“I’m working. What’s up?” I tried to sound cheerful, knowing that it would annoy him.
“You need to be in the damn office working. We are on the crest of something here. We need everyone here and doing their jobs properly,” he said, and I closed my eyes to stop from telling him to fuck off.
One of the things that really bothered me about my dearest and only sibling was how quickly Sean had developed a faux American accent. Basically, as soon as he had stepped off the plane he had acquired an entirely new voice with all the Americanisms to boot. It probably bothered him that I never bothered to hide my Dublin accent.
I’d lost count of how many times he had asked me to disguise the fact that despite sharing a set of parents, schools, sports, and a fancy house in Southside, I’d misspent my youth on the Northside and had earned myself what my parents called a ‘rough’ accent. It was just one of the many things that made it hard for people to believe that we were brothers, and I didn’t mind that. He was fair, skinny, and very tall. I was dark, muscular, and just plain tall at six-three. People who didn’t know us would never guess that there was just thirteen months, twenty-one days, and eighteen hours between us.
“I’m on my way. I’m going to be twenty minutes at most,” I was distracted, continuing to browse while he spoke to someone else who must have just entered his office. I couldn’t make out his murmuring and let the phone drop a little.
“Ten minutes! Do you hear me?” he shouted.
I snapped the laptop shut and hung up without responding, dialing for the office receptionist, and drumming my fingers as I waited for an answer. Sean and I had never gotten along very well as adults. As kids it was totally different, we were inseparable. But as we each found ourselves working in the family business and he made his way up the ladder while I searched for the nearest exit, we just hadn’t that much in common anymore. His endless attempts to make me feel as worthless as possible would have been easier to ignore if my parents hadn’t set him up as chief watcher and jailkeeper. I could barely move in the office without him asking me what I was doing, checking my work, and undermining my authority over my team. And if I dared to go against him, the threat of it getting back to my parents was real. Nobody who saw it would have believed that I was actually the older brother or the more educated one.
“Send a car to 30 Mercantile immediately,” I barked down the phone at the receptionist, and then winced as I realized how much like Sean I sounded. “Sorry, Sophie,” I added as I pinched the bridge of my nose.
“So, Sean found you,” Sophie said with what I guess was a smile. “Roger’s already on his way.”
In the past few weeks, Sean had been constantly on my back about work, feeding me endless paperwork to keep me from doing any of the things I wanted to do with the company. I left a handful of dollars on the table and nodded at the waitress, then swung my bag over my shoulder and stood up to leave. The sky that I had watched threaten rain all afternoon decided at just that moment to unleash a downpour. I turned up my collar and wrapped my arms around myself as I stood just outside the doorway to wait for the car. My phone vibrated in my pocket, and when I checked it I swore out loud and got myself a filthy look from an old lady passing by. It was a text reminding me that not only was I about to get wet, get yelled at, and get overloaded with work, but I also had to be at a restaurant by seven o’clock for a blind date tomorrow that I had agreed to go on after I’d lost a bet with my friend. I allowed myself to fantasize about running away. It passed the time.
Chapter 3
FREYA
“WHATEVER HAPPENS, we will get through this,” Drew was comforting my mom as I made my way through the studio, my hands tightly wrapped my third cup of coffee. I had crashed at my parents’ house that night, but none of us had had much sleep. I joined in the hug, leaning gently against them, and smiling reassuringly. Drew was like a brother to Beatrix and me. He had been part of Dynasty Games since we had moved into the studio at my parents’ place, and it wasn’t unusual to find him joining them for meals after a particularly busy day. He nodded towards the table in the middle of the room.
“You brought pastries?” I grinned and opened the box of sticky sweet doughnuts and shiny glazed danishes theatrically to get a laugh from my mom, who regularly despaired at my sweet tooth. “Have I ever told you how much I like you?”
“Not lately,” Drew said, smiling. He caught my eye, and I saw the familiar twinkle in his eye. Drew and I had been friends in high school, as we had met through the gaming club. I was the only girl in the group, but things had gotten awkward when he asked me out while we were still in school. I felt that we should always have just been friends, but there was an awkwardness between us for a while and I never told anyone – apart from Beatrix – about his interest in me. We had put it behind us and stayed friends. Fortunately, we’d long got over the awkwardness when he applied for a job with my parents. It was during a brief six-month period when I’d struck out on my own by living in the dorm freshman year. By the time I came back, a little older and a lot wiser, Drew was a part of the team. It made sense that he took a job with the family business to get him through college, and he’d been with Dynasty Games for almost five years. He had grown up a lot and lost the geeky look that had been so my type when we had been together. I had barely noticed that the hours he spent at the gym when he wasn’t working had paid off. Okay, so maybe I had noticed.
We sat down at the table and silently tucked into the pastries, knowing full well that the silence would be over when Beatrix made it into the office. We didn’t have long to wait. Clutching a coffee and pale without her usual makeup, Beatrix swept into the room in a flurry of questions and orders, which wasn’t that different to her usual style, but we could usually afford to ignore her bossiness. Not today.
