by Jenna Black
“I’m not a big espresso fan,” I informed him as I approached.
“Make that a latte,” he called to the barista, then smiled charmingly at me. “Better?”
Arguing with him over a beverage order seemed like more trouble than it was worth. “Whatever,” I said, taking a seat. “I’ve had a long day already. Can we just cut to the chase without the whole dog and pony show?”
The espresso machine let out a shriek that set my teeth on edge, and Cyrus waited until it went silent before answering.
“No theatrics, I promise.”
The barista brought our coffees over. I hadn’t been planning to drink mine, but the scent was so enticing I couldn’t resist.
“You don’t think calling me for an urgent, private meeting is theatrical?” I asked.
He huffed. “Well, I wasn’t trying to be, but I guess it was a bit at that. Sorry.”
I sipped at my strong, rich coffee, being careful not to burn my tongue. “So what’s the big emergency? And why did you need to talk to me particularly?”
“I said it was important, not that it was an emergency. But I don’t think Anderson will like what I have to say, and I’m trying to spare everyone some drama.”
This didn’t sound good. I put down the coffee. “What is it?”
“We were speculating the other day about who might be behind the attacks against you. I promised I would warn all my people off, and I did. But I found I was curious myself, so I did a little investigating.”
My heart gave a loud ka-thump in my chest. If Cyrus thought Anderson wasn’t going to like what he was going to say, then that meant . . .
“It was Emma, wasn’t it?”
Cyrus nodded. He pulled a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket. “I stopped by her place and poked around on her computer for a bit while she was out.”
I must have looked shocked at his blatant invasion of Emma’s privacy, because Cyrus gave me one of his wry grins. “I’m her boss, and she’s living in a house that I pay for. I have every right to keep an eye on her, especially when her loyalty’s been questionable from the start.”
Add one more item to the long list of reasons I never wanted to be an Olympian.
Cyrus slid the paper across to me. “I didn’t find anything interesting in her files or browser history. But I did find this in her recycle bin.”
I unfolded the paper and saw a screen shot of a computer’s recycle bin full of junk files. A number of them with nonsense names had been highlighted, and I could see a bunch of tiled windows that had opened up in WordPad.
“I found seven different versions in her recycle bin,” Cyrus continued. “I don’t remember exactly what the email you showed me said, but the one on top in that shot is the closest to what I remember.”
I had memorized “Konstantin’s” email claiming responsibility for the fire at the Glasses’ house, and although the one on the screen shot wasn’t exactly the same, it was close enough. Looked like I’d been right all along to suspect Emma as the author of all my woes. I reread the letter a couple of times as I tried to process what I’d learned. Obviously, Emma was the firebug and was responsible for the fires at the Glasses’ house and my condo, but I had to conclude that the fire at my office was every bit as accidental as it had originally seemed. It predated my feud with Emma, and the circumstances were very different. Perhaps what had happened at my office had sparked the whole idea in Emma’s head. No pun intended.
“I had a talk with her,” Cyrus continued. “She claims she didn’t write it and she has no idea how it showed up on her computer.”
I gave a little snort of disbelief, and Cyrus’s cynical smile said he was with me. The smile faded into a look of grave intensity.
“None of this changes anything in the long run,” he told me. “Emma is still an Olympian and under my protection. I have made it abundantly clear that you are off-limits and that I won’t tolerate disobedience. I don’t expect you to have any more trouble with her. But I thought you should know. I’ll leave it up to you whether you want to tell Anderson or not.”
I stared at the incriminating paper, shaking my head once more at the irrational depths of Emma’s hatred. Anderson wouldn’t want to know how low she’d sunk. He had a hard enough time reconciling his image of Emma with the woman who had betrayed Erin to her death just to spite him, but this was even worse. However, this might be something he needed to know, whether he wanted to or not.
“Thanks,” I said, putting a heavy dose of sarcasm in my voice.
Cyrus smiled. “You can see now why I didn’t want him to hear it from me.”
I rubbed my eyes, feeling tired and headachy. I didn’t exactly want Anderson to hear it from me, either.
I wondered if Cyrus thought I was rubbing my eyes to stave off tears, because his voice suddenly went all soft and sympathetic. “I wouldn’t take it personally if I were you. Emma’s . . . not well.”
“No kidding?”
“Her maid tells me she has nightmares every night,” Cyrus continued after giving me a reproachful look. “I can see with my own two eyes that she’s losing weight. She shouldn’t have left Anderson when she did. In retrospect, I can see she was being self-destructive, and I probably served as an enabler.”
I’d been so furious at Emma and the things she’d done that I’d never put a moment’s thought into what her life might be like now. She was jealous, vindictive, and spiteful as all hell. More than once, I’d thought of her as crazy, but I’d never quite made the jump from “crazy” to “clinically insane.” Until now.
“I’m trying to help her,” Cyrus said, “but I don’t think she’s too interested in being helped. I made it very, very clear to her what the consequences of disobeying me would be, but I’m not sure she doesn’t have a death wish. I’ll try to keep an eye on her, but watch your back, just in case.”
