Odin (Billionaire Titans Book 2)

by Alison Ryan

  I wondered if maybe the “feelings” were tricks my mind was playing on me.

  One of my sixth grade teachers, Mr. Geier, had lost his right hand in a childhood accident. I’ll confess that it freaked me out at first, his stump, but the more I got to know him the more I forgot about it. He was just Mr. Geier, and he only had one hand. No big deal. He talked about it sometimes, telling us the biggest challenge besides learning to write and throw left-handed, was figuring out how to tie his shoes. No YouTube tutorials in those days.

  Anyway, sometimes during class I’d catch Mr. Geier wincing and rubbing the end of his arm. One day he caught me staring, and he explained it to the class. He was experiencing something called “phantom pain.” If he’d slide his drawer shut and have his arm atop the desk, somewhere his hand would have been pinched or crushed by the closing drawer, his brain would be tricked into experiencing pain as if he still had his hand.

  He told us that it was much worse and more frequent when he was younger, but that it still happened from time to time.

  Was I experiencing some version of phantom pain?

  As often as I tried to will myself to move, which was constant, I also tried to force myself to feel something physical. Anything. Even pain would be preferable to nothing. A few times I thought I might be able to trick myself into an erection; either through mental gymnastics or when I knew Clara was giving me a sponge bath and I struggled mightily to experience her cleaning me down there.

  Nothing.

  Which was why I was so shocked when it happened. As Clara finished telling me about her husband and his heroics, I felt a tear roll down my face. It wasn’t my imagination. It was happening. If I had any doubt, her reaction quelled it.

  “Oh my God!” she exclaimed, followed by her imploring me, just inches from my face if my newfound bat-like sonar was anywhere near accurate, “Odin? Odin, can you hear me?”

  “Of course I can!” I wanted to scream. But my brain and body were still not on speaking terms.

  So I lay there, pounding my mental fists and gnashing the teeth inside my brain.

  Atlas and Piper rushed into the room with Clara.

  “Look!” Clara exclaimed.

  “I’ll be damned,” Atlas remarked.

  “This is good, right?” Piper asked.

  “It can’t be a bad thing, I don’t think, but honestly I don’t know what it really means,” Clara replied. “We were… sorry, I was talking to Odin, I talk to him all the time, I think of it as a conversation, even though he just listens…”

  “I clearly picked the wrong Titan brother,” Piper interrupted, laughing along with Clara while Atlas grunted.

  “I was telling him about my husband, how he died in the shooting at Desert Springs. It got pretty somber, I guess, and the next thing I knew I looked at Odin and saw this tear.” Clara recalled.

  “Shit, aren’t we supposed to be trying to uplift him? Give him hope?” Atlas countered, his voice filled with frustration.

  “I’m… I’m sorry, Atlas, I just started talking and that’s where I wound up. I never meant to…”

  Suddenly a new voice entered the room.

  “Say no more, sister. Hope just walked in the door. Meathead, go out and get my things.”

  If I could cry, surely I could smile. Raven Conway always had that effect on me. Despite the fact that no smile was forthcoming, I was laughing heartily inside. Nobody bossed my brother like Raven. I only wish I could have seen the looks on Clara and Piper’s faces.

  13

  Raven

  I’d been in Belfast when Atlas called, mixing IRA business with redheaded, freckle-faced, green-eyed pleasure.

  Reykjavik was next on my itinerary, a meeting with a professional colleague named Nolan Weston. The intelligence community was swirling with rumors that the reports that a man I’d done freelance work for, Richard Hunt, had died were apparently greatly exaggerated. Nolan felt it best to meet in person, and it had been too long since I’d taken a dip in the wonderful Blue Lagoon, so I was more than looking forward to visiting Iceland.

  The shooting on the Strip had been kept so tight-lipped that even I hadn’t heard about it. Odin’s going incommunicado just meant he was busy, I assumed, not comatose.

