Hostile Attractions Read online

  I don’t need to detail for them who that might be. They know Corvus’s biggest clients as well as I do.

  Logan sets down his mug, his mouth slack. “Well, it should be her problem. Not yours.” But he doesn’t sound so certain now.

  “You could go to jail too, right?” Callie asks. “If you help her and the government comes after her.”

  “Possibly.” I stare at the floor, my mind going through the defenses I might use. “There is attorney-client privilege. Even the worst people in the world are entitled to legal advice.”

  “She’s not your client.” Logan gestures angrily. “Come on, don’t involve yourself in this. Tell her to fuck off. It’s what she’d have done to you.”

  “Hello.”

  Minerva’s soft voice from the top of the stairs has all of us going rigid. I don’t know how much she’s heard, but even Logan’s last few words were more than enough.

  She comes down, still in my T-shirt and sweats, her feet bare. Her dark brown hair hangs around her shoulders. I’ve never seen it like that before, loose and dry and looking oh so soft.

  “He’s right.” She stops on the last step and crosses her arms as she stares at us. “I wouldn’t have helped you. Before.”

  When her gaze falls on Callie, her cheeks go pink, then red, and her gaze cuts away. Guilt comes off her in waves until she gets her expression back under control. But her cheeks keep their color.

  I couldn’t sleep last night, and not only because the couch is too damn small to sleep on. She was upstairs, in my house, in my bed. Only a few feet away. My hyperawareness of her was because of what she’d done, how much I loathed her—but there was also something more there. Something I wish wasn’t.

  And then there was the hard drive, sitting next to my laptop, a silent black box that held a bomb. I have no idea what to do with the information she’s brought, even though I spent most of last night thinking about it, running over all the various legal issues in my head.

  None of them came out well for her.

  Logan’s expression remains angry even in the face of Minerva’s guilt. But my brother doesn’t really forgive and forget, especially when it comes to Callie.

  I also don’t forgive and forget, especially when it comes to my brother’s wife, which is why Callie and I aren’t exactly friendly. I can’t forget how badly she hurt my brother, and even though they’ve reconciled now, forgiveness is hard. I’m trying though.

  “At least you admit it,” Logan says. “So why should we help you?”

  Minerva’s eyebrows jerk up. “We? I don’t remember asking you for anything.”

  Callie claps her hand over her mouth in shock. “Oh my God. You haven’t changed at all.”

  Minerva shakes her head. “No, I’m still the same old Minerva even if I have left Fuchs.” Her gaze cuts to me. “What did you tell them? Everything?”

  She doesn’t look betrayed… more like she expects me to dump all her secrets out before my brother. Like it’s only what she deserves.

  It is, of course. So why the hell didn’t I do it?

  “He didn’t tell us anything.” Logan’s mouth is flat. “Something about professional ethics.”

  “We’re discussing if I should allow you to contact your friends from here,” I say, not wanting her to think I’m on her side. My holding back isn’t that at all.

  “And the verdict?”

  “We haven’t reached one yet,” Callie says softly. “Do you… do you need some clothes? I can go—”

  Minerva shakes her head so sharply Callie flinches. “No. I don’t want any of the cameras to see you bringing things in here. Like women’s clothes.”

  “Cameras?” Logan scrubs a hand over his face. “Jesus.”

  Minerva mapped out those cameras—they’re all there because of her. It’s a good reminder that she’s no innocent. Not a bit.

  “You can email one person,” I say. “Just one, and I want to see the message and the email you’re sending it to. That’s the only offer you’re getting.”

  Her expression never flickers. It’s almost as if the woman I met last night was a mirage, a figment of my imagination. There’s not even a hint of give in the woman before me. “And if they don’t respond?”

  I shrug. “You have three days. If they contact you by then, good for you. If not…”

  I look meaningfully at the drive. I wouldn’t take it from her—at least I’m not planning to—but I won’t hesitate to fight dirty with her.

