It hurt to look and it hurt to not look. But my chest aches most of all, because he never showed.
I sigh and toss back the last of my wine. Enough watching the sea and being melancholy. It’s bedtime. Way past bedtime.
I start pulling out my hairpins as I walk to my bedroom, leaving them on various end tables. Since it’s only me here, I can set things wherever I want. I’m not messy exactly, but I don’t have to be uptight about where things go.
Three bobby pins tinkle as I set them on the table in the foyer. The stairs to my bedroom are just off the entryway, my bed calling to me. I kick off my heels by the door. I should have done that when I walked in, but I was buzzed on food and wine. Carefully I set them on the rack, because a good pair of heels is priceless. And these are Mary Janes in the most sinful shade of red, tied with a massive silk bow.
I straighten up once the heels are safe, curling my toes against the cold tile. I lift up onto the balls of my feet, once, twice, working the kinks out of my feet. Someday I’m going to regret wearing heels so often. But not enough to stop now.
There’s a sharp knock at the door. Then another. Hard, insistent.
I spin, my heart slamming into my ribs. Sick adrenaline floods my throat.
The knock comes again, the raps coalescing into a pattern. My heart slows down, down, down until I feel like I’m suspended in honey. I’m both electric and frozen all at once.
I knew he would come, somehow. I didn’t think it would be right now.
My muscles trembling, I slowly open the door, the wind stealing inside when I do. The weather is vicious tonight. It bites and snaps, and inside me something dark and needy does as well.
Dev stands on my doorstep, the fog collecting wetly in his dark hair as the wind whips it into his eyes. He’s only in a jacket, the collar down, and he must be freezing. But if he is, he doesn’t show it.
Not even the weather can make him bend.
He says nothing as he waits. But what is there to say? We put something on hold four years ago, and we’ve come to the point where we need to finish it.
I step back, let him inside. This time when our gazes meet, neither of us look away. This time our gazes lock.
We’ve been alone before. We’ve been alone so often it’s hardly remarkable when we are. We conduct business, carry on as if nothing is between us.
That lie is shattered by the force of our gazes interlocking.
I have to kiss him. I’d do almost anything to kiss him. I’ve been holding my breath for him for years, and now I have to breathe or die. Kiss him or die.
We kissed just once before. Back when I was deciding whether to leave my old job and join the Bastards on their crazy adventure. Dev kissed me, and it ruined kisses for me forever.
And then he said it could never happen again since I’d be working for him and he wasn’t that kind of asshole.
It made sense at the time. I understood and even appreciated his position. I wanted the job, took the loss of him as the price I’d pay for moving up in the world. If we were fucking each other, it would have been disastrous. I was his subordinate back then and therefore completely off-limits.
But things between us have shifted at work. It’s why he’s here now.
I’m not his employee anymore. I’m his partner, his equal. And I’m burning for him. A greedy, consuming fire grips me from my head to my toes.
He shrugs out of his jacket, lets it fall to the floor. Two long strides—his legs are magnificent, made for eating up distances, especially the distance between us—and he’s reaching for me.
His hands come up, cup my jaw, tilt my face up to his. There’s an expression on his face I haven’t seen since the last time we kissed: wonder and reverence and openness. He looks awed by me.
His skin is cool from the night air, his scent crisp with salty chill. It’s like he’s wearing the weather as cologne. A strand of dark hair falls over his brow, a stark contrast to the deep warmth of his golden eyes.
I part my lips as he lowers his head.
And we kiss for the second time.
This kiss is as shocking as the first, but there’s also a sense of rightness. Of homecoming. His hands fit my face perfectly, his mouth made for mine.
The need in my core shifts and sharpens. I’m getting the kiss I was desperate for, but my body wants more.
He slides a thigh between mine, his hips cradled in my belly. His erection presses into me, and a pulse of heat and urgency deep inside me answers. My entire body is awash with heat.
I reach for him, settling my hands on his torso, finding my way to the hard muscles of his back, traveling down to the divide between his hips and his ass. He flexes under my hand, thrusting into my belly.
When I moan, he deepens the kiss. It’s like falling into light—white-hot, bright, blinding. Like looking directly at the sun, a dangerous temptation.
I’ve dreamed of this for so long. Waited for it for so long. And it’s exactly as I remembered and imagined.
But every fantasy has an end. So does this one.
I know Dev much better now than I did back then. Working together, day in and day out, brings a kind of intimacy as well. Not the kissing kind, but something deeper. He’s here and we’re together physically, and my body is screaming this is right, inevitable… but my brain knows my body is confused.
I pull away. My hand finds his chest, and I push.
He stumbles backward, confusion wrinkling his brow. “What’s wrong?”
I wrap my arms around myself, wishing I had on my heels. It’s hard to confront him when I have to look up to him. When the crane of my neck reminds me of how he angled my head to kiss me deeper, harder.
“This isn’t happening.” I manage to get it out, barely.
His jaw tightens. “I don’t understand. We waited years for this. And now it can happen.”
“I didn’t wait.”
He goes very still. “I never asked you to.”
