Primal Bargains

by Raleigh Davis

  “He’s definitely not nice.” That’s one thing I’m certain of. “But you can be good and care about others without being nice.”

  Mom snorts. “We thought Nick was nice and decent and too good to be true at first too. You’re not dating him, are you?”

  Oh boy. “I thought hearing this would be good news? You don’t have to worry anymore.”

  Mom sighs. “We haven’t cleared the debt—it’s only been transferred. And I’m worried you’re the price we’ll have to pay now. At least more than you already were.”

  I slump into one of the chairs in the main room. It’s sleek and modern but uncomfortable, with zero give. I wonder if I’m the first person to ever sit on it. “Mom, please trust me. I can’t explain all of it, not yet, but this guy… he’s the real deal.”

  I need her to believe it, because I believe it myself. Gideon is isolated, drawn inward, but when his humanity flashes out…

  “Oh, honey,” Mom says. “If you’re sure, then… then I have to believe.” She sighs. “There’s all this paperwork, and I’m so lost.”

  “I bet if I ask Gideon, he’ll recommend a lawyer we can consult. For free.”

  “Unfortunately, we’re going to need one.”

  “Mom.” I grip the phone tighter. “I love you. And this is a good thing.”

  “I love you too, sweetie. I’m trying to look on the bright side.”

  That’s pretty good for Mom. We chat a little longer about nothing in particular, but already she sounds less tired. More vibrant.

  Afterward, I get back to work. I might be sleeping with the boss, but I still have a job to finish. Although I leave behind my half-finished camera setup with a quickness when said boss texts me to come into his office.

  When I walk in, he’s behind his desk, wearing a too-satisfied smile.

  “You rang?” I ask dryly. His summons was pretty polite for him, but it was still a summons. Not that I’m complaining about coming to see him in the middle of the day. Quite the opposite.

  My heart is fluttering, my skin is tingling, and my nipples are already tight. All just from the sight of him.

  “Good, you came.” He flattens his palms on his desk. “I have an idea. And I want you to see.”

  This sounds intriguing. I take a chair and cross my legs. The squeeze of my thighs and him so close make my core pulse. I clear my throat, tell my body to behave. “Really? What is it?”

  He grins, looking like a wickedly naughty boy. No, actually a wicked man. There’s too much raw sex coming off him to be boyish. “What’s the name of your sister’s ex-husband?”

  “Um, Nick Salantino.” I lick my lips. “Why?”

  “That’s what I thought it was.” He picks up his phone, taps the screen. From the speaker, a ring sounds. “Turns out it’s ridiculously easy to find him on the internet.”

  His smile goes sharklike, hungry and sharp. Like he smells blood.

  Oh no. If Nick gets pissed—and he will—he’ll go after my sister again. He’s always found a way to hurt her when he’s angry. And he’s still doing it.

  “Please don’t do this,” I say. “He’ll get mad, and then he’ll do something awful again. You don’t know what he’s like.”

  “I know exactly what he’s like,” Gideon says coldly. “He’s a bully who takes his inadequacies out on your sister, your family, and you. And I’m going to show him there’s an even bigger dog in the yard now.”

  My eyes are wide. Gideon is definitely way more powerful than Nick. “Why would you do that?” My voice is small.

  The phone is still ringing.

  “Because he’s threatening you,” Gideon says simply. “And I can’t allow that to happen. I protect my own.”

  His own could mean employee… or it could mean a lot more. I swallow hard.

  “Hello?” Nick’s confused and little aggro. Like we’re interrupting something important.

  “Hey.” Gideon’s greeting is a verbal back pat. “It’s Gideon, Gideon Wolfe. Wolfe Medical Industries. Is this Nick?”

  “Yes.” Nick’s tone is filled with awe and greed. “This is Nick. CEO of Salantino Enterprises.” His voice shifts like he’s trying to sound as though he and Gideon are equals. But he’s already given himself away.

  “I’m so glad I caught you.” There’s a dangerous purr in Gideon’s tone I think only I can hear. “I wanted to discuss something with you.”