  Minerva doesn’t accept or reject my offer. She simply watches me as if measuring my resolve.

  Logan, impatient as always, breaks in. “You haven’t explained why you came here of all places. Why not straight to this friend? Or even a hotel?”

  Minerva keeps her gaze on me. “He watches the hotels. All of them. I guarantee you, Fuchs is searching every hotel in this city and in a hundred-mile radius. He’d find me in an instant.”

  “But not here?” Logan is deeply skeptical.

  “He’d never look for me at Elliot’s,” she says. “Not in a million years.”

  “He also wouldn’t look for you at our house.” Callie makes the offer in a reluctant tone. “And there’s more space there. You wouldn’t even have to see us.”

  Callie clearly does not want to see Minerva, not here, not in her house, but she has to make the offer.

  It’s a kind thing to do, and I haven’t always been kind to Callie.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say gruffly. “You guys have enough to worry about with the baby. It’s only three days.”

  Logan sends me a grateful look.

  “Besides,” I say, “I want to go through this hard drive more.”

  There’s a flicker of surprise in Minerva’s gaze. She thought that one little peek was going to be enough for me. Well, if she’s going to stay here, she’s going to pay, one way or another.

  “Can we see it?” Logan tosses the question offhand, but Minerva isn’t fooled.

  “No,” she says coolly.

  “But Elliot got to?”

  She doesn’t respond to that. “Fine. I agree to your terms, not that I have much choice.”

  “You always had the choice to walk away,” I remind her. She could grab her drive and be out the door in seconds and never see any of us again.

  The look she sends me is both defiant and pained. “I never had that choice.”

  Chapter 6

  I breathe a sigh of relief once Logan and Callie are gone. Just a small one since Elliot is here, large and looming and way too much physically, but at least I feel less guilty around him.

  What I did to Callie, I had to do. Fuchs right to my face told me to find the biggest, most expensive bouquet I could and deliver it to Callie along with his congratulations on the worst day of her life.

  Was I trembling, deep inside, when I did? When I shoved those flowers into her arms and sneered at her? Did I feel any sympathy? After all, her secret identity had just been exposed and in the most humiliating way possible. It was my darkest fear come to light.

  I don’t think I did any of those things. All I can remember was how steady my hands were when I passed her the flowers, how I made my tone so perfectly tart, so fake cheery, and how pleased I was that Fuchs would be pleased.

  That was it.

  Elliot shuts the door behind them, taking a moment to stand there with his hand on the knob. He convinced them to leave again, saying that he’d be just fine alone with me. That I wasn’t likely to knife him or anything.

  I heard everything they said downstairs, from their greetings all the way to Logan advising Elliot to tell me to fuck off. I can’t say I was surprised Elliot called in his brother—I was only surprised he didn’t call in all the Bastards. They stick together very tightly, which Fuchs discovered to his eternal fury.

  But I still hesitated to confront them. Partly because I was feeling guilty—a strange thing to feel after five years of numbness, like an arm or a leg or my entire body was aflame with pins and
needles as sensation flooded back through me—and partly because I wanted to see what Elliot would do. The drive was sitting down there, under his watchful eye, no password protection on it. He could have done anything he wanted with it.

  He protected my secrets. That was the biggest surprise of all. He’s horribly uptight, so maybe it was just a flicker of conscience or ethics or something that stopped him… but the gesture mattered to me. He’s not on my side, but it felt like he might have been in those few moments.

  “So?” He turns from the door, pins me with a hard look. “Ready to write that email?”

  The sooner that’s done, the sooner I can be out of here. I’m astonished he gave me three days. I was expecting a countdown of hours, with me getting tossed in the canal once it reached zero.

  I grab the waistband of the sweatpants, pulling them up so I don’t trip. “Sure.”