  A friend at UCLA got me access to the research wing of the medical center after hours, saving me from adding a potential B&E charge to the outright theft of the device. Copying the research was something I could have accomplished from my hotel room at the Beverly Hills Wilshire, but being there in person allowed me to sift through handwritten notes that hadn’t yet been entered into the database.

  The device I borrowed from UCLA was handheld and emitted ultrasound waves with pinpoint accuracy at a specialized frequency, intended to jumpstart electrical activity in damaged neural pathways.

  I probably could have bypassed security at the Titan safe house and surprised Atlas by sitting in the living room when he walked through, and that’s the route I would have preferred to take under different circumstances. Instead, I touched base with Nathaniel first and he opened the gate and let me in the boring way.

  He welcomed me and had one of his guys move my car a few blocks away, where it would be picked up later and taken to a secure location for the duration of my stay.

  When I strolled into Odin’s room, I found Atlas scolding one of two women in the room. I assumed she was the doctor, Clara O’Grady, since the other woman was heavy with child and had to be Piper.

  I stepped between Atlas and a wide-eyed Clara. “Say no more, sister. Hope just walked in the door. Meathead, go out and get my things.”

  Atlas and I shared a love-hate relationship, and for some reason he always seemed uneasy around me, scared almost. I used that to my advantage, and loved nothing more than reversing his tried and true intimidation tactics.

  He left the room in a huff and I introduced myself to Piper and Clara before walking over and getting my first good look at Odin.

  “He looks so peaceful. Like he’s just sleeping,” I said.

  “We’ve had a bit of a breakthrough,” Clara explained. “He just cried. A single tear, but still. It let us know there’s something going on inside.”

  “Were you able to get the thing from L.A.?” Piper asked.

  “Indeed,” I replied. I slipped the backpack from my shoulders and handed it to the doctor. “Everything is in here. The device, a thumb drive with all the research, and a few notebooks.”

  Clara accepted with a nod, unzipping it and pulling out the ultrasound machine, flipping it over in her hands to examine and familiarize herself with it.

  “What’s it supposed to do, exactly?” Piper queried as Clara began flipping through the notes I’d provided.

  “Think of it like a translator. Odin’s body and brain are speaking different languages right now. This device, hopefully, will bridge the gap. Help them communicate effectively once again. It’s been officially tested exactly once on a person. And it worked. But his coma wasn’t due to the type of severe trauma that caused Odin’s. And there’s a chance he was going to wake up anyway, that the machine didn’t do a thing to help.” I gave the layperson’s explanation. “But in a best case scenario, it’ll be a dozen roses given from his brain to his body and the two will start talking once again.”

  The doctor had opened her laptop and started pulling data from the drive I’d brought with me. “This holds real promise,” she said. “It’s so simple an idea, but has such potential. If nobody else has bothered to say it, thank you, Raven.”

  I plopped down in a chair. “Not a problem. The Titans call, I help in any way I can. I owe Odin and his father pretty much everything I have. I’m just repaying a debt. No need to thank me.”

  After my initial dinner with Odin, way back in high school, things started happening quickly for me. Good things. Fantastic things, actually.

  Odin mentioned me to his father, who took the two of us out to dinner on his next visit to the city.

  We ate sushi, a first for
me, at a place called Nobu. I had a tough time getting past what I was eating at first, but Emerson encouraged me to try as many things on the menu as I wanted to, and everything he recommended was delicious. I think Odin was a little jealous that his father and I hit it off so well.

  A week after that dinner, Emerson contacted me with the news that he knew a family that would like to meet me. I’d been “in the system” long enough to know that teenagers don’t get adopted. Especially when they look like I do. In the old days, predators preyed upon girls like me, offering some perverted form of stability in exchange for getting their pedophile rocks off. That’s been mostly cleaned up, but I never expected to find the elusive “forever family” once I reached high school.