“We need to be ready. We have an appointment with the lawyers at eleven, and we need to be prepared. Mom, if you can help me sort the paperwork that we printed last night. Drew, could you get back onto scanning every machine in this place. We still need to find out what happened, even if it turns out there isn’t anything we can do about it.”
“There will be something we can do,” I said, offering her the box of pastries.
“Right, and you know this how?” She pushed the box away and looked at me, her eyebrows raised and her mouth a tight line.
“There’s just got to be,” I matched the seriousness of her expression, but she rolled her eyes.
“Thanks for the optimism. I am sure that will be super useful when I can’t pay my mortgage,” she called as she flounced out of the room. I could hear her phone ringing as she disappeared into her office.
“Effie,” my mom used my childhood nickname. “She is worried. She doesn’t mean to be like that.”
“What can I do? Shall I come to the lawyers’ office?” I asked quietly, my cheeks flushed with embarrassment and annoyance.
“Nothing really to be done,” she said. “Help Drew if you like, but leave this to us, sweetheart. We know you have travel plans, and this shouldn’t stop you.”
“I want to help,” I answered, confused by this sudden closing of the ranks. Did they really expect me to continue with my plans while they all panicked about the future of the company that I had helped to build? Beatrix hadn’t spoken to me like that since we were kids. Sure, I had always been the dreamer while she was the practical one, but she had always respected the work I did for the company, and I was suddenly struck by how much I was go
ing to miss collaborating with her.
“I know you want to help,” Mom smiled softly at me and left the room as Beatrix called her into her office. It was quite obvious that she didn’t think I had anything useful to offer.
“Drew,” I sat down heavily on the seat beside him. Paula was off with a stress headache, so I flicked her computer on with a sigh. “Show me what we need to do.”
“There’s nothing…” he began, and then saw my expression and changed tack. “I’m going through everything to see if there has been a breach somewhere. Our security is pretty tight. Our IT company makes sure of that. I can’t work out how this happened. Whoever did it knew exactly what they were doing.” He sighed and went back to his work.
I sat and stared at the unfamiliar screen in front of me. I hadn’t the first idea about security, or hacking, or data breaches, or any of it. I knew about graphics. I knew about design. I knew how to make things look good, how to make someone’s eye go to exactly where you wanted it. But all this technical stuff, it just wasn’t me. For the second time that morning, I quickly searched the internet for Clover House, and for the second time, my heart sank as the screen was flooded with praise about their many awards, glitzy events, and impressive charity work. I clicked on the website, and my eyes scanned over it. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. There wasn’t going to be a section devoted to their hacking strategies or a PDF on corporate sabotage to download.
I glanced over at Drew. He looked tired. His anxious face was glued to the screen, desperately searching for any clue that might give us some insight. I knew he wouldn’t find anything. These people weren’t going to pull off a stunt like this and then leave evidence behind. They were professionals. I browsed the ‘About Us’ section of the website and saw their smug faces staring back at me. One of the faces looked vaguely familiar and I realized with a jolt that he was the man who held the door open for me at Antoinette’s yesterday. Those same blue eyes stared out at me. What a small world. One of these people, maybe him, knew exactly what had happened. The only way anyone was going to discover anything would be from the inside.
Something inside me flipped over at the thought. Infiltrating them was the only way we would ever find out what had happened. Maybe Beatrix was wrong – I wasn’t as useless as she seemed to think. There was no way I could go ahead with my travel plans while they struggled to keep the business alive, and I clearly wasn’t needed in the studio. I tilted the screen slightly so that Drew wouldn’t see what I was doing, but he was oblivious. I took a deep breath to brace myself and started to read all about the wonderful internship that Clover House was so proud of. According to the blurb, they were so committed to supporting new graduates, they might even fast track my application. My heart pounding, I quickly sent them my details – congratulating myself on having the foresight to give them my mother’s maiden name and Effie as my first name. A warm wave of fear flooded me as I thought of all the ways I could possibly be traced. In a matter of minutes, I had upped the privacy settings on my social media accounts to the highest levels and essentially disappeared from the internet.
Chapter 4
KEEGAN
TO GET TO MY office, I had to run a gauntlet of persistent, high-pitched women and men eager to seem as though they were my trusted advisor. First Sophie at the front desk, who seemed to think she had to stand up and shout some pleasantry at me every time I entered, drawing everyone’s attention to the fact that I was there. I don’t know who told her that was necessary, but it drove me crazy. Marc from Accounting stopped me in the hall to ask if I’d seen the basketball game last night. Then there were the girls in the PR and Marketing departments. At any given time, half of them were fluttering their fake eyelashes at me, while the other half were permanently angry with me for a few ill-judged flirtations when I had first joined the Boston office.
Let’s face it – fucking the boss is never the way to get ahead in any job. And in this case, it pretty much guaranteed that there was no way you were going to make your way up the ladder where I might have to deal with you regularly, and I wasn’t the golden boy that some thought I was when I first arrived. There was a reason that the head of Marketing was Brian. Not only was he the best we had, but he was gay and I clearly wasn’t his type. The daily gauntlet of making my way through PR and Marketing was a constant cringing reminder of my early mistakes at the company.