  I can’t see Nick, but I can definitely imagine what he’s doing right now. He’s sitting up straighter, a gleam in his eyes and sweat beading on his brow. He wants whatever Gideon’s about to offer him. He wants it so badly he’ll do anything. Nick was always more ambitious than clever or hardworking. If it promised to be easy, he jumped.

  He doesn’t even stop to wonder why Gideon Freaking Wolfe would want to do business with him. All he can see is dollar signs.

  “Great.” Nick’s tone is thick with flop sweat. He wants to play it cool, but he’s desperate too. “That’s great. So we’re doing—”

  “I’m not interested in your company.” Gideon’s tone is as smooth and cold as silk left in snow. “I’m not calling about that.”

  Nick’s swallow is audible. “Um, then what is this about?”

  “Your ex-wife.”

  My entire body tenses, waiting for Nick’s explosion. He’s going to say something awful now. Or worse, take it out on Elena when he calls her later. That’s always been his MO.

  “Okay,” Nick says slowly. He’s being surprisingly reserved here, but he probably doesn’t want to lose it in front of Gideon.

  “You’re never to contact her again. Not about anything. No more lawsuits, no more abuse, none of it. Forget she even exists.”

  “What?” Nick is utterly baffled. “Are you fucking her?”

  Ah, there’s the old snarl, the nasty anger. When Gideon growls, it’s cute. When Nick growls, it’s stomach turning.

  “You really lack imagination, don’t you?” Gideon steeples his fingers. “Do you understand what I’m requiring of you?”

  “You’ve got some fucking nerve. That bitch isn’t going to get rid of me that easy.”

  I flinch at what he called my sister. I know he’s said worse, right to her face, but it’s still gross. Sometimes I wish he’d get hit by a semi just so we’d never have to deal with him again. Which is a terrible thing to wish on someone.

  “Yes, she is,” Gideon says, deadly calm. “Because I say so. It doesn’t matter why I’m doing this. You only need to know that I am. You won’t contact her or any member of her family ever again. If you do, I’ll know about it. And I’ll bury you, because I’m Gideon fucking Wolfe. I’ll make you disappear, and no one will miss you.”

  The silence on the other end of the line is deafening. But I can still hear my heart in my ears, loud, insistent. Even hopeful.

  Turns out I might not need a semi to deal with Nick. I might just need Gideon fucking Wolfe.

  “I…” Nick’s mouth hangs open on that pause, so open I can hear the wind whistling past it over the line. “Okay.”

  I clap my hand over my mouth. He sounds so small and wormy, scared shitless. Which is how he should always sound, the bastard.

  “Good. I’m glad that’s settled.” Gideon spins around in his chair as if he’s just made a fantastic business deal instead of threatening someone’s life. When he comes back to face me, he winks. “Tess will let me know if you’ve fucked up.” Steel creeps into his tone, like metal frost, and I shiver even though it’s not directed at me.

  “Understand?” he finishes.

  “Perfectly,” Nick croaks.

  “Great. Talk to you later.” Gideon chuckles evilly. “Actually, you’d better fucking hope we don’t. Bye.”

  I stare at him for a long moment. He stares back, cool as you please.

  “I can’t believe you just did that.” The mortgage was one thing. This— Holy shit, he didn’t. I lift my finger, stab it at him. “You cannot call him. Not him. I won’t let you. He can’t…”
I’m shaking now. “He’s forgotten about me. Don’t let him remember.”

  Immediately Gideon is next to me, folding me up in his arms. “Jesus, honey. I won’t do anything, just… just don’t do this. Don’t cry.” He sounds helpless, which snaps me out of it. Gideon never sounds helpless.

  “I won’t.” I rub furiously at my eyes. “You didn’t find his name, did you? The guy in the Army?”

  Gideon watches me for a long moment. “No,” he says finally. “I haven’t found him yet.”

  “But you were looking for him.”

  He glances away. “He can’t get away with that. Any more than that asshole who married your sister can. I dealt with him, didn’t I?”

  He did, and I doubt Nick will screw with my sister or my family again. But my harasser is a different matter. I haven’t heard from him or even heard about him since I left the Army. He’s not an active threat. And I don’t want to remind him I exist.