  I met with Carl and Joanna Graham for lunch on a Saturday afternoon. Carl was a retired Navy Captain and Joanna taught fourth grade. The Grahams lived in Connecticut, at the other end of the state from New York and from Odin’s school. They’d lost two daughters to congenital heart defects, which worried me since I knew from past experience that joining a family with lost loved ones means you just wind up chasing ghosts. Or being chased by them. They were also older than typical adoptive parents, but Emerson said he could iron out any details if things worked out.

  I expected lunch to last an hour or so. At just after 9:00 PM, we set our dessert forks down after dinner. We’d spent most of the day together, and what began as something of an audition for both the Grahams and for me became a rousing “You got the part!”

  A month later, I moved into white picket fence, suburban America. I graduated from the small, private K-12 school where Joanna taught, and in the Fall I matriculated to MIT on full scholarship. The Grahams took care of everything the scholarship didn’t and they became mom and dad in every sense of the word. Emerson monitored my progress in school, and when I finished my double major in three years, he was waiting with a job. The Firm came calling, as did the FBI, CIA, DoD and others, but I owed a debt and I treasure loyalty. I worked directly under Emerson at first, and I directly found myself in boardrooms filled with suits who wondered “What is that black girl with the braids who looks like she belongs in high school doing here?”

  Little did they know, but if they made it into that room, what I was doing there was confirming painstaking research I’d done on them, their companies, their finances, and their families. Nothing was beyond my reach in this digital age.

  A bidding war between Emerson Titan and Richard Hunt ensued, and I became something of a freelancer, digging up secrets, building impenetrable firewalls, and committing various degrees of corporate espionage to keep my clients happy. And massively profitable.

  Odin had always served as a safety net for me, a comfortable slice of “home” when I couldn’t make it back to the Grahams in Connecticut. They’d let me upgrade their vehicles and send them on some pretty spectacular vacations, but they were happy in their relatively modest home and quiet neighborhood. I visited when I could, and I knew they were proud of me, but I could never share much of what went on in my career with them. Or with much of anybody who wasn’t named Titan. It didn’t pay to get close to people you may have to destroy or help disappear.

  It felt good to be back among Titans, despite Odin’s condition.

  “Piper, how much longer?” I asked, anxious to meet a baby Titan. My time in foster care and state homes had brought me in contact with many babies and small children over the years, and although I didn’t think my temperament or career choice made me a good candidate for motherhood, I loved the role of surrogate big sister. I couldn’t wait to hold Atlas and Piper’s little bundle.

  Piper ran her hands over her pregnant belly, pausing in one spot for a moment. “Just over two weeks. Do you want to feel her kick?” she asked.

  “Her?” I asked. “Nobody bothered to tell me that. Congratulations! Have you decided to name her ‘Raven’ yet?”

  “Not exactly,” Piper replied. “We’re still debating the merits of a few options.”

  “That’s nice, humor Atlas a while longer, let him feel like he has a say. It’ll be good for his ego; not that it needs a boost.” The three of us shared a laugh.

  “Raven, there’s something on this drive that I think you need to decrypt. Everything I’d expect to be here is present, but there’s another file, a .wav file that might be important. I don’t want to miss anything,” Clara handed me her laptop and I began scrolling through the files.

  “That’s really strange. It should open when I click on it, but nothing happens. Everything else on the drive opens right up. Let me have the drive and I’ll check it on my computer. I’m running some military-grade anti-encryption software on it and there shouldn’t be anything I can’t access.”

  Atlas returned then, and he showed me to my room, where I could get to work on the drive. My weakness for roulette offset my baccarat profits, but I had my choice of suites all over Las Vegas. This trip being business, however, and with my connections to the Atlas family presumably putting me in some degree of danger, Atlas didn’t have to strong-arm me much to convince me to stay in the house during my visit.

  I set about opening the mystery file on the thumb drive, confused since I hadn’t noticed it when I first accessed the computers at UCLA and since the drive was new and couldn’t have been tampered with. Either I missed it (unlikely), or something triggered it into opening once the doctor began reviewing the data.

