Hardwired For Ecstasy

by Ravenna Tate

  “And once they do that, the truth about Hallee and Dirk will come out. They’ll realize we’ve been onto them for months now, and they will alert Clyde Medici and Shawn Castle. The jig is up. We’ve just lost all of them again, and there is no fucking way they will ever let us find them a second time.”

  He rose. “I have serious damage control to start on, beginning with your relationship with Leland. I need to tell them about that.”

  She nodded.

  “Does that mean I have your permission to do so?”

  Why did he sound so skeptical? “Yes, of course you do. Tell them whatever you have to in order to get to the bottom of this.”

  “Thank you.” He eyed her with a hard stare that had her confused. “Are you sleeping here tonight?”

  “I…” She swallowed hard, fighting against tears. “Not if you’d rather I didn’t.” Most of her things were here now, but screw that. She’d deal with it.

  “It’s probably best you… Shit. I don’t know.” He ran his fingers through his hair, clearly conflicted about her. Emma’s heart was breaking, and she didn’t know what to do. “Stay here. It’s fine. But I’ll likely be working all night.”

  His computer pinged with an incoming video call, making her jump slightly.

  “That’s the rest of them. I have to take this.”

  She rose. “I’ll go upstairs then. Atticus, I didn’t do this. Why would I? They might not have mentioned my name, but clearly the woman they’re talking about is me.”

  His frown deepened, but his expression gave away nothing.

  “I don’t know which one of them did this, but it was either Leland or Bonnie. My money is on Bonnie. But it wasn’t me. I need to know you believe me.”

  He gazed at her for long moments while the constant pings from his laptop told her the other Weathermen were waiting for him to join the call. Fuck them. This was more important to her right now.

  “I don’t know what I believe right now. I need time to think about it. Get some sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Emma felt like someone had just stuck a pin in her and drained all the air out of her lungs. If she hadn’t been so determined not to show him weakness, she’d have collapsed onto the floor.

  She’d found the final hacker. They’d just made love. Everything had been perfect. And in the space of a few moments, because of an article she’d bet a year’s salary on that Bonnie had planted, it was gone. All of it. He no longer believed her or trusted her. And whatever might have been was over, just like that.

  She turned around and forced her feet to move toward the door. Behind her, she heard him answer the call, but he told them all to hang on a moment. He didn’t want her to hear any of this. That was the last straw.

  Emma walked through his apartment, swiping at the tears falling down her cheeks, grateful his staff was nowhere around. She went into the bedroom where she’d put most of her clothes and personal items weeks ago, and stuffed them into her large duffel bag.

  Then she went into Atticus’s bedroom and gathered up the items that were in there, shoving them into the bag as well. There were still some things in the apartment, but she’d get them another time. This would at least allow her to live at her own apartment for a while until she figured out what to do.

  She grabbed her laptop bag and left the apartment. Atticus must have still been in the library because she couldn’t even hear his voice. No one saw her leave, which was what she wanted. She couldn’t deal with explanations right now.

  Once she was back home, she tossed her duffel on the floor of her bedroom and curled up on the bed, letting the rest of the tears come. Maybe she’d be able to sleep. Then in the morning she’d figure out what to do, starting with tracking down who had planted that article. It was her best skill, after all. Finding people.

  Just before she drifted off to sleep, she remembered that tomorrow was Tuesday and Atticus would be expecting her at work. Fuck that. She’d send him an email in the morning saying she was ill. She couldn’t face him. She couldn’t face any of them.

  The best thing to do would be to quit. She had some money saved because he paid her a hell of a lot more than she’d made at the police station. She’d find the source of the article on her own and prove to Atticus he’d misjudged her, while she looked for another job in a different city.

  And then she’d spend the rest of her life trying to forget Atticus Yates.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Within the first ten minutes of the call, Atticus realized what an ass he’d been to Emma. They all agreed there would be no point to her having done this, but they couldn’t agree with her that it had been Bonnie. Most of them felt that Atticus was right and Leland was behind it.

