A Tangled Web

by A. Claire Everward

  At the words, her eyes closed and she pulled away, but he held on to her. He had to do this. To say this. For her.

  “You were violated when you were a young girl,” he said, “so you think I wouldn’t want to touch you? That this, us, would have been different if I had known from the start? Is that how much you trust me? That’s who you think I am, what you are to me?”

  Raging, anger flowing from him in waves, he turned and walked out, the door slamming behind him. She stumbled back, finding purchase against the wall.

  And straightened up in surprise when, no more than two minutes later, the door was flung open again, slamming into the wall, and he strode back in, holding papers in his hand. He raised them. “My copy of the contract. Where’s yours?”

  She stared. She had never seen him lose control this way, never seen him turn into raging fire.

  “Where the hell is it?” He was, just now, dangerous. And he didn’t care.

  She walked over to a drawer, opened it and took the copy out.

  He snatched it from her hand, and, putting the two copies together, tore them into pieces, letting them fall to the floor.

  “Now we can speak freely. Ever since you first set foot in this house, every single thing we’ve said or done has been bound by the strict limits of this damn thing. Well, that’s over, we’ve been through too much together for that, and we certainly care about each other too much for that. From now on we say what we want and do what we want. And let’s start with this. The only reason I’m not touching you is because you’re so terribly bruised and I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t want you to even remotely associate my touch with pain. And I want to make sure that when I do touch you, you’re not as vulnerable as you are now, so that you will know, really know, that I mean it, and how I mean it. It’s certainly not because I’m put off by what happened to you or because I think you’re damaged.”

  She shook her head and he surprised her by taking her hand again and pulling her to the full-size mirror on the other side of the room. Making her face it, he stood behind her, his hands firmly on her shoulders. “Look at yourself. Just look, damn it,” he said, and she did. She saw herself, and she saw him, the rage in his eyes, boring into hers in her image. “You were hurt by a degenerate bastard I really wish I could kill with my bare hands. But you fought back, and you made sure he doesn’t do that to anyone else, and then you fought some more and grew up into a remarkable, not to mention gorgeous and damn desirable woman. And let’s get one thing straight—I wanted you before, and I damn well want you now. The only thing that’s changed is my understanding of why you are as you are and how things need to be done for me to get you. Which I will, let’s get that straight, too. And one more thing. I understand now just how inexperienced you are. So just to make it clear. I am going to touch you again, and we are now dating.”

  His hands dropped to his sides. “Now let’s go see what the search found. Your laptop is beeping like crazy in the den and Graham is complaining the fish needs to be taken out of the oven or it’ll dry, and you know how he gets when he doesn’t get his way.”

  She nodded, still shocked.

  “I’ll see you downstairs.” He turned and strode out again, leaving the floor strewn with the torn contracts. As he reached the stairs, he breathed in deeply. There. Now she knew. He descended the stairs, hoping to God he’ll see her again.

  When she joined him in the den, after minutes that to him seemed like an eternity later, the light was back in her eyes and she looked better. Much better, in fact.

  “The results of the search don’t make sense,” he tried. “I’m not sure what it found.”

  She deliberated him for a long moment, then came to stand beside him before the wall screen. Relief passed through him like a fresh breeze. She was still here, still with him, more than ever with him.

  She saw immediately what the search results were indicating. It wasn’t that they didn’t make sense, they simply needed to be looked at from a different perspective. She took a confident step toward the screen. “Command,” she said, surprising Ian, and her laptop indicated it was now in listening mode. “View level one sub-search.”

  The figures on the screen changed. Ian looked at her. Her eyes were focused. He couldn’t see what she was seeing, but trusted her to do her thing.

  “No,” she said to herself. “View level two sub-search.”

  “No,” she said again after viewing the result. “Switch to temporal.” And she started calling out dates. At some point she backtracked, then reorganized the data, then pulled up the connections to the tangible for him, going back up several levels in the schemes of his company to simplify the image. And now he could see it.

  “Son of a . . .” he said. “How did I not catch it?”

  “He’s good, and he started it gradually, constantly testing himself on the way, making sure he won’t get caught. You can see the temporal pauses. God, he’s been implementing his plan since . . .”

  “Since that first time you and I went out, to the retirement party. He was there, that’s when he first saw us together,” he said.

  “And his jealousy of you finally drove him over the edge.”

  “The irony.” Ian shook his head.

  Tess looked at him in question.

  “I’ve decided to expand Additive Manufacturing’s operation. Substantially so. As CTO, his importance would have increased accordingly.”

  “I don’t think . . . I think what he wanted was to be you. Nothing else would have been enough.”

  “I really don’t know why I bother.” Graham came in muttering, pushing a serving cart with their dinner on it.

  “Sorry, Graham. We were having a fight,” Ian said with some amusement.

  “Yes, I know, and I understand that a good fight is conducive toward a healthy relationship. But, fish, I’m just saying.”

  “Sorry, Graham,” Tess added, stifling a laugh, and Ian put his hand lightly on her lower back, warning her not to laugh a split second before he himself did. The instinctive touch, the way it felt this time, made her look at him, made him glance at her with something new in both their eyes.