He thinks I mean dating, which of course I’ve done since we kissed the first time. But I mean something very different. He’s not my only impossible dream.
“You weren’t at dinner tonight.” I can’t keep the hurt out of my voice. Can’t stop remembering how badly I wanted to watch the door, to see him coming through it.
And he never did.
He glances away, almost defensively. “I was busy dealing with Corvus stuff.”
“You didn’t come into my office today to see how I was. Everyone else did. Paul and Elliot even called.” I swore I wouldn’t get emotional, but the feelings keep leaking out of my words.
“I… I didn’t think about it.” His tone is flat.
I close my eyes for a brief moment. One of the most important days of my life, when I achieve everything I’ve been striving for, and he didn’t think about it.
He was busy. With his own stuff.
I open my eyes, make my back stiff and straight. I need to be as unemotional as he is. “You think I’m the same person I was four years ago. That I kept myself in stasis for you.”
“That’s not true.” Finally he shows some vehemence.
“I’ve watched you over the years.” I couldn’t stop watching him. Even when it hurt. “And you’re… you’re even more closed off now. No one ever knows what you’re thinking or feeling. No one knows anything about your family or where you came from. If you’ve had a relationship, none of us knows anything about it.”
I thought that maybe I wasn’t lucky enough to know those things about him, that once I was trusted enough, he’d tell me. But it turns out no one’s trusted enough by Dev. No one knows anything.
He might be ready to kiss me—and more—but he’s not ready to be with me. He’s not ready to risk his emotions.
“I’m not… I don’t expose myself like that,” he says through gritted teeth.
“It’s not exposure.” I lift my hands, trying to explain. “It’s having friends, relationships. People you love and who love you. And those guys, the one
s at Bastard Capital? They do love you. You really hurt them with the Corvus stuff.”
I saw their pain, their betrayal, and I felt it myself. We all worked together so closely for years… but Dev didn’t see it that way. He didn’t want to be part of our family.
We’d been rejected.
“They understand.” His tone is flat again.
“No, they don’t. When you were plotting all this, did you ever think of them? Of how they would feel when you revealed you’d been working behind their backs?”
“I couldn’t… I couldn’t tell anyone, or it might have failed.” He’s dragging the words out like he can’t catch his breath.
“No, you couldn’t trust them. That killed them to learn that. Because they trusted you. Completely. And you shattered that for… for Corvus?”
I want him to explain it, to justify what he did. Yes, Corvus needed to be taken down, all their nasty programs dismantled, but everyone at Bastard Capital was doing that. He was the only one who had to take them on entirely alone.
He says nothing. He won’t look at me. He’s closed off again, just like he always wants to be.
When I kissed him four years ago, I found that reserve of his mysterious. Alluring.
Now I see it as a wall that no one can break. What’s on the other side would be more than worth it—Dev, open, honest, ready to love—but I’d shatter myself on that wall before it even cracked. I can’t sacrifice myself on a hopeless quest even if he’s all I ever wanted. Even if this is tearing me apart inside.
Better to hurt now than to struggle and ache for years and still never reach him.
“This wouldn’t have worked,” I say quietly. I’m staring at the floor because if I meet his eyes, I might still change my mind. His gaze is that powerful for me. “We can’t restart something that’s doomed to fail.”
He raises his head, his gaze meeting mine. He looks angry, wounded. “Then why did you kiss me?”
“Because after four years of your silences, I deserved something.” It comes out smaller, meaner than I meant it, but I don’t want to admit that I’m weak. That I had to give in to the urge to touch him, kiss him, even though I already knew it could go nowhere.
I sound small and mean because I feel small and mean. And achy and devastated.
He heads for the door then. With one long arm, he snags his discarded jacket. The stiffness in him, the pain, tears at me in spite of my resolve.
“I don’t know what you need,” I say frantically. “I can figure out almost anyone else—their hopes, their desires. But you… I don’t know what it is you want.”
He stops for a brief moment but doesn’t turn around. Then he leaves without another word.
Chapter 3
Anjelica’s wrong. It’s not a question of what I want; it’s what I need. And I finally know exactly where what I need is.
It’s hidden somewhere in the massive array of files and data that Corvus holds, and I just have to find it. Except that searching their archives for what I want is like looking for a single sheet of paper within every single library in the United States. Public, private, and university libraries. Every book you can think of, and I’m in search of one sheet.
Once I find it, I’m turning my attention back to Anjelica. She’s wrong about me, and she’s wrong about us. I’ll prove it to her. Not that my attention is ever truly off her—she’s always in the back of my mind, a shape always at the corner of my vision. Even when she’s not here, she’s here for me.
I’m in my office, scrolling through file directories on my computer. It’s tedious work that a search program would be better suited for, but all the algorithms I’ve written to search the archives have come up empty.
There’s always artificial intelligence, and I’ll need it for the next search programs I design, but for now I can look with my own two eyes. It’s midnight on a Thursday, and I’ve got nothing else to do.
Thursdays are Anjelica’s painting class. It used to be her dance class night, but the school promoted her to instructor several months ago, and now she teaches on Tuesday night.