  He’d hated having to spill Emma’s secret to the group, but he had to in order to outline the possible suspects. Bonnie was the obvious choice because of the run-in Grayson and Barclay had with her and Dave Perry five months earlier, but it didn’t explain why she would put her own position in jeopardy.

  When Atticus outlined Emma’s prior relationship with Leland, and how Leland had lied to Emma and to his wife, the suspicions that Leland being the one who had planted the article made a lot more sense.

  “Emma must be devastated,” said Oliver.

  Atticus said she was, but he was too ashamed to tell any of them how he’d reacted at first. “My concern is if either of them did this, how one or both found out Emma is here, working for me.”

  “Leland is a cop,” said Ace. “And Bonnie works for HCS. It’s too easy. Either one could have tracked her credit card receipts or found the lease she signed on her apartment. They then simply had someone spy on Emma. An amateur could have tracked her to this city and to your company.”

  Ace was right, of course. Atticus was having trouble concentrating and he knew why. He’d pushed away the woman he loved, all because of a fucking article online. Granted, this had far-reaching implications, but he’d hurt Emma and he knew that, too. All he wanted to do right now was find her and beg her to forgive him. “Okay. But why? Why did either of them do this?”

  “Bonnie is easy,” said Dominic. “We went against her. We made a fool of her at that meeting.”

  “But if it was her,” said Addison, “she’s fucked her entire agency and she’d know that. She would know she’d be caught and it would make HCS look like idiots. That’s why my money is on Leland, and Bonnie knew nothing about this.”

  “Atticus, if it was Leland,” said Damien, “how did he find out that Emma told you about him? That she broke her word? That’s his only real motivation to do this.”

  “Not exactly,” said Viggo. “What about to get back at his wife? What if Leland has a reason to hurt Bonnie, and found out about the meeting where she threw a hissy fit because we got what we wanted? And what if he also knew where Emma was, and simply used both pieces of information to concoct this story? He hurts them both at once.”

  “So you’re suggesting this has nothing to do with the author wanting to hurt us?” asked Kane.

  “Even if Leland did this to hurt both Bonnie,” said Blaine, “that still doesn’t explain why he involved Emma. I can see him finding out we know where the hackers are but had refused to cooperate with HCS. Bonnie might have told him, or he might have simply hacked into her email or something. He could have leaked those facts to indirectly hurt her. But then why mention Emma, even if he didn’t use her name? Why bring that aspect into the story at all? Because once he does, he opens the door for someone to dig into his own past.”

  “Whoever did this wanted to hurt Emma, Bonnie, and all of us at the same time,” said Grayson.

  “How did they find out we know where the hackers are?” asked Barclay.

  “They might not know,” said Grayson. “Not directly, at any rate. They might only know, for example, that there was a meeting with two of us and four HCS employees, and they inferred the rest based on what they know about Bonnie’s feelings on the
subject. Which means it might be someone who works closely with her at HCS.”

  “Might even be Dave,” said Barclay. “Or someone else who works with them. They learn the meeting happened, Bonnie is shooting off her mouth one day and lets something slip, and the person goes digging.”

  “They find out about Leland and Emma by asking around at the police station,” said Blaine, “and they track Emma to CentralEast and then to Yates Industries.”

  “And the rest they simply infer,” said Atticus, nodding. “That does make sense. It makes a lot more sense than Leland finding out Emma broke her word, or Bonnie deliberately putting her job on the line simply to get back at a woman whom Leland cheated on her with.”

  “Bonnie doing this makes little sense,” said Emmett. “She doesn’t hurt Leland with this, and she doesn’t hurt Emma. She only hurts us and herself. She’s too shrewd to fuck herself.”

  “But it also doesn’t make much sense for Leland to have done it,” said Oliver. “He has no reason to hurt us. He’d only want revenge on his wife, or Emma, or both. What does he care about any of us?”