  He slid his hand around her and held her close to him.

  “Don’t blame me if the fish is dry. Really, I don’t know how I put up with you two.” Graham left the room, indignant, and so very happy to see them together.

  “Told you.” Ian was still laughing when they sat down to dinner.

  Not only did the search results tell them when Brett had started making the changes in Ian Blackwell Holdings’ numbers, creating his web of algorithmic discrepancies, they also narrowed the range of relevant data, pointing Tess, after further reorganization, to subsidiaries where the point of origin possibly was. And so midnight found them treading through these subsidiaries, the company’s non-profit ones, which it had in a number of locations worldwide. Wherever the origin was, it was in one of them.

  “Smart. And cold,” Ian said. “The way he placed the discrepancies, if anyone would have found them, they were more likely to see them in one of the profit subsidiaries, think someone was embezzling money there and launch an investigation that would have alerted him, and he would have had enough time to trigger the point of origin hidden in a non-profit no one would look at in this way.”

  “Yes,” Tess said thoughtfully, her eyes on him.

  “What’s bothering you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Sleep on it,” he said. “I’m not doing anything with any of this anyway until we have it all and we can get him.”

  “I’ll probably wake up with it at two in the morning,” she mused.

  In fact, it was half past two when she did, waking up with a start not too long after she had fallen asleep. She sat up in her bed. No, she thought as fear wrapped itself around her heart, but was immediately washed away by her anger and resolve. Damn you, I won’t let you do this, I won’t let you hurt him, was what went through her mind.

  Moments la
ter she was sitting in her robe behind Ian’s desk, searching. A little over two hours later she strode into his bedroom, turning on the lights as she did. As she approached the bed he sat up, surprised. She’d never come in here before.

  “Tess? Are you okay?”

  “You’re Ian Blackwell.” She stopped at the foot of the bed. He looked at her in question.

  “You’re Ian Blackwell, the man who built a huge multinational company and is busy running it, but still flew half the country to check out a small company named InSyn even though he could decide what to do with it from afar and get his people to do the work. You’re hands on, and guess what, he knows it. He must have studied you more closely than we thought, and longer than we thought, even if he started on what he’s doing only after you got married.”

  He was now completely awake. “What did he do?” He got out of bed and she realized fleetingly that this was the first time she’d seen her husband half-naked. He grabbed his robe and followed her to the den.

  “When he talked to me, he said something about misleading,” she explained to him on the way. “He said that people can pretend to be so much, mislead so easily if they wanted to. I thought he was talking only about me, about what he intended his proof to show. But then he also told me that he was going to hurt you, but not in the way I think. That’s what got me thinking. See, he did know that you look at everything, and that there was therefore a chance you’d see something. He was just worried that you’d see it too soon. And he was certainly worried that you have once he found out who you married. So he lined up everything, everything, to be traced back to you, implicating you.” All the screens in the den were on, and she directed him to the ones on his desk, showing him what she’d found. He sat down and listened to her.

  “His point of origin is, in fact, in one of the non-profits, I found it. But remember I told you that it was disconnected from the web of webs that will eventually encompass the entire company and I didn’t know why? It’s because he never intended for it to directly activate that web. Once his web was advanced enough, he disconnected the point of origin from it. He then created another point of origin in Ian Blackwell Holdings, the parent company. And it’s one that is built as if you created it, and as if only you can trigger it. He’s not going to activate the web spanning your company. He’s going to trigger his point of origin, but instead of it activating the web, it will trigger your point of origin, and it will be your point of origin that will activate the web, crashing the entire company. It will look like you did it. It will mislead everyone to think you’re to blame.” She was angry. “And that’s another reason he used a non-profit. The data densities there will enable him to destroy all tracks from the web and from your point of origin to it—and to his—more quickly and more efficiently. It will be as if that specific subsidiary was never part of the web, and as if his point of origin never existed.”

  He was quiet, his eyes on her.

  “No,” she said.

  “No what?”

  “You’re considering what to do with him. But it’s too early. I still need to deal with his main point of origin, which is the only place from where, if I can interfere with it, I can unravel his plan in a way that will destroy him and protect you.” Her tone was thoughtful, and he realized she probably had no idea what she’d said. That she was protecting him.

  “What do you need?” he asked.

  “That location where the origin is, is also the most protected one. That’s why, while I know where it is, I can’t touch it remotely. I need to be there, to dig directly all the way down to it in a way that he won’t know I’m there. He would never expect anyone to do that.”

  He nodded, understanding. “Where is it?”

  “Sydney. The point of origin is in IBH Ivory.”

  He stood up. “Get dressed.”

  Chapter Twenty

  He watched her. She was deep in thought, her eyes on the clouds outside, the soft white blanket they were flying through light enough for the flight to be smooth.

  “Coming to live with me, in my house, it must have been so much more difficult that I'd initially thought.”