  It’s in the past. I’ve moved on, made a good life here, built a company with my friend. I don’t need to bring him back into it or get revenge on him. He’s gone, and I want to leave him that way.

  “This is different,” I say. “He hasn’t done anything to me in years. Don’t remind him I exist.”

  Gideon’s mouth flattens. “He wouldn’t dare. Not once I was done with him. Don’t you want him punished?”

  “Honestly, I don’t. What I really want is for him to never have done it in the first place. I want Victoria to have back the career she always wanted. Punishing him isn’t going to change what happened.”

  “I’ll find him eventually.” Gideon is unyielding. “You know I will.”

  I blow out a breath of frustration. “You can’t just attack all my problems. I’ve got a leaky sink. Are you going to glower at that too?”

  His expression cracks, and he starts to laugh. “Maybe. But I’ve also got some wrenches. I can frown and then tighten it.”

  “Well, if you could fix it, that would be great. It drips all night and drives me crazy when I’m trying to watch TV.” I take a deep breath. “But please. Please. Please. This is very important to me. Stop. Looking. For. Him. I’ve put that behind me, and I want to keep it there.”

  I hold his gaze, trying to impress on him how intensely I mean this. The mortgage thing was great, scaring off Nick was even more great, but there has to be a limit.

  Eventually his shoulders ease and he sits back down. “Fine.” He’s being very ungracious. “I won’t contact him. But if he pops his head back up and contacts you or even speaks your name, I’m going after him.”

  “Good. Thank you. Wait— How would you know he’s speaking my name?”

  He shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it. But I promised and I mean it.”

  I reach up and cup his jaw. So hard, so dangerous-looking. But underneath, he’s got a soft heart.

  I don’t dare tell him that. He’d snarl at me and demand I call him a monster. But now that I’ve seen the softness, I can’t look away.

  Chapter 25

  I can’t tell if I’m relieved when the guys show up with their notebooks or not. I suppose I am on some level—I’ve always fought with these guys by my side before, so tackling this with them feels familiar. And good. And really, we should have put our heads together about these books a long time ago.

  I know why we didn’t, but we should have.

  But I’m also hesitant. There’s something wrong here, something I’m missing, and it definitely involves one of them. One of my friends in med school said we were getting trained to be highly competent diagnostic algorithms, and it was true. After seeing your hundredth case of disease X, you knew in your gut what it was even if all the symptoms didn’t align.

  My gut sees the patterns of our work in this. How we come together to go at and around a problem. I can’t explicitly identify what those clues are, but something deep inside me sees them anyway.

  Which means one of the people coming into this room is the villain I’m searching for.

  I’m almost certain it’s not Gage or Bishop. Which leaves Cassian and Archer. But try as hard as I can, the pattern of either of them being behind it just won’t assemble.

  That leaves Morgan and Raven, which makes no damn sense. To them the notebooks would be like Ira’s fountain pens or his antique hand-built computers—curiosities that they wouldn’t care much about.

  So why does this thief care so much about the notebook? Unless they know what secrets are in them. Which we don’t even know.

  I’ve got both Tynan’s and my notebook out on the desk. I know I said last night we shouldn’t open Tynan’s, but after thinking it over, I was wrong. Cassian’s right—he’s dead. No one will care if we look at his stuff. And if it holds clues to whatever is going on, we have to know.

  But I still waited for them to come before I opened it.

  Gage immediately goes for the carafe on my desk, pouring himself a cup of coffee. The man’s addicted, which is weird because he’s not jittery at all. In fact, he’s positively low-key. Would he just be comatose if he stopped caffeine altogether?

  Archer takes a chair by the window, looking out over the grounds. I’ve got a view of the west side of the property, and if the angle is just right, you can see the ocean way out in the distance. He puts his chin on his fist, his notebook tapping against his thigh.

  Bishop is the fidgety one. He passes his notebook from hand to hand, riffling through the pages but never actually opening it. Instead of taking a chair, he starts to pace. He looks like he’s about to defend his life before an unsympathetic judge.