  “Unless he used the fact of the meeting to hurt Bonnie,” said Viggo. “But you’re right about the motivation being wrong. If he wanted to hurt Emma, this is a convoluted way to do it, even if he does know she’s seeing Atticus. And Bonnie could lose her job. All that will do is make her leave him, unless of course that’s what he wants.”

  “Emma isn’t the first person Leland cheated on Bonnie with,” said Atticus. “I did my homework after she told me, but she doesn’t know that yet so please don’t say anything. If Bonnie wanted to leave him because he’s a pig, she’d have done so a long time ago. No. I think you’re all right in that neither Leland nor Bonnie did this. But I do think someone inside HCS did. Who else would know about the meeting, and would know how close we were to having all the hackers?”

  “At least we never told Bonnie or the others at HCS that three of the hackers work for us,” said Ace. “That was a smart move.”

  “It also means the author might not actually know that we’ve found all the hackers,” said Dominic. “Think about it. We only just found the last one today, and this went to print this morning. Unless someone at Atticus’s company is a spy who knows Emma and Leland had a fling, knows Leland was married to Bonnie at the time, and knows about the meeting between Grayson, Barclay, and the four contacts at HCS, saying we know the location of all the hackers is only a rumor the author planted.”

  “Good point,” said Addison, “but why? What’s the motivation? Whoever write it wanted to stir shit up for Bonnie, Emma, and all of us. There’s a connection we’re missing here.”

  “Who do we know at this press?” asked Kane.

  “I don’t think any of us knows them,” said Ace. “What about Julianne? Can she find out anything further?”

  “No. You know how that is. They won’t reveal their sources, even to another reporter. The byline is likely an alias so that doesn’t help us.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Damien.

  “I asked her already and she said this press is known for using author aliases as a way to protect them. They see themselves as a champion of sorts, ferreting out corruption in big businesses.”

  “Well, there you have it,” said Atticus. “Whoever wrote this meant to target us. Bonnie and Emma are collateral damage.”

  “Which brings us full circle to why,” said Emmett. “They could have planted a story saying we know where the hackers are without involving HCS, Bonnie, or Emma. Why do it this way? Why throw those two into the mix?”

  “It makes us look guilty,” said Addison, “by tossing in the angle of someone working for one of us who used to work for the cops, but is now helping us with inside information. Mix in a source at HCS, and it makes us look like we’re doing exactly what we’ve been doing. Hacking into government sites and using people in key locations to find these hackers.”

  “But that still means someone knows about Bonnie and Emma,” said Damien.

  “All right,” said Blaine, “but let’s get back to what Addison was saying first. I think that makes sense. By tossing in an informant at HCS and someone who allegedly is feeding us inside info from the police, instead of painting a picture that makes us out to be heroes, it makes us sound like criminals who use anyone and everything to get what we want. At the same time, it pegs us as refusing to cooperate with a government agency.”

  “What still bothers me though,” said Oliver, “is why they specifically named the police station where Emma worked. That’s not a generalization or speculation. The author knows Emma worked there. There’s a reason he or she put that information in the article.”

  “And that brings us back to Leland,” said Ace.

  “Or Bonnie,” said Emmett.

  “Or someone at HCS,” said Blaine, “who found out about Leland and Emma, and hates Bonnie enough to hurt her by putting that little tidbit into the story.”

  “Everyone at HCS except Dave Perry hates Bonnie,” said Viggo. “So that narrows it down considerably.”

  The group chuckled.

  “How do we find this person?” asked Atticus. “If the byline is fake and no one at Central Free Press will tell us who Terry Bennett really is, how do we uncover this? And in the meantime, what do we do when Sam Preston, Mindy Tesserone, and Dante Herrera start comparing notes with each other, and then with Clyde Medici and Shawn Castle?”

