by Julie Kriss
I looked again at the text from my brother. If I didn’t at least call him, he’d worry. He’d definitely worry if he found out I’d been kicked out of my apartment. And if I told him I was going to stay at Dane’s Long Island house—which Aidan didn’t even know about—my brother would definitely know something was up. I couldn’t talk to him, but I couldn’t not talk to him. I was between a rock and a hard place.
Think, Ava.
The answer came to me a minute later. There was only one person I could talk to.
Before I left town, I needed to talk to my brother’s wife, Samantha Riley.
Twenty
Dane
* * *
I was in the lobby bar at the Four Seasons fifteen minutes early for my meeting with Kaito Okada. I was wearing one of the suits Ava had bought for me and all of the accessories, including the designer underwear. I didn’t really know what she meant about designer underwear making you feel different—it just felt like underwear to me. But she’d told me to wear it, so I wore it.
I ran my hand over my newly-shorn hair, which was now cut close to my scalp. It felt weird being without my messy locks, as if the top of my head was naked. It made me look different in the mirror, too. Now, instead of looking like my go-fuck-yourself programmer self, I looked like some rich fuck who was a partner in a big venture capital company. Which, damn it, I was. I just never felt like playing the part of the rich fuck. I had no choice tonight.
As I sat at the bar, waiting, I got looks from a lot of the women in the room. I wasn’t used to it. One of the reasons I dressed the way I usually did was because it made me invisible—I hated attention. Now, wearing an insanely expensive suit and a rich-guy haircut, I felt like I had a target on my chest, and I didn’t like it. The only person I wanted to notice me was Ava, and she’d already left town.
That still fucking hurt. I didn’t want to think about it.
There was a ripple of attention and a small group of Japanese people came into the bar—three women and three men. I recognized Okada immediately from the photos I’d seen. In person he was small and slim, compact. I figured most women would call him handsome. He wore a suit that was even more expensive than mine because it was custom made, but he didn’t wear a tie and the top button of his shirt was casually undone. He wore his hair slightly long, with a lock of it over his forehead. When he saw me he approached me, his team following him like baby geese.
“Mr. Scotland,” he said, giving me a polite Japanese bow. “It’s an honor to meet you at last.”
I slid off my stool and returned the gesture. “Mr. Okada. You’ve come a long way.”
“Not so long, really.” Okada shrugged. “When you have a private jet with a bedroom, the flight isn’t so onerous. You should try it sometime.” He smiled.
So he knew I didn’t own a private jet. I was willing to bet Kaito Okada knew a lot about me—probably more than I knew about him. I tried to think of something pleasant and polite to say. I sucked at small talk. I wished I had Ava standing next to me; I should have at least made her write me a small-talk script. Which I would have had time to do if I hadn’t spent three days fucking her instead of working.
It was worth it.
“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” I managed, trying not to sound grumpy and pissed off. “I spent six weeks teaching myself the Sensei programming language last year.”
He brightened at the mention of the language he’d created. “Did you? Very few people have mastered it.”
“I didn’t master it, exactly.” Actually I had, but Ava had told me that the Japanese found bragging unattractive; apparently they preferred modesty.
Okada looked at me, his expression almost speculative. Then he turned to his team and spoke to them in Japanese. They bowed to me, then bowed more deeply to their boss, and all of them turned and left.
“What are you doing?” I asked Okada.
“That was my executive team,” he explained. “I told them to go to their rooms and get rest, because you and I are going to meet alone.”
I frowned. I’d imagined taking Okada and his team to Nobu, sitting through polite conversation while we ate sushi, just as Ava and I had rehearsed. “Where are we going?”
“Do you know what I like?” Okada motioned to the bartender. “American whiskey. It’s a drink that, in my opinion, is only made properly in your country. Americans are exquisite at making whiskey.” He ordered two glasses, gave me one, and took the other. He held up his glass, and I took the hint and tapped mine to his.
“What are we toasting?” I asked.
“You and me,” Okada said. He took a sip, sighed. “Good. So what do you think, Dane Scotland? Here we are. Enough bullshit. Let’s get drunk.”
At midnight we were in an airplane hangar outside of O’Hare airport, sitting in folding chairs and admiring Kaito’s private jet. We’d both ditched our suit jackets, and I’d ditched my tie. Okada had found an old blanket folded in the corner of the hangar and had thrown it over his shoulders—even though it dwarfed him, he managed to look dignified. Kaito’s driver, a discreet Japanese man, was outside somewhere in Kaito’s Rolls-Royce, waiting for us to finish drinking and tell him to drive our dumb asses back to the hotel.
“It’s so nice,” Kaito said about his jet. He took a sip from his whiskey glass. For a guy who weighed maybe a hundred and twenty, he could drink alcohol like nobody’s business. “It’s a gorgeous jet, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” I said. I was miles behind him in the drinking game, but I was still more drunk than I’d been in years. My brain was foggy, and I kept wanting to open my mouth and say honest shit I wasn’t supposed to say. Like how I didn’t really care how big or expensive his jet was. Kaito was definitely a legit genius—we’d had a few conversations that programmers around the world would give their left nut to hear—but this meeting was giving me a strange feeling, alcohol or not. It felt a little like Kaito was showing off, and not because he was an asshole with a big ego. More like he was showing off because he was trying to sell me something.