  Her eyes remained on the hushed sky outside as she laughed softly. “When I understood it was you, I was . . . alarmed, to say the least. The powerful and ruthless Blackwell. The womanizer Blackwell, which is what your own contract and your attorney clearly implied.”

  “I'm not a womanizer.”

  At that, she turned her eyes to him, amusement clear in them.

  “Well, yes. I guess I was.”

  Her brow furrowed slightly at the past tense, but he had no intention of correcting himself. Instead he held her gaze. “You stayed.”

  She contemplated him. “I don't just back out of my promises because of fear.”

  “No, you wouldn't.” A smile passed his lips.

  “And . . .”

  “And?” He wanted to know.

  “Remember the day you first brought me to the house?”

  “Of course.”

  “When you showed me my room, you made sure I knew no one would come into it except for Lina. You specifically said that you will not come into my bedroom, that I was safe from you.” She shrugged. “No one has ever done that before, taken such care to try to make me feel safe.”

  He remembered. “I'm glad you stayed.”

  She turned back to the window. “So do I.”

  She woke up to find herself covered with a blanket, her seat comfortably reclined. She straightened up, confused. “When did this happen?”

  “About an hour ago,” Ian, in the seat opposite hers, said. “You couldn’t have gotten much sleep last night.”

  “Neither did you,” she remarked.

  “I slept more than you did. Why don’t you go back to sleep? There’s a comfortable bedroom here.” The last time—the only time—she’d been in this jet was on the day they were married, and neither of them had wanted her in it. They had spent that entire flight sitting in the same places they were sitting in this time. How different things were between them now, Ian mused.

  “A bedroom. Right, very funny.” Tess laughed and shook her head. “I’m okay. I’d love to freshen up, though.”

  Ian smiled and pointed to the back of the jet. “All the way back there. I’ll order us some coffee, something to eat maybe?”

  Tess nodded and got up. She peeked curiously through the next divider, and smiled at the sight of Graham, who had fallen asleep on a divan that stood along the sidewall on the right, apparently while watching a movie on the big screen television on the other side of the aisle. The wireless headphones were still on his head.

  She walked on through the next divider and then stopped, her jaw dropping. When she continued to the bathroom in the back, she did so slowly, looking around her in astonishment.

  The astonishment was still on her face when she returned to her seat. “You have a bedroom. With a double bed and shelves and books and . . . I think that was a closet. Was it? And there’s a real bathroom back there. Shower and everything.”

  Ian smiled.

  “This is . . . it’s like a house. An apartment. I don’t know. This thing is big.”

  He nodded. “There are also crew quarters up front, and a fully equipped kitchen. That was the whole idea, a jet for longer flights—we’re flying from San Francisco to Sydney without needing to refuel on the way. And it allows me to rest if I haven’t had time to sleep, or to fly wherever I need to and back without staying there overnight.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.” The first time she had been on this jet, she hadn’t noticed anything about it. But this time she saw it all. The dark wood of the tables and cabinets, the same as in his Blackwell Tower office. The warm vanilla seats that fit in perfectly with the light creamy sidewall and darker carpet. The bathroom she had just been to, the bedroom. That media corner Graham was still deeply asleep in. All that on a jet. It was incredible.

  Ian watched her, enjoying her awe. Enjoying the fact
that after all she’d seen in her time so far with him, he could still surprise her. “It’s a Bombardier jet. I’ve worked with them through my company for years, and I finally decided to go with this new model of theirs for my personal use, too. It was actually delivered to me just a month, I think, before you and I met.”

  “Seriously, is there anything you don’t have?”

  His answer was a smile, and something in his gaze that made her heart beat pleasantly faster.

  She lowered her eyes, unable to meet his. Found herself wondering at this, at traveling with him, at flying with him halfway across the world—

  “Wait,” she said, the realization dawning on her. “What if someone at IBH Ivory talks to your San Francisco office and Brett finds out I’m with you?” They had made the decision and had left so quickly that she hadn’t had a chance to think it through.

  “It’s okay,” Ian said. “Only Becca knows where we are, and I made sure she doesn’t note it anywhere on her computer this time. And I’d like to see someone try to get that information directly from her. She knows to alert Robert if Brett shows up, and I told Brett I would be involving Robert in my plans for you since, as he knows, Robert is also my personal attorney. As for Ivory, they think I’m dropping by for a visit since I’ll be in Australia with my wife, on our way to the honeymoon we never had, and they understand my need for privacy.”

  “Aren’t you at all concerned about the media?”

  “You’d be surprised how many times I’m somewhere and no one knows. Ira makes the necessary arrangements for me wherever I go. In Sydney, too, the driver who will be driving us around is one of his men, and he’s made sure we have everything we need to limit our visibility there.”

  She shook her head. “Still, maybe this is too much of a risk, maybe I should go somewhere else, see if I can guide you how to do what’s needed, the direct access part of it at least.” She tried to think how else she could do this without exposing him. “If he realizes what we’re doing and that I’m still with you, he can hurt you before I can do anything.”

  “I want you with me,” he said softly. “I need you with me.”