My stomach felt sour. I’d be the first to admit I’d disliked Emma from the moment she’d recovered from the catatonic state she’d been in when we first dragged her from the pond. She’d started out being merely annoying with her self-centeredness and bitchy comments, then graduated to being downright mean, consumed by unfounded jealousy and her understandable desire for revenge. She’d stopped having any redeeming features in my mind when she’d threatened Steph. And yet . . .
And yet, I had saved her life. Saved her from an eternity of repeatedly drowning to death. Finding her and rescuing her had been the single greatest victory of my life. I didn’t want her to die after all that, didn’t want to undo the good I had done.
Of course, I also didn’t want her setting another fire.
“You’d better keep more than an eye on her, Cyrus,” I said, though I had no ammunition with which to back up my ultimatum.
“I’ll do my best.”
His assurance didn’t exactly fill me with confidence, but then nothing he said would. I picked up the incriminating screen shot. “Can I keep this?”
Cyrus nodded. “Be my guest. And if you tell Anderson and he takes the news as badly as I fear he might, let me remind you that you will always be welcome among the Olympians.”
I paused with the paper halfway to my purse as a disturbing thought hit me. “How do I know this isn’t all some kind of twisted setup so I’ll have a falling-out with Anderson?” I asked. That would certainly explain his reluctance to break the news to Anderson himself. Hell, if I was going to be paranoid, I could even imagine he’d created the screen shots just so he could give me bad news to deliver.
He laughed. “An interesting idea. My father is capable of scheming and manipulation on that level, but I’m not as complicated as he is.”
“Yeah, you’re just a plain old everyman.”
“Well, I didn’t say that. But I wouldn’t make trouble for you with Anderson unless I was sure it would make you join the Olympians. I’m not much of a gambler. Give me the sure thing any day.”
Is it weird that Cyrus admitting his own potential for dishone
sty made me more inclined to believe him?
What tipped the scales in the end was my absolute conviction that Cyrus wasn’t an idiot. He knew that if Anderson kicked me out, I’d make a run for it rather than join the Olympians.
“I’m never going to become an Olympian,” I told him, just to hammer home the point.
There was a glint in his eye when he smiled at me, and I wondered if making myself into a challenge to be conquered had been a tactical error. “Never is a long time, Nikki. A long, long time.”
FOURTEEN
I wasn’t in any hurry to deliver Cyrus’s news to Anderson, so I decided to go for a run as soon as I got back to the mansion. As luck would have it, Maggie had the same idea, so I had company. I wasn’t exactly feeling sociable, but running with Maggie isn’t much of a social occasion for me anyway. She’s five eleven to my five two, and she can cover a daunting amount of ground in a single stride. I have to run like my life depends on it to keep up, and I don’t usually last all that long or have the breath to do a lot of talking.
On a day like today, running like my life depended on it was just what I needed. The effort of keeping up the aggressive pace left no room in my mind for inconvenient thoughts and worries. For just a little while, I left my problems behind me and didn’t think about anything at all. My muscles burned and protested, my chest heaved with effort, I was sweating buckets despite the chilly temperature, and I adored every painful, oblivious moment of it. I pushed well past my usual limits and didn’t even notice I was doing it.
By the time we started our cool-down walk, my legs were shaking with fatigue, and I was really glad I wasn’t just an ordinary human being anymore or I’d never have been able to get out of bed the next day. Much of my hair had slipped free of the ponytail I’d tied it in, damp tendrils clinging to my face and neck. Maggie was panting delicately, and her face was glowing a bit with the exertion and a touch of sweat, but her curly auburn hair was pristine in its French braid. She looked like she was just about to start a run, while I looked more like someone staggering over the finish line of a marathon. She gave me almost as much of an inferiority complex as Steph did, but she was a good friend anyway.
“So, are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” Maggie prompted when I was no longer breathing so hard I couldn’t answer.
“Wrong?” I asked, giving her innocent wide eyes. “What makes you think something’s wrong?”
“You don’t love running enough to push yourself that hard. Not unless you’re trying to run away from something that’s on your mind.”
I grimaced, realizing she was right. There were times when I enjoyed running, but mostly I did it because it was good for me, not because I loved it. And usually I’d quit long before I’d worked myself into such a lather.
I was sick to death of lying and trying to hide my feelings. Or maybe I was just too exhausted, both mentally and physically, to hold it all inside. Instead of pretending nothing was wrong, I told Maggie about my disturbing conversation with Cyrus. My lips were chapped with the cold, but that didn’t stop me from chewing on them, making them worse.
“What do you think I should do?” I asked. “Should I tell Anderson?”
I realized I knew her answer before she even spoke. Unlike me, Maggie’s first instinct is always to follow the rules. Hiding the truth from Anderson might not be technically breaking any rules, but I suspected it would feel that way to her.
“Of course you should tell him,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “He has a right to know. And he would want to know.”
“But—”
“Besides,” she interrupted, “he’s likely to find out eventually, and he’ll be pissed off that you didn’t tell him.”
She had a point. I kicked out at a pinecone in frustration, sending it straight into a tree so that it almost ricocheted back at us.