But what could Kaito Okada want to sell me? We were supposed to discuss Tower VC investing in his new project, the one that was rumored to have to do with cancer treatment. It would be an investment worth tens of millions, but Kaito didn’t have to sell me on that. Especially not by showing me his private jet. The whole thing was a little weird. It was the middle of the night, we were sitting in an airplane hangar, and I was far off the script. One of the other Tower guys—Aidan for example, or Noah—would know how to handle this. I just wanted to go home and nurse both my hangover and my heartache for Ava.
Now he was telling me how much he’d spent on the jet, and all of the amenities it had. How many people he hired to staff it. Finally the whiskey got to me and I couldn’t take it anymore. I said, “You’re not offering to take me to some underage sex island, are you?”
His only indication of surprise was a single raised eyebrow. “Not in the least. I’m a happily married man. And you, Dane—you’re not that type of man, I think.”
“I’m not,” I grumbled.
“You’re the one-woman type?”
“Apparently.” I emptied the last drops in my glass and put it on the concrete floor next to my folding chair. “Though I don’t think she agrees. She left this afternoon.”
“Left,” Kaito said. “You mean left left.” He had next to no accent and his English was fluent, though it was his second language. Of course, because he was a genius.
“Yeah, she left left,” I said, my voice a rasp. “So whatever you’re trying to sell me with this,” I gestured to the plane, “I’m probably not buying. I was supposed to take you and your team out for expensive sushi and talk about investing in your new project. Maybe we should stick to that.”
Kaito smiled and leaned back in his chair. He was drunk, but he wasn’t sloppy. “I knew it. As soon as I saw you, I knew something was bugging you, as you Americans say. So you love her, and she left you. That works well for
me.”
I scowled at him, though he wasn’t looking. “I’m glad you find my problems with women amusing. And convenient.” I didn’t get into the part about love. I didn’t know him well enough for that. And I didn’t want to even think it, not with Ava gone.
“Do you know what Okada is working on?” Kaito asked, ignoring my grumpiness.
“The cure for cancer.”
“You have good hacker skills,” he said. “No one else knows what we’re doing, even the Japanese government, though they’ve tried. We’ve repelled three hacking attempts by your American FBI, but somehow you know.”
Jesus, the FBI? “It’s just a theory.”
“It’s a good one. You’re close. Not exactly right, but close. What we’re working on is an improved system of chemotherapy. The next generation of chemo, perhaps. Less toxic, less invasive, and the results are faster. So not curing cancer exactly. That hasn’t been done yet. But an improvement in the treatment that will improve millions of lives and possibly save them.”
So there it was. Okada’s best-kept secret, spilled to me in this lonely airplane hangar. “Tower VC is in,” I said, knowing full well I spoke for the other three. “Whatever venture funding you’re looking for, we’ll find it.” The partners would kill for a chance to contribute to this. As would I.
“You’re not getting it yet,” Okada said. “I have skills, too. I know you’re working on a teaching system that uses AI to teach students. Languages at first, and then other things. A system that learns the strengths and weaknesses of its students and adapts to them. A system that iterates the lesson plans in response to the students’ inputs, thinking like a real human brain.”
The whiskey in my stomach turned to acid. What Okada was saying was something I’d never told anyone, even my partners at Tower. “What the actual fuck?” I croaked. “You can’t know that.”
“A simple weakness in your penthouse’s wi-fi, my friend.”
I remembered an alert that went off months ago, that I’d responded to right away. “I patched that.”
“Too slow. I got a thirty-second glimpse into what you were doing, and I extrapolated the rest. Because you think like I do, my friend. We may be from opposite sides of the planet, but in truth we’re brothers. Don’t you think?”
I leaned my head on the back of the chair, my mind spinning. “A nerd bromance,” I said, quoting Ava. “I’m not interested.”
“Yes, you are.” Okada smiled again. “You don’t spend your days doing money deals like your friends. You spend your days making things that can change the world. That teaching system—when it’s perfected it could teach people across the globe to perform surgeries, or teach astronauts in space. You’re not a money man, Dane Scotland, though you pretend to be for your company. Money doesn’t interest you at all.”
He was right. It was nice to have money, I couldn’t deny that, but for me money was a means to an end. After we closed our first deal over a decade ago, when we’d sold my first software for over forty million dollars, I could have happily moved to a shack on the edge of the woods and lived alone. I’d never need more money than that, and I had no desire to make it. I’d gone into Tower with the others because they were my best friends, the only family I’d ever had. But I’d always been slightly different from them. Aidan was a master at making money in New York; Noah was living a wild life in L.A.; Alex was doing deals in Texas. I did occasional software deals for the company, but mostly I stayed in my penthouse and worked on my own shit. Like the AI teaching program, which the other partners, my best friends, didn’t even know about.
“So what do you want?” I asked Kaito, my admission that he was right about me. “You want my AI program in exchange for a stake in your cancer program? It’s an unconventional deal, but we can probably work something out.”
