Hostile Attractions Read online

  Emily isn’t looking at him as he recites all this, but a faint smile plays at her mouth. Like he’s figured out a murder mystery before he’s reached the end and she’s impressed by his powers of deduction.

  “You were known for your commitment to various causes. And then one day you disappeared.”

  Her gaze flicks up. “You didn’t find that on any computer.”

  “No.” Ramona cuts in then. “We found Deena Hastrom.”

  Emily’s mouth opens into a perfect O. And then she’s sagging, slumping, and I pull a chair under her before she falls down.

  “Deena…” Her eyes are dull with betrayal. “She was supposed to email me. She was my contact, the only one I could count on. And she talked to you?”

  Suddenly the entire thing hits me in a rush. All at once. “It’s all true.”

  “You think I lied?” Her voice rises fast, high.

  “No, I… It’s just that seeing it all together, it’s a lot.”

  “Right.” She turns away. “Now that you have testimony from your friend, you believe.”

  That’s not it, but I’m not going to argue here.

  “She erased her identity and went to Corvus intending to expose them,” I explain.

  “For five years?” Finn’s eyebrows jerk up.

  “Things got away from me,” Emily mutters.

  Ramona sighs, props a hip against the desk. “Deena didn’t say what you were doing at Corvus. Only that you’d disappeared and she didn’t know where to find you.”

  “She was out too,” Emily says. “Chad got married, Reagan died, and Deena… quit.” She puts a hand to her face. “I really was all alone.”

  I grab the arm of her chair and squeeze since I can’t hold her. “You’re not alone.” I glare at Finn. “We’ll help you.”

  Ramona looks very, very displeased. Finn looks torn.

  “We all want to bring this information out,” I say, holding their gazes. “And to bring Fuchs down.”

  Ramona is the first to look away, chewing her lip as she does. Finn drapes his arm over her shoulder, pulling her in close.

  “It’ll be okay,” he says to her. To me he says, “Should we talk to Callie about this? Get her to publish it?”

  Emily’s hand falls from her face. “No. You’ve done enough.”

  She won’t look at me.

  “We can help.” I keep my tone quiet even as I put some urgency in it. “It doesn’t have to be you on your own.”

  She doesn’t say anything. Somehow she’s drawn herself away from us. Back into Minerva, the woman who stands alone.

  Ramona clears her throat. Does it again. “Think about it. They have the resources.”

  It’s an olive branch of sorts.

  Emily looks at her with a clear, steady gaze. But still wary. “I will.”

  I’ll have to work on her more when we get home. Convince her to let us take over, that she doesn’t have to go to prison. She’s got options, and we can offer her all of them.

  My intentions are partly selfish too. I’m not ready to let go of her.

  “We should go,” I say. “Thanks for finding this.”

  Finn nods. Ramona crosses her arms.

  Then Finn’s phone and mine blow up at the same time, pinging us both with a message. We check the screens at the same time.

  “Dev,” I say.

  “What does he want a meeting tomorrow morning for?” Finn says.

  “This morning actually,” Ramona says, pointing at the clock.

  I sigh. There’s only a few hours until Dev wants all the partners to meet. “We can talk about Emily’s situation then too.”

  I look at her, daring her to protest.

  “You call her Emily?” Finn asks. He’s got one eyebrow raised.

  Emily rises, turns for the door. “You can all keep calling me Minerva. I know you’ll be more comfortable that way.”

  Finn and I share a look.

  “See you in a bit,” I say, then go after Emily.

  Chapter 26

  This isn’t the first time I’ve been in Bastard Capital. None of them probably remember, but three years ago I was here offering a buyout for one of their start-ups. That was before Arne and the Bastards declared war on each other, and it was an insubstantial meeting so they could hand over contracts or something. I don’t remember the name of the company now—they turned out to not be worth it, and Arne liquidated them a few months after they came to Corvus—but I remember meeting Mark, talking with him for a few moments.