  Yet there it was, nameless, mocking me while I extracted everything from the drive.

  I played with it a while, wondering if it wasn’t some sort of glitch, when Atlas knocked on my door.

  “Clara’s going to try the ultrasound on Odin. Thought you might want to be present.”

  “You thought right, Atlas. Let’s go see.” I bounced up off my bed and we headed downstairs.

  14

  Odin

  It was so good to hear Raven’s voice and sass. And good to know that she might have brought something with her to end my nightmare.

  “I studied everything I could about this device online. Ideally, in a hospital setting, the patient would be placed in a full-sized ultrasound machine to completely map his brain before attempting to make corrections with this gizmo. But getting one of those in here, or leaving to take Odin to one of them, seems beyond any risks you want to take, correct?” Clara asked whomever was in the room with us.

  Atlas answered in the affirmative. “At this juncture, we don’t move him for any reason short of imminent death. I tried to reach one of my other brothers, Achilles, yesterday afternoon, but he’s not answering anything; telephone or email. His personal bodyguard is likewise incommunicado. My father hadn’t heard from Achilles in nearly a week. He was in Toronto last week and the jet he was using is still at the airport there. It’s safe to assume he’s either gone dark or someone has gotten to him. Security is paramount until we make contact with him.”

  I heard a murmur of assent in the room. Achilles, my youngest brother, was an outlier in the family. His passion was music, and he ran a fledgling record label which was taking more and more of his time. There was no acrimony between Achilles and the rest of the family; he just wanted his own path. It wasn’t unlike Atlas becoming a SEAL or the rare book collecting and dealing to which I’d been devoting more and more of my time and money. Billionaire playboy bookworm, Odin Titan.

  I wondered if maybe Achilles hadn’t just met somebody and decided to hole up for a while, but not being able to reach his bodyguard was troubling.

  My third brother, Canaan, was a competitive fencer with Olympic dreams who was taking a sabbatical from Titan Industries to focus on his athletic dream. I’d competed in the London games in Modern Pentathlon, but all I returned home with was a cast on my right wrist and a regrettable tattoo of the Olympic rings that I let an Estonian high jumper talk me into after she and I had too much vodka on the penultimate evening of the games.

  I’d been second in the standings after the first three events, looking like a strong candidate
for a medal, having dominated the fencing section and finished second in the swim. Show jumping was my weakest event, but I was paired with a strong horse and I’d exceeded expectations there, leaving only the final cross country run/shooting competition. I wasn’t among the handful of best shooters in the competition, but my running would hopefully make up for any errant shooting.

  I started the run well, moving to the lead and staying there. My first and second of the four shooting stops went surprisingly well, and I seemed to be heading for an Olympic medal.

  Disaster struck during the third section of the run, when my heel was clipped by an opposing runner trying to pass me. I tumbled headlong into the infield, breaking my right wrist while attempting to stop my fall. My shooting wrist.

  In the pentathlon, each competitor has up to fifty seconds to his five targets before resuming his run. Hitting the targets quickly means getting back out on the course quickly. Having to sit there for the entire fifty seconds is dying a slow death while other competitors take insurmountable leads.

  Holding my injured wrist and waving off medical attention, I made it to the third shooting stop and tried shooting left-handed. Disaster. Right-handed was out of the question, as I couldn’t even hold the pistol.

  Frustration and rage boiled over as I watched half a dozen competitors fly out onto the track ahead of me while I could only wait for the seconds to tick by. In the end, I finished eighth, and I was roundly applauded for my courage in finishing the race.

  I never understood what was courageous about doing something I’d trained and sacrificed for four years to do. My brother, Atlas, was brave, although he’d brush off such a compliment by saying he “was just doing his job.” That’s how I felt about my Olympic experience, although the famous image of me crossing the finish line while holding my broken wrists tightly to my chest, wincing in pain, became an unforgettable symbol of the London games.