“I don’t want your AI program, Dane,” Kaito said. “The reason I came all this way isn’t to buy a program. It’s to acquire you.”
“Me?”
“Yes.” He pointed to the jet. “I want you to get on that jet and fly to Japan to work for me. You think I was trying to sell you my jet? I was trying to sell you a ride on it. One way. You come work for Okada and add your brainpower to mine. We can accomplish incredible things. You can still work on the teaching program, of course. I’ll assign as many of my staff to it as you want. It’ll be finished faster than it could ever be if you worked on it alone.”
The whiskey was dissolving out of my system and I was sobering up fast. “You want me to leave Tower.”
“Like I said, you’re not a money man. You’re not happy as one. They don’t quite understand that about you, I think. So, yes, leave Tower.”
I shook my head, a reflex. Leave Chicago? Leave my friends? Leave the States? I wasn’t that kind of guy. I didn’t jet set. I didn’t go to the dry cleaner’s on the corner, let alone to the other side of the world. Like I say, a cabin in the woods, alone. That was me.
But to work on Okada’s cancer treatment? That was a pretty fucking big deal.
I stared at the jet, and the image that came into my mind was Ava. Standing at my door after all those years, looking brave as hell. Sitting in the rain in front of her mother’s home, crying and still brave as hell. To be honest, when I pictured my cabin in the woods now, I pictured her there with me. Her and our baby.
She’d never fully gotten over losing our baby eleven years ago. But what she didn’t realize was that I hadn’t either. I thought about that baby often, usually in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. I thought about how old it would be now, what school it would be going to, whether he or she would be happy. I wanted my kid, whether an accident or not, to be happy.
I could have a chance at that, maybe. Did I want it?
“I have to think about this,” I told Kaito.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Kaito said. “My team and I are getting on the jet and going back to Japan. I don’t expect you to be on the jet, because you’re not a rash man. You think things through, like me, and I respect that. But I’m going to want an answer.”
“You’re not staying for four days, like you planned?”
“There’s no point. We understand each other, I believe, and neither of us is interested in wasting time on small talk. So take some time for consideration, as I would in your place. But I want an answer in one week.”
My voice was choked. “That’s the only offer?”
“Yes. I don’t want Tower’s money, Dane.”
“No. You want one of the partners instead.”
“I ask for what I want, no matter how big it is. It gets me far in life.”
I scrubbed a hand over my face. I was sober now, and I wished I wasn’t. I wished I was drunk, so drunk I could pass out and forget about everything I had to think about.
“One week,” Kaito said. “And then I want an answer.”
Twenty-One
Ava
* * *
I met Samantha in Central Park, on a bench along one of the wide boulevards. I was wearing yoga pants—okay, fine, they were designer—and a long, flowing top that Versace had discarded from its spring line two years ago because it didn’t sell. I’d bought it at a crazy discount, which was a shame, because it was one of my favorite tops I’d ever owned.
It was eight o’clock on a weekday morning, so Samantha was wearing a dark pencil skirt, a slim blouse of subtle blue, and black heels. My brother’s wife—the love of his life and the owner of his cold, cold heart—was a beautiful woman, but it wasn’t the kind of beauty or sexiness that hit you over the head. She was classy and professional, her hair worn up and all of her body discreetly covered. It was only when you took a second or third look that you noticed her body was flawless, her waist snug and tiny without shapewear, her legs long and slender. She’d started as Aidan’s executive assistant, but when they fell in love and became unable to keep their hands off each other, he’d married her and made her one of the executives at Tower VC. She was smart, organized, brilli
ant, and in regular circumstances, intimidating to someone like me. But I knew Samantha, I liked her, and these weren’t regular circumstances.
“You’re looking me over,” she said as she took the seat next to me on the park bench. “What do you see?”
“You’re perfection, except for one thing,” I told her.
She sighed. “You always say it.”
“Because I mean it. I’m begging, and I mean begging, you to accessorize.”
“I have accessories.” She pointed to the tiny gold studs in her ears.
“You’re killing me,” I groaned. “I’ve got hoops that would look so good on you. And a belt. I’m thinking thick, a little chunky, bright red.”
Samantha looked amused. “I don’t wear red to the office, Ava.”
“You could, though,” I argued. “Or leopard print. Fabric with a knot at the hip. It would be so sexy.”
“I go to the office to work. I don’t go to look sexy.”
“Why not look sexy? You work with your husband now.”
Samantha smiled. “Aidan wears black to the office every day. He always has. We do sexy in our off-hours.”
I clapped my hands to my ears. “Stop, please.”
That made Samantha laugh, which was a little rare for her. Not because she was miserable, but because she was naturally reserved. So was my brother. But since they’d gotten together, I’d seen both of them laugh a lot more often. It was good to see my brother, who had grown up in the same awful home I had, find someone who made him happy. I was absolutely positive that he deserved that.
I wasn’t so sure that I did. I was working on it.
“Here’s your check,” Samantha said, reaching into her purse and pulling out an envelope. “Full payment for the Chicago job. I don’t know why we couldn’t have just couriered it to you instead of me meeting you in person.”