  I didn’t see Elliot. I would have remembered that.

  He’s sitting next to me in the conference room. We haven’t talked about what Finn found or Elliot’s offer to help me.

  I’m too raw to discuss any of it. Deena spoke with them but not to me. I can’t get over it.

  And I’m pissed. She could have sent me… something. We planned this together. I lost my entire life to this—and she can’t even email me. But she can talk to the Bastards.

  I almost wish I didn’t know that. Then I could pretend she just hadn’t gotten my email, didn’t know that I’d finally gotten out.

  I also can’t get over that Elliot had Finn searching out my real identity. Logically, I should have expected it, but in my heart… My heart wanted him to believe me.

  But I don’t deserve his trust. Not after everything I’ve done. And right now my instinct is to refuse his help. To keep going alone.

  Anjie sets a cup in front of me. It smells like coffee, which I desperately need. I’m running on two hours sleep, max.

  I don’t reach for it.

  Elliot drags it toward me, and the noise grates against my ears. Heck, his entire presence next to me feels like an abrasion.

  “You need it.” The gentleness of his tone… it makes me grit my teeth.

  He’s also right, which I really hate. I don’t want to fall asleep in this meeting. So I take a sip.

  It’s so delicious it makes me angry. I wanted to hate it.

  Ramona comes in with Finn then, and I go rigid.

  Learning that Elliot has been investigating me hurt. Facing down Ramona was pure agony.

  I didn’t know Ray was her brother when I had him framed for robbery. Somehow that makes it worse. Because he was completely faceless, nameless to me, just a homeless man I was going to test our system on.

  He had a family. I ruined his life and theirs when I did that.

  Putting a face to what I’ve done… I breathe through my nose, deep and slow. Forcing the air in and out.

  I hardly knew who Ramona was when I sent her that information from inside Corvus. All I knew was that someone had broken into Corvus to access the panopticon files and they were trying to break the encryption. So I sent them what they needed. I had no idea who was on the receiving end.

  That was when I decided to break out of my mask. Someone on the outside was trying to help. I wasn’t alone. That was my breaking point.

  Joke’s on me because these people on the outside that I thought were helping have every reason to hate me. And without my armor of being Minerva—cold, uncaring—I’m too raw to be near them. To see what I’ve done to them.

  “More.” Elliot points to the cup. “Before it gets cold.”

  I take a sip, then keep my eyes on the cup as everyone else files in. If they’re shocked to see me here, no one says anything. Perhaps Finn already warned them.

  Dev is the last one to come in. If he’s aware of how the attention in the room shifts to him when he does, he doesn’t show it.

  He sits down, steeples his hands. Doesn’t say hello or call the meeting to order or anything. “I’ve bought a controlling share of Corvus.”

  There’s a moment of quiet shock, almost denial. Did he say what we thought he did? It’s followed by a wave of Holy fuck, he did.

  “In the next few days,” Dev says, “I’ll have the board vote to oust Fuchs.”

  Corvus is publicly held, so a takeover has always been theoretically possible. But the comp
any is so entwined with Fuchs and the myth of him—hell, the company is the myth of Arne—that it never seemed possible.

  My first instinct is to deny that the board will do it. Fuchs has dirt on all of them, some pretty unspeakable stuff in some cases. Like underage girls and bestiality kind of stuff. Things that made my stomach turn to hear about but that Minerva didn’t bat an eyelash at.

  Dev seems too assured to let a little thing like the board members’ scandals slip past him. I wonder what he’s found on them, if he’s going to use it to twist their arms. Or maybe the promise of freedom from Arne was enough for most of them.

  “Holy fuck.” That’s from Mark. The rest of them are too stunned to speak. “And you were going to tell us about this when? Because this isn’t some spur-of-the-moment whim. You had to have been working on this for months. And all behind our backs.”

  “Not behind your backs.” Dev raises a finger. “In secret. Otherwise, it never would have worked.”