“I just don’t get it,” I said, restraining the urge to give the pinecone another kick. “Where is Emma getting all this crazy shit from? What have I ever done to give her the slightest hint that I might be after Anderson?”
I’d meant them as rhetorical questions, and wasn’t expecting Maggie to answer. And yet there was a kind of waiting quality to her silence. Something that told me she had something to say but was thinking her words over carefully. I came to a stop, shivering in the cold now that I was finally cooling down.
“What is it? What are you thinking?”
Maggie gave me an almost apologetic smile. “I don’t think it has anything to do with you or what you’ve done. I think it’s more about Anderson.”
I frowned in confusion. “Anderson’s never done anything that would give her reason to be jealous, either. Not if she were sane, that is.”
Maggie shrugged and turned as if to start heading back toward the house, but I grabbed her arm to stop her. Obviously, she had more to say, even if she was reluctant to say it.
“Come on, Maggie. Help me out here. Is there something going on I don’t know about?”
She looked distinctly uncomfortable, but like a true friend, she answered me anyway. “I’ve known Anderson a long time. I even knew him back when he and Erin were together.” She gave me the apologetic smile again. “I can see the way he looks at you when you’re not looking, Nikki. It’s just like how he used to look at Emma when his relationship with Erin was going south. Emma’s a crazy bitch, but she’s not making it all up.”
I opened and closed my mouth a few times, but I couldn’t come up with anything to say. Never once had I picked up that kind of a vibe from Anderson, but now I had to wonder . . . was it because there’d been nothing to pick up, or had I been completely blind to the signals?
I shook my head. “You’re wrong,” I said. “You have to be. I can be clueless sometimes, but not that clueless.” My voice went up at the end, making my words sound more like a question than a statement of fact.
“Maybe,” Maggie said with an unconvincing shrug. “But I bet you anything that Emma’s seen the same thing I have, and that’s what set her off.”
“Guess that means you’re both nuts,” I grumbled. So much for the peaceful oblivion I’d been looking for when I decided to go running.
I was in even less of a mood to deliver bad news to Anderson now than I had been before. How could I look him in the eye after what Maggie had just said? I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from overanalyzing every nuance of his behavior, looking for any hint that Maggie was right. If Anderson had the hots for me, I didn’t want to know it. I had more than enough complications in my life as it was.
I took a long, hot shower, and by the time I got out, I’d convinced myself I had to tell Anderson that Emma was behind the fires, no matter how much I didn’t want to. It could turn out to be dangerous for him to underestimate her level of malice, and the sooner he accepted what she had turned into, the safer we would all be.
Dread making my stomach feel twisted and cold, I descended the stairs to the second floor and forced myself toward Anderson’s study. The door was open, but when I stepped inside, I found the room empty.
I could have gone looking for him, or I could have tried again later. Instead, I decided to take the coward’s way out. Maybe the “right” thing to do would have been to wait until I had a chance to sit down with Anderson and deliver the news in person, but I’d had more than enough confrontation for one day, and I just couldn’t face more.
Hoping Anderson wouldn’t come back and catch me in the act, I rummaged through his desk for a pen. Then I took the screen shot that Cyrus had given me and scrawled a brief note on it. I saw Cyrus today, and he gave me this. He says he got it off of Emma’s computer. Remember not to shoot the messenger. I left the paper on the seat of his chair, and then hustled out of there, glad to have escaped without having to face him.
FIFTEEN
Thursday and Friday passed without me once catching a glimpse of Anderson in the house. I kept expecting him to show up on my doorstep, or call me and demand I come to
his study, but he didn’t. I might have thought he’d gone off somewhere for a vacation, except when I casually asked Maggie at lunch one day if she’d seen him lately, she told me he was home. I wondered if he had just chosen to ignore the message I’d left him, or whether he was pissed at me for being the bearer of bad tidings and was simply avoiding me.
Another storm was due to roll into town sometime Saturday morning, with a slight chance of snowfall. As usual, it was still dark out when I woke up in the morning, but I could almost feel the threat of the approaching storm. I needed to make a grocery run, and it looked like I’d better do it soon if I didn’t want to risk having to drive in the snow. The only grocery store I knew of that was open at six in the morning was a good twenty minutes away, but it would be worth it if the snow came.
It started raining as soon as I pulled into the grocery store’s parking lot, but it was nothing more than a chill drizzle. No snow yet, but the temperature had dropped ominously. Predictably, the parking lot was almost deserted at this time in the morning, and I hoped that meant the hoarders hadn’t hit the shelves yet and bought out all the milk, bread, and eggs as sometimes happens before a snowfall.
It was raining a little harder when I exited the store, and if I hadn’t had two paper grocery bags in my arms, I would have put up my umbrella. Instead, I merely hurried a little more, ducking my head to keep the droplets out of my eyes.
The parking lot was still mostly deserted, and though it was somewhere around dawn, the clouds were heavy enough to keep the rising sun from showing through yet. I noticed that even with about a hundred open spaces available throughout the parking lot, some jackass had parked his car so close to mine I’d have to perform contortions to get into the driver’s seat.