  Atticus repeated what he’d told Emma earlier, and the others agreed that was the more pressing concern here. If the hackers started talking to each other in detail, they’d lose them all.

  “We issue a rebuttal,” said Ace. “We send a statement to the Central Free Press, saying we don’t have the locations or the names of the hackers, and if we did, we’d be in full cooperation with HCS.”

  “What about Emma?” asked Kane. “What do we say about her?”

  “Nothing,” said Atticus. “We don’t address whether we have an employee working for one of us who used to work at the Fourth District police station in Central.”

  “We’ll be asked about it,” said Viggo. “I already have emails and missed calls from reporters, as I’m sure you each have by now as well.”

  The others agreed they did.

  “We can’t expose her,” said Damien. “If we do and they dig, they’ll find the connection between her, Leland, and Bonnie.”

  “So how do we address it?” asked Atticus.

  “We simply say we have no knowledge of having received any inside information from any government agency or police force,” said Blaine, “and leave it at that.”

  “It won’t take some enterprising reporter that much time to ferret out which of our employees used to work at that specific station,” said Kane. “Unless you want to build a fake background for Emma tonight.”

  Atticus shook his head. “No. If we do that and it turns out this is Leland or Bonnie behind the story, and if they find the fake background, then we end up looking like we were trying to hide Emma. The suspicions planted in the story will be true in the eyes of the public, even though they never were.”

  “All right then,” said Ace. “It’s settled. We each have our PR departments send the same statement to the paper. If anyone asks about the employee who used to work for the police, we all give them the same answer. I don’t know what else we can do at this point.”

  “What do we do when the hackers bolt?” asked Blaine.

  “Let’s hope they don’t,” said Barclay. “If we act like this is bullshit, maybe they’ll think it’s just one more story planted to try to hurt us. Happens all the time.”

  The call finally ended three hours after it began, but Atticus was too wired to sleep. His main focus was Emma. He felt sick to his stomach recalling how he’d treated her. If he could take it all back he would. Losing her because of this would kill him. He prayed she’d forgive his behavior earlier.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Emma woke at half past three in th
e morning and opened her laptop to send Atticus an email, letting him know she wouldn’t be at work that day. He hadn’t called or emailed her yet, so she assumed the Weathermen were still on their call. It had been around midnight when she’d left the library. Either that or he was super pissed off she was gone and hadn’t bothered trying to contact her.

  She regretted sneaking out of his apartment like that instead of facing him to talk, so she wrote that as well. She needed some time to think about everything, but mostly she wanted to be with him. By the time she finished the email, she was even more confused. Did she know what the hell she wanted?

  She reread the email several times, trying to communicate what she wanted to say, but still wasn’t happy with the wording. This was ridiculous. She should have stayed there and talked to him in person.

  Just as she was about to delete the email, her phone rang, making her jump. It was Atticus. She stared it, debating, her heart pounding. What could she possibly say to make this right? Then again, he owed her an apology as well.

  Emma answered the call. “I was just emailing to let you know I won’t be at work in the morning. I don’t feel well.”

  “Where are you?”

  Fresh guilt washed over her. He sounded terrified and relieved at the same time.

  “I took most of my things and came home.”

  “Emma, this is your home.”

  “Is it? Didn’t feel that way a few hours ago.” So much for feeling guilty about leaving. What the hell was wrong with her?

  “I can’t talk about this over the phone. I need to see your face. I need to touch you. I’m on my way over.”

  Emma stared at her phone. Had he just disconnected the call? What an arrogant ass! The urge to leave her apartment was strong, but she didn’t want to walk around the city in the middle of the night, alone. This wasn’t Central, where the entire place would be lit up and people would be out.

  She washed her face and put on some clothes, not wanting to answer the door wearing next to nothing when Atticus showed up. Sex couldn’t cure this. She was so damn conflicted. Why hadn’t she simply stayed and slept in the other room? He’d acted like an asshole after reading the article online, but she’d acted like an irresponsible brat by leaving.