After the gauntlet, the dragon. Sean. I will never know where he lurked waiting for me, but it was rare that I would make it into the safety of my own office without him ambushing me and listing a string of my failures and weaknesses. This morning, he was already in my office sitting at my desk, playing with my stress ball. I resisted the urge to ask him what he was doing in my space, choosing instead to completely ignore him as I took off my jacket and checked my voicemail.
It wasn’t long before the barrage started.
“Marketing hasn’t got your figures. They needed them two days ago. The Design team didn’t see you yesterday at all. Do you understand how busy we are? How critical this time is? How careful we need to be?”
“Marketing will have the figures when they are ready. I’m actually waiting for an email back from you about a few things for the report. The Design team didn’t need to see me yesterday. And yes, I understand how this animated game is fundamental to the continuation of life on Earth. Are you fucking done?”
“Look,” he spat out as he got up to walk around the office, straightening pictures and moving piles of paper around on my credenza. “I know you’d rather be back in Ireland chasing farm animals and getting drunk, but some of us actually care about this company. Do not mess this up.”
“You’re right,” I agreed, looking up at him with my very best nonchalant smile. “I would much rather be back home living my own life, but here I am, stuck living yours. But whatever you might think, I have no intention of fucking anything up. If you have a problem with my actual work, then you can raise it with me in a meeting with the shareholders. Until then, kindly fuck off.”
I waited until he was out of sight and closed my eyes, taking a deep breath and releasing it slowly. He was always a pain, but lately he was unbearable, watching my every move and sectioning off the company so that we were overseeing different departments. At least it meant I didn’t have to work directly with him. The numbers on my screen were a welcome escape, and I let myself become totally immersed in them. Numbers were safe, they were reliable. A two never turned into a six. The total column only changed when it had to.
Although this was not what I have envisioned for myself as a child or even a decade ago, I had a talent with numbers and spreadsheets and found that my work stood up to scrutiny.
The minutes ticked by, and the hours followed. I sipped my water and took pleasure in the jumble of spreadsheets merging into one unified work of art. A tap on the glass door made me jump, and I braced myself for more flak from Sean. Instead, it was Beverly, the janitor. I gave her a wave, and she came into the office. Lovely Beverly with her warm smile and wonderful dry humor. Beverly was my only ally in the Clover House world. She was in her sixties, but there was no faster worker. She couldn’t care less that I was supposedly her boss, and I’d lost count of the times I had been told off by her. I pretended to put up with it, but really I enjoyed being put in my place by her sharp Irish tongue. She reminded me of my late grandmother.
I like her so much that she came on Friday mornings to my condo and cleaned, even though I didn’t need a cleaning lady for myself and she didn’t really need the extra cash.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes, Beverly,” I smiled.
“I’m sure I am. Look at the state of this place,” she tutted, busying herself with the recycling bin and the surrounding pile of scrunched-up pages where I’d missed my target.
I looked around. I hadn’t seen the mess, I had been so absorbed in my work. I also hadn’t seen the time. It was almost a quarter to seven. I swore under my breath and snapped the laptop shut. I sto
od up, tore off my tie and untucked my shirt. The blind date was tonight!
“We’ll have none of that!” Beverly gasped with mock outrage, before continuing her work laughing softly to herself.
“I haven’t time to go home. Will I do? For a date?” I asked, tucking my shirt back in, undoing the top button, and trying to adopt a casual pose. She looked at me with one eyebrow raised.
“Well, young ones these days haven’t much in the way of standards, so I’d say you’d be grand,” she sniffed.
“That’s good enough for me,” I laughed, and swung my jacket over my shoulder.
As I made for the door, my phone vibrated in my pocket. It was Mick calling from Ireland to make sure I was on my way to the date he had arranged.
“Laddie,” I said. “It’s almost midnight. Should you be in bed?”
“I’m just making sure. Don’t let me down; I set this up as a favor to her sister, and I am in big trouble if you’re a no-show,” he warned.
“Did I ever let you down?” I laughed at the seriousness of his tone, emerging from the office building and speeding up as I made my way along the sidewalk, thankful that I was meeting her in some hipster cocktail place that had just opened up a few blocks away.
“Not yet,” he said warmly. “I will warn you though, she isn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer…”
“Right, cheers for dropping that in at the last minute! I’ve just arrived. Later.”
I hung up and took a deep breath as I entered the cocktail place. Sitting at the bar was one lone woman. Her shiny jet black hair, cut sharply in a distinctive modern style, skimmed her shoulders and complimented her fashionable vibrant blue dress, skin-tight and clinging to all the right places. In an instant, I wished I had had time to change. If this was going to be a success, I was going to have to own it.
“Hey, you must be Lucy?” I gave her my best smile and saw her quickly look me up and down, but her expression gave nothing away.