by Tasha Black
Not today.
“Are we clear?” he asked.
“Crystal,” she replied, expressionlessly. “Although there might not be much left by the time you get there.”
She was cool under pressure, but she wasn’t used to dealing with someone at Dalton’s level of perception.
He caught a small increase in her pulse, and an almost imperceptible change in her scent.
She was afraid, alright, but not just of him.
“Trouble in paradise?” he asked, taking another big bite.
Sterling stole a glance over her shoulder at the couple she’d sent to scout ahead. They were oblivious. Totally focused on each other.
“I got in over my head,” she admitted quietly, turning back to Dalton. “I’m on the hook to some pretty bad people.”
Dalton knew she was talking about Panchenko. But he chose not to respond.
“Now it looks like we are not going to be able to deliver on our agreement. I’m pretty sure I know what that means for me, but I don’t want to think of what that means for the men in my command,” she said, her voice breaking slightly at the end.
Her cool demeanor was cracking. Something he’d never seen before.
He waited, giving her time to elaborate. She didn’t disappoint.
“All of the soldiers are going to be abandoned,” she said. “Left to fend for themselves. You and I both know how that will turn out.”
Dalton couldn’t help picturing the time surrounding when West found him, abandoned in the VA hospital, slowly losing his mind. The parts he could remember were a nightmare. Without West he would not have survived.
“I know I fucked up, but the soldiers shouldn’t have to suffer for my mistakes,” she pleaded. “I could make it right, if I had access to the technology inside you. It saved you. It could save all of them.”
He crossed his knife and fork on the plate and slid it to the end of the table.
“Are you really willing to turn your back on them, on me, and just walk away?” she asked.
Ice running through his veins, Dalton reached into his pocket, dropped a twenty dollar bill on the table.
Then walked away.
26
West walked in the front door of Worthington Enterprises feeling mildly annoyed. For whatever reason, his pass hadn’t opened the garage.
His shoes and cane clipped the marble floor briskly.
The people in the lobby seemed to be staring at him. It had been buzzing in here when he stepped in, but suddenly there was only silence. Beyond the usual primping for the boss.
Maybe something was going on inside the building, his phone had been blowing up all morning. Frankly West didn’t care, he’d turned it off an hour ago.
He had much more important things to worry about right now. Cordelia might be feeling okay that Jess was “with friends” but either she had forgotten about being a teenager, or had never been the kind of teenager West was. The thought that Jess was away from home with strangers who told her they were her friends was enough to put West back in a coma.
He’d been up all night debating, but there was really only one answer. There was no way he was giving up his limbs until he knew she was home, safe. And he needed Mallory’s help.
The elevator door slid open. Weirdly, no one seemed to rushing to get in with him. There was usually no shortage of lackeys jockeying to get some face time. But today, he would be alone.
That suited West just fine.
He pressed the button for Med Pros.
Nothing.
They were supposed to have fixed the issue with his prosthetic hand not registering.
He tried again with his real hand.
Still nothing.
He banged on it a few times.
“Can I help you with something, Mr. Worthington?” a female voice asked over the intercom.
“Good morning, Erika. I’m having some technical difficulties,” he said as politely as he could. “Can you send me down to Med Pros?”
There was a long pause.
“I’m sorry, sir, you don’t have clearance to access that level,” Erika replied.
“That’s not possible,” he retorted.
“I’m sorry, sir.” Erika’s voice was soft. “I can’t override.”
West sighed.
“Can you get Dr. Pruitt up here, right away?” he asked.
“I’ll message her, sir. But she is in an important meeting. Would you like to have a seat in the lobby while you wait?”
“Sure, sure,” he said.
What the hell was going on?
West stepped out of the elevator and headed to one of the benches in the lobby, leaning heavily on his cane.
It was a beautiful bench, but hard and uncomfortable. Funny, he’d never had to wait for anything here.
He slipped his cell phone out of his pocket and decided to call Mallory directly.
On powering it up, he saw he had missed multiple calls from Dalton, Mallory, and even Cordelia.
He checked Cordelia’s message first.
“I’m so sorry, West. Please call me,” she sounded like she was crying.
Could it have something to do with Jess?
Before he could begin to guess, a hand grabbed him roughly and yanked him to his feet. He was ushered outside in a dervish of bright hair and white lab coat.
Good morning to you too, Mallory.
“What the hell is going on here?” she demanded, the moment they stepped out in the blazing midday sun.
“Funny, I was about to ask you the same question,” he said.
“Let’s start with the fact that I come into the lab this morning to find Andrews and his Alpha Division goons waiting for me. And then I find out—” she began.
“Wait, what? I didn’t authorize that,” West stormed. “Someone is getting fired over this.”
“I think someone already has,” Mallory replied.
“What are you talking about?” West demanded.