  Cassian walks right up to my desk, peering at the notebooks. “This is Tynan’s?” He points to it.

  I nod. Immediately he opens it and starts flipping through it. His mouth is set in a grim line, and for some reason I imagine he’s doing an autopsy, trying not to breathe in the smell of cold formaldehyde.

  He gets to the end and pauses, releasing a harsh breath. We all watch and wait. Even Bishop has stopped pacing.

  “Nothing.” Cassian tosses it down to the desk. “The same fucking gibberish that’s in mine.”

  My attention flicks over to Archer, gauging his reaction. He’s got the same strained relief on his face that we all do though.

  I take my place behind my desk, setting Tynan’s notebook back where I had it. Ira appointed me executor of his will, and I’m going to take charge here. I was always the natural leader of the group, urging us on to new and more daring things. Like putting our AI into Ira’s car and turning it on.

  Which makes it real fucking ironic that Ira made me the executor.

  “So no one’s decoded their books?”

  Bishop starts to pace again. “I couldn’t even look at it. I put it on the shelf and tried to forget about it.”

  “I looked when I first got it.” Cassian’s flipping through his own notebook now. “But I never tried to decode it.”

  Gage simply shakes his head.

  “I tried for about two years.” Archer looks out the window as he says it. “I figured out that it’s probably an asymmetric algorithm, but that was as far as I got.”

  I groan. An asymmetric algorithm means that there are two encryption keys—one to encode and one to decode. So figuring out the encode key doesn’t do shit for getting at the decode key.

  “But it’s not a difficult computation,” Archer says. “Which means we should be able to break it with pen and paper. No supercomputer required.”

  “How do you figure that?” Cassian asks.

  “I can see some patterns. And there are formulas in there. Math is easier to crack than language.”

  “Ira never left us puzzles that were impossible to do,” Bishop reminds us. “In the end, we were always able to crack them no matter how difficult they appeared.”

  “He also never left us anything important in those puzzles,” Cassian says. “The real work was done out in the open, not hidden behind some kiddie decoder-ring bullshit. This—” He holds up the
book, his jaw tight with frustration. “This is just some fucking game. So why steal it?”

  They all look to me. “I don’t fucking know. But they went for the safe, and that’s all I have in there.”

  “So why not steal one of ours?” Gage asks. “Shit, Bishop had his sitting on the bookshelf.”

  I stab a finger into Tynan’s book. “Because this one doesn’t belong to us.”

  The atmosphere becomes oppressive, crackling with tension.

  “Has anyone considered blackmail as a motive?” Bishop asks.

  Gage flinches. “We burned those books. Trashed that equipment.”

  “Not all of it,” Cassian points out. “Not the most important piece of all.”

  “It’s a home for crabs now,” Archer insists angrily. “No one’s going to recover that car.”

  I hold up my hands for silence. “The notebook proves nothing. If we can’t read it, neither can anyone else.”

  “The thief might not know that,” Gage says. “If they suspect something, they might be looking for proof. Specifically, proof among Tynan’s things.”

  They all look to me. “He died intestate,” I explain. “There was no will, and I wasn’t the executor. As far I know, he had nothing and no one to give it to.”

  “Are we sure he had no family?” Bishop asks. “He never talked about them, but…” Bishop’s expression makes it clear that he doesn’t buy that Tynan had no one. And Bishop would know since he really does have no one. Except for us.

  “I looked. The other executor looked, the one for Tynan’s probate. There wasn’t any family we could find. His parents died when he was young. All his grandparents died before he was born. No aunts, no uncles, no siblings. Not even a third cousin to contact.”

  Archer taps his toe against the hardwood floor. “So the only person who would want this notebook would be Tynan?”

  “Or you guys,” I shoot back. “Since you’re alive and he’s not, that complicates things, doesn’t it?”

  Gage looks like he wants to punch something. I can sympathize. “It has to be blackmail. Which means we need to catch this fucker.”

  “And then do what?” Archer points out mildly. “Sail out past the Golden Gate and drop them into the Pacific?”