  “You don’t trust us.” Logan looks very white. Very still.

  The shock has coalesced into something colder, harder. Resentful.

  I’m trying not to notice Elliot’s reaction, but I can’t help it. His expression is stricken. Betrayed. “We’re supposed to all be in this together. All of it.”

  Dev’s getting annoyed. Or frustrated. I can’t tell the difference. “You wanted Fuchs gone. And soon he will be. We’ll have control of all of Corvus’s assets.”

  “To do what with?” I ask.

  They might be pissed at Dev, but when I speak, they all suddenly remember they hate me. Every face that turns toward me is hard. Except for Elliot’s.

  “I’d be a fool to tell you,” Dev says. “But that hard drive is now our property.”

  I snort. “You’ve treated it like yours from the very beginning.” If Dev thinks I’ll be intimidated by him, he’s very wrong. I came up under a harder, scarier man than he’ll ever be.

  “It had to be contained.” He says it as if I’m an idiot or a child. “Release of that information could have jeopardized the takeover.”

  I suck in a breath. What arrogance. From all of them, Fuchs included. They made their plans, and the mere mortals simply had to get out of the way. God forbid my escape from five years of captivity interfere with his business plans.

  “Yeah, that information?” I toss out with careless glee. “I already released it. To a reporter.”

  “What?” The shock on Dev’s face is a pure delight. Gotcha. “To who?”

  Next to me, Elliot shifts. “Fuck,” he mutters under his breath.

  I ignore him. “That information is mine. All of it. I spent five years under that psycho, doing terrible things, to get it. I’ll give it to whoever I please.”

  My righteous indignation doesn’t even dent Dev’s composure. “We know all about the terrible things you did.”

  Right. I want to wrap my arms around myself or reach for Elliot’s hand, grab some small bit of comfort and never let go. But that would show weakness. So I don’t.

  Dev sets his jaw when I don’t respond. “We’ll have to move quickly then. Before this story breaks.”

  They all nod, even Elliot.

  “I’ll start bringing in whatever board members I can,” Mark says. “And I’ll get Paul on the phone. He probably went to kindergarten or something with some of them.”

  “I assume you already have a legal team?” Elliot asks Dev.

  “Yes, but I need you to take charge of them now.”

  Elliot nods.

  Suddenly the moment where they were all angry at Dev is gone, as if it never happened. They’re all united, all committed to making Dev’s plan work. To beat the countdown that I started.

  Fine. I’m fine with that. I knew none of them were on my side, that I only had myself in all this. I’ve survived this long on my own, and I’ll keep on surviving, without them.

  Finn looks to Logan. “We can tackle the other parts of the handover,” he says.

  Logan nods. “And I’ll talk to Callie and Anjie about the media stuff, what we want to release when.” His attention swings to me. “When’s this story coming out?”

  “I… I don’t know.” God, I wish I had a better, snappier answer. One that would knock them on their asses again.

  They all look at Elliot. He shrugs even though his face is dark. “It’s my fault. I left her with my laptop and the hard drive. I assumed because you were monitoring the emails she set up…”

  My skin goes cold as my stomach knots hard. “Finn hacked those emails,” I say flatly. I’d suspected that, but to hear it said out loud… “Looks like I managed to outsmart him though.”

  Elliot is sitting less than a foot from me, but I’ve never felt so far from him. Not even when we hated each other.

  Finn clears his throat. “She is who she says though. Well, I mean she’s not. She’s telling the truth. She made up Minerva Dyne and spent all that time at Corvus collecting evidence.”

  I’d appreciate the show of support more if they weren’t all furious that I’ve finally done the right thing after all this time and released some of what I’d gathered. Or if Elliot—

  My lungs hitch. I’d thought he might have begun to at least trust me some, if not have real feelings for me. But everything that’s been revealed last night and this morning proves it’s all a lie.