“Are you kidding?” she asked, incredulous. “Do you ever check your phone? Or watch the news? Radio? Any contact at all with the outside world?”
“I was a little preoccupied. What did I miss?”
“I think you better sit down,” she told him, walking him over to the fountain and motioning to the marble lip.
They sat, and for a moment, she just gazed at him in open pity.
“The board had an emergency meeting this morning,” she began. “They held a vote of no confidence. West, you’re not the CEO of Worthington Enterprises anymore.”
He stared at her, speechless.
“You no longer have access to Med Pros outside of scheduled, monitored appointments,” she added.
“What the hell?” He jumped to his feet. “Forget about getting fired, someone is getting my foot up their ass for this.”
“What, so they can get a restraining order keeping you out of the building entirely?” she asked coolly.
She was right, but it didn’t make things any easier. West paced and tried not to let himself get any angrier.
“Go cool off,” Mallory told him. “Find Dalton. I’ll be in touch as soon as get things under control in there.”
He didn’t reply.
“Trust me,” she reassured him. “I can handle these goons. They wouldn’t know a mass spectrometer from a scintillation counter.”
West nodded.
She patted him awkwardly on the arm, and then headed back into the glassy building that had once been his identity.
27
Cordelia stared at the mountain of paperwork, the blinking red message indicator on the phone, and the endless string of new email messages streaming down her screen. She could bury herself in all this and not come out for weeks.
Framed by the familiar window, the city crawled by in miniature. At least she had her old desk back.
Although every time she walked into the CEO’s office and saw Peter sitting behind the sleek, glass-topped desk she wanted to throw up. That was West�
�s desk, plain and simple.
Though, if she were honest with herself, she had to admit, he’d never sat at it as often as he should have.
At least when he had, he was productive.
Her mind went back to the night they’d sat together behind that desk, taking inventory of Med Pros until the wee hours of the morning.
It had been exhilarating to talk to him for the first time, really talk. And have him listen with respect. His dark eyes had danced as he sparred with her about how Med Pros worked.
And there had been the pressing awareness of him beside her. That big body radiating warmth. The smell of his aftershave.
She’d lived that night like she was floating.
It seemed like a lifetime ago now.
And the time before that was like someone else’s lifetime.
Because before that, before West or Worthington Enterprises, Cordelia had been working her dream job, at the Glacier City Zoo, feeding and observing the canids. Ironically, as it turned out, the wild dogs were more civilized than the politicians and businessmen downtown.
After the zoo flooded and closed, she’d taken the job with Worthington Enterprises, where she had fed and observed West. Or rather, she had fetched him coffee and despised him quietly, in exchange for minimal pay and excellent health benefits that would keep her sister in physical therapy.
Had it really all happened that night? The rise from West’s coffee runner to his confidante?
And had there really been more between them than slowly earned respect and a smoldering physical attraction?
Cordelia had structured her life around doing the right thing. Slowing things down with West was a hard choice she felt had to be made, in order to protect her sister from his capriciousness.
If they were really meant to be together, would slowing things down have been enough to make him give up on her?
West was the kind of guy who would dress up in a costume and try to save an entire city.
If he ever really cared about her, would he let go so easily?
She shook her head, trying to clear it, and saw another message flash up on the screen.
It was from the VP of Finance, and the message wasn’t even copied to Peter.
After West’s injury she had practically run this company. It might take the staff a little while to catch on that she was back to running for coffee and making out a calendar, this time for a man she neither liked nor respected.
Or maybe it wouldn’t.
Peter was leaning on her pretty heavily these days, if only unofficially. In her time running the show as West’s proxy, she’d developed some great relationships with the people at Worthington Enterprises. And now, in the wake of the surprise change in leadership, she had found herself the one they all wanted to talk to.
In the beginning she had suspected that Peter only hired her as a jab at West. Now she saw the real reason.
Peter needed her to make this transition possible for him.
The phone began to ring again, but Cordelia didn’t pick it up.
Instead she looked over the stack of notes and the messages popping up in her inbox.
And then she glanced back at the elevator door.
She could just get on, push the button, get off in the lobby and head out the door. Not even look back.
She never wanted any of this. It had all been for her family. But where had it gotten her?
Jess was still in a wheelchair. Cordelia hadn’t seen her in two days. Edward Dalton had messaged her yesterday, letting her know he was making progress, but she hadn’t seen him at all since the night they talked. She supposed the change in leadership was making things as busy for him as it was for her.
As for Jess, the only communication had been a second message yesterday:
I’m staying with a friend for a few days. Everything is totally fine. Don’t worry. I’m happy.
It hadn’t done much for Cordelia’s sleepless nights, but she had to admit, hearing the words friend and happy from Jess had made her heart soar for a moment.