She thinks I don’t notice her, but she couldn’t be more wrong. All I’ve done over the past few years is notice her. More than notice—I’ve been damn near obsessed with her, not that I could show it. And then she made partner and I thought…
I thought wrong is what I did.
I keep scrolling through files, automatically cataloging the names as my mind wanders off to more interesting subjects. I wish Minerva were here—the expertise of a Corvus employee would help.
Now that I own the company, I can call on any Corvus employee I like, have them in my office in a few minutes. But I can’t trust any of them with this task.
I can’t really trust Minerva either, but I could frame it in a way that she wouldn’t understand what I was really looking for. Doesn’t matter though since she’s off with Elliot, working to clear her name.
Finn and Doc could help me with the AI. But I don’t like the idea of that. I’ve been searching for this for so long I have to be the one to find it. No help, not from anyone.
I couldn’t explain that to Anjelica. It’s hard for me to explain myself and my reasoning to most people, but when it comes to her…
My fingers slow, then stop scrolling. I fell in love with her the moment I saw her.
It was an accident actually. We’d just gotten a final accounting of how much we all made through my miraculous stock algorithm, and it was a lot. Like, a shit ton, especially for a bunch of dudes working out of a garage. When I saw the numbers, I had to go outside for a second because my brain wasn’t grasping it.
Our lives were upended, literally overnight. We had fuck-you money and then some. Except… what we were supposed to do now?
I was pacing in front of the garage, trying to clear my head. And then Anjelica came walking down the street in those shoes that hurt her feet. There was something about how she kept going, pretending that everything was fine… I was gone. My heart jumped out of my chest, searching for her hands to catch it. It never came back.
I’ve scoffed at ridiculous shit like that before, and I still do, but I can’t deny what happened. She was so… so different. She was hiding in plain sight—still is—and my heart immediately recognized it. Recognized her.
I don’t deal well with people, but I knew I couldn’t simply walk up and declare my love. That’s stalker shit.
So I waited for her to come to me. We walked together to her bus stop twice. And we talked. Everything about her was so bright, so bursting with color. I was enthralled.
And then she decided to accept the Bastards’ job offer. I didn’t speak for or against it. I said nothing at all, and they didn’t think it odd. I could have stopped them, told them that I loved her and we couldn’t hire her.
I didn’t. Because I might have fallen just like that for her, but she didn’t feel that way about me. She was attracted to me, sure, but it wasn’t deeper than that. She had a right to say yes or no to the job offer without my screwing it up.
When she did say yes, our personal relationship was done. To have power over someone and use it to manipulate them into being intimate with you…
I shudder. No, I could never do that.
In the end, we made the right choice. Anjelica was perfect as our office manager. She’ll be perfect as a partner.
I just thought that now we might… but I was wrong. She thinks I’m not ready. I am, have been for years, but convincing her will take some planning. Because I don’t understand why she stopped, not really. Her reasoning made no sense to me. Of course I didn’t tell anyone about my plans—that’s why they worked. They should all be happy about what I did, not pissed at me.
It doesn’t hurt. I’m used to being alone. It’s pretty much all I’ve ever known, at least until I found the Bastards. No, it’s not hurt. More of a hollowness.
I start to scroll again. What’s hiding in these files will help. When I find it, the hollowness will be filled. Or a
t least papered over.
The night custodian passes my office with his cleaning cart and gives me a wave. I wave back.
“Stopping for lunch soon?” It might be odd to think of midnight as lunchtime, but Alfred and I have flipped schedules compared to the normal world.
“Yep. You?”
I shake my head. “I’ve got too much to do. There’re leftover sandwiches in the fridge if you want some.”
Anjelica used to order all the food, but it’s Yancy’s job now. She orders from the same places Anjelica did, but somehow it doesn’t quite taste the same.
“Thanks. I’ll try one.” Alfred hesitates. “You sure you don’t want to take a break?”
The concern in his voice makes me wonder what I look like. I’ve been spending the days doing my usual work—finding new start-ups to invest in, watching over the ones I’ve already invested in, and the more shadowy work I do. At night for the past few weeks, I’ve been going through the Corvus files. I sleep of course, but not much.
“I’m all right.” I’m not, not really, but Alfred doesn’t want to know that.
He points to the atrium, shrouded in darkness beyond the glass wall of my office. “I heard that noise in there again. Like a sprinkler was overpressure.”
I sigh. “Thanks. I’ll look at it.”
Alfred heard the noise first last week and told me about it. So I went into the atrium to search out what it could be.
It was the first time I’ve ever been inside there. The atrium is Anjelica’s. It’s so powerfully, intimately hers that I couldn’t possibly go inside. I can’t believe other people simply walk in, stroll around, sit for a while. It’s like rifling through her brain. Or maybe her heart.
But there was something wrong in there, and I wanted to see if I could fix it. I never did find the source of the noise. But the orchids… My God, the orchids. Hidden in every hollow, every corner, waiting to be found. Hiding in plain sight. It was almost too much.
I heard the noise last week, during the day. I went in, searching for it, and Anjelica caught me. I felt like she saw me staring at her or something. Watching her through those glass walls when she couldn’t see me, hiding in the paradise she created.
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