  “I didn’t do it for any of you,” I say. “I don’t owe you anything.”

  I say it to all of them, but I really mean it to hit Elliot. It’s not true—I owe him my life, among other things—but I want him to hurt as bad as I do.

  I’ve been betrayed over and over again, just in the past few days, and they all hurt. I won’t let myself crack because of it, but that won’t stop the pain. Elliot turning on me is the worst though. Probably because I was starting to care about him the most.

  If my words do hurt him, he doesn’t react. His mouth flattens, but it’s into his usual frown. His you’re wasting my time frown.

  “What’s done is done,” Dev says.

  That’s true. Whatever Elliot and I had feels very done right now.

  “But we need to get to work on this,” Dev finishes.

  With that, they all rise. No one looks at me or says goodbye. I’ve become invisible, unnecessary. Irrelevant.

  As he’s walking to the door without even a backward glance, Elliot stops as if he’s forgotten something. “Anjie. Arrange for security to take her home.” He gestures toward me, then leaves without meeting my eyes.

  Chapter 27

  Dev has really fucked things up.

  Mr. Mysterious just had to throw that bomb into the middle of everything, sending us all running to secure this thing. It’s a good plan, taking over Corvus and forcing Fuchs out, but he might have said something, anything, while he was doing it.

  I’ve been going back and forth with the legal team for several hours now. They’re all good, top-notch even, but there’s a million and a half details to be ironed out, and they’re not happy about the new sped-up schedule they’re on.

  Neither am I, but too bad.

  My mood isn’t helped by the fact that I can’t stop thinking about Minerva. I’ve been slipping up and calling her that again, but that performance in the meeting was pure Minerva. Smuggling information out to a reporter right under my nose? Also pure Minerva.

  I’m such a fucking sap. I’d left the hard drive because it was hers and the laptop because I thought she was bored. I knew what she could get up to with a computer, and I still left it with her.

  Because I trusted her. I trusted her story that she was waiting for her friends, trusted that she’d tell me if she’d done anything like that.

  But she’s been playing her own game all this time. If Finn’s story about finding this Deena didn’t match up with what Minerva had said about her, I’d suspect her of lying about these friends of hers all along. She wasn’t though. She told me the truth, I offered her my help… and she went her own way in the end.

&nb
sp; That’s what hurts the most.

  Anjie pops her head into my office. “You need anything?”

  I shake my head. “Just more time. And a way to make the legal system move faster than a snail’s pace.”

  “Sorry, I’m all out of spare time.” Her mouth purses. “Minerva got home okay.”

  Right. I should have asked about that. “Thanks. Look, I know you didn’t want to have to interact with her, and I made you. And I’m sorry.”

  She shrugs, very elegantly. “It was fine. I might have been too rough on her at first.”

  I might have been too. But now that it’s all come to this, was I really?

  I close my eyes because I can’t take any more questions without answers right now. I force my mind to clear.

  I open my eyes, focus on Anjie. “Yeah, I… She didn’t really say anything, but I got the impression it didn’t go well. None of her interactions here seem to.”

  Which was the understatement of the fucking year.

  “She really was working against Fuchs all this time?”

  I nod. “Left behind her friends, her entire life, and became Minerva.” She stayed true to her mission through the very end. I have to give her that.

  “Emily Dove.” Anjie tests the name. “Much softer than I would have expected.”

  My jaw clenches because I don’t need reminding. All of Emily turned out to be much softer than I would have expected.

  “I gave her a burner phone,” Anjie says. “In case we need to contact her. She can’t call out on it.”

  Anjie holds out a slip of paper with a number on it.

  I take it from her with heavy fingers. “She’s not a prisoner.” And yet… we took her hard drive. Kept her without internet access. And now we’ve given her a phone that can’t call out. Surrounded her with armed guards.

  Anjie says nothing.

  “I did what I thought was best,” I say. “The situation was unprecedented. There was no right way to proceed.”