Jess told Cordelia once that she worked too hard to please other people. Jess had declared that she could take care of herself, and it was time for Cordelia to do the same.
Maybe she’d been right.
Cordelia realized that somehow, she was standing in the middle of her office, bag in hand.
When did she do that?
She took a step toward the elevator without thinking.
She could just walk away.
A tingle in her arm from the bite mark, almost faded to nothing, broke the spell.
The elevator doors slid open a second later and Dalton stepped off, holding a paper coffee cup.
“Going down?” He asked her, holding the door.
“No. I… No thank you,” she replied, unable to make eye contact with her old friend, so confused were her thoughts.
She hurried back to her desk and hung her bag on the hook beside it.
Before she could sit down, Peter came out of his office.
“Mr. Dalton, good to see you. I want to go over some of the new security protocols I have in mind,” he said smoothly with a glittering smile.
“Of course, sir,” Dalton replied, taking the last sip of his coffee.
Dalton turned to Cordelia.
“Would you throw this out for me, sweetie?” he asked holding the empty cup out to her.
Sweetie? What was he playing at?
Without thinking, Cordelia took it from him.
In the space where the barista usually wrote the order there was something else.
Mallory’s place. 8:00.
“No problem,” she said quickly, tossing the cup into the trash after meeting his eyes for just a split second to let him know that she’d seen his message.
Dalton headed into the office, and Peter closed the door behind them.
Cordelia stood, practically frozen beside her desk.
Why did Dalton want to meet?
And why didn’t he just text her? She always had her phone handy.
Her company phone.
Whatever it was, Dalton was taking pains to keep it a secret.
Suddenly, Cordelia felt a wave of relief that she hadn’t gotten on that elevator.
Whatever was going on, it was going to be easier for her to keep an eye on it from up here.
28
Cordelia slid her banged-up ten year old Honda into a spot between two other cars that made hers look like a Mercedes.
The streetlights in the Scar were seldom a priority for public works. She was lucky to have found a parking space that was lit well enough for her to find the car again later.
The neighborhood was eerily quiet. Cordelia had been here before, of course, when West was still unconscious in the hospital. She’d come to help Mallory pick up supplies but she hadn’t gone inside Mallory’s place. She’d just double parked out front and waited. With the windows up. And the doors locked.
She’d been surprised about where Mallory lived back then. But tonight in the ominous darkness with the crumbling macadam underfoot she was even more surprised that Mallory was still in the same place.
Surely West was paying her enough to get an apartment in a safer part of the city.
A block away from Mallory’s building, she finally spotted some people. A couple of guys sat, smoking marijuana on the stoop of another building.
“Hey, Blondie, you looking for company?” one said to her in a low smooth voice.
The other giggled.
“Don’t you know it’s not safe to go alone in this neighborhood?” another one pointed out.
Cordelia didn’t often find herself the brunt of this kind of unwanted attention. But she knew it for what it was. Like the lorikeets at the Glacier City Zoo after a whole school bus of kids had bought nectar and fed them, these silly boys were high on their own treat and squawking for attention.
Well, they weren’t going to get it from her.
She was passing the group with her nose in
the air and a stern expression on her face, when she heard sudden footsteps behind her.
Panicked, she turned back.
But it wasn’t the young men.
Two enormous police officers in the new Alpha Division uniforms trotted her way, wearing expressions that could only be described as zealous.
“These guys giving you trouble, ma’am?” one of them thundered hopefully.
“They’re just boys, I’m fine,” Cordelia said.
The boys ditched their pot in the gutter and stood up quickly.
“Sorry,” one murmured.
But one of the officers pulled a strange looking weapon out of his jacket anyway.
It looked like a hair dryer, though he held it like a gun.
“Stay put,” he said expressionlessly.
One of the boys, with eyes big as saucers, tried to slip in the door behind them.
The officer fired immediately.
There was no shot, no bullet, no charge of electrified air. Only an odd whoosh.
The boy took two more wobbly steps and fell to the ground, convulsing in pain, unable to make a sound.
Cordelia was fixed in horror.
Another boy moved to help his friend and the second officer tackled him to the ground.
“I’m sorry for the trouble to you, ma’am,” the first officer said, the weapon still in his hand as he stood over the prone body of the first boy. “You can go on now, we’ve got this under control. Have a safe night.”
Shaken, Cordelia hurried toward Mallory’s building. She’d heard rumors of the new police officers overstepping their bounds, but what she had just witnessed was brutality.
Out of nowhere, a huge hand grabbed her arm.
She turned, a scream already forming in her throat, and found herself looking up into the pale blue eyes of her friend, Edward Dalton. Where had he even come from?
“Edward,” she breathed in relief.
He took her by the arm and led her silently to Mallory’s front door.
Standing still before it, as if he were waiting for something, Dalton raised one hand.