  I’m actually not. There were four of us at the beginning of this, but I’ve had no contact with the other three for years, for obvious reasons. Once I was in at Corvus, I couldn’t be talking with people from my old life and blowing my cover.

  I have their old emails, phone numbers, but I have no idea if they still work. These people aren’t on social media, which makes them harder to track down. Face-to-face in the open, without cameras or microphones, is the way they prefer to do things. It’s safest.

  I sit down in front of his laptop. “Is this machine running the encryption program?”

  “You mean the one January had to design to stop your boss? Yes.”

  Arne had been so furious when that program had been released. The spyware he’d put on everyone’s phones hadn’t been exposed, at least not publicly, but Pixio putting the encryption on their phones basically rendered the spyware useless. I’d been sent off to limit the damage and punish those Fuchs held responsible.

  January is now dating Mark Taylor, who’s another Bastard. And one of the people I had to punish was Grace Li—she’s currently not allowed into the country. But she’s also engaged to Paul Tsai, also a Bastard, so she seems to be doing just fine.

  And then there’s Ramona Blythe. I put her brother in jail, although I didn’t know he was her brother when I did it. She’s also dating a Bastard—Finn Braden, who released a virus into Corvus that destroyed a very valuable surveillance program we were going to sell to every police department in the country. And several national governments.

  I gave them the information they needed to get that virus into Corvus, although they didn’t know it was me. I don’t think that’s enough for any of them to forgive me, and why should they? The things I did to them are unforgivable.

  All I ever did to Elliot was sneer at his legal abilities, and he can’t stand to even look at me. The rest of them are going to be ready to carve me up.

  And Fuchs… he’ll have the cruelest, coldest punishments waiting for me if he ever finds me.

  “Good,” is all I say as I try to hide all these thoughts running through me. “I don’t want this intercepted.”

  In a few minutes, I’ve set up a burner account on a faraway server, routing a throwaway email address through a maze of computers, the better to hide where it’s coming from. I’m a little rusty since I haven’t written any real code in a while. Fuchs has a ton of talented programmers; he never needed me for that.

  “There.” I open a new email message. “Do you want to watch over my shoulder? Just in case?”

  Elliot frowns. He doesn’t like being teased, although I suppose I’m being too mean to be truly teasing. “I don’t trust you.”

  As if I need to be told. “That’s why I asked if you wanted to watch.”

  Whoa, that sounds much dirtier than I meant. Any level of dirty with this man is not appropriate, and that was several levels of it.

  I duck my head and start typing away, not waiting for him. If he wants to watch, he knows where I am. And thank God I didn’t say that aloud.

  There’s no space for him to loom behind me though—I’m sitting with my back to the wall. He’ll have to slide into the bench across from me… or slide next to me.

  My eyes never leave the screen, but I feel him move. The air shifts and slips over my skin, warmed by him. The hair near my cheek stirs, whispers across my face like a caress.

  And then he’s motioning me over and sitting right next to me, arm to arm, thigh to thigh. There’s space of course—it might be a booth, but it’s a luxurious one—except Elliot redefines space. What should be ample becomes not enough and too much.

  It’s because he’s so tall and his shoulders are so broad, and I have to stop thinking about this. I’ve stopped typing because it feels like he’s stealing all the oxygen. Oh, and my brain has stopped working.

  Minerva would never fall for this. But I don’t feel like her right now.

  “I’m writing to a friend,” I say. “One I can trust.” I point to the screen, although all there is to see is the email address. But he’s making a mental note of it, and he’s definitely going to search out everything he can about it. I wouldn’t expect anything less from him.

  My fingers hover over the keys since I can’t think of what to write. Or at least how to put it in a code she’ll understand without revealing anything to anyone who might intercept this. I’ve decided to try my one email on Deena. She was the steadiest of all of us, besides me. That’s why we decided I was the one who’d go undercover—I was the one who wouldn’t break.

  Elliot jerks his chin at the laptop as if to say Get on with it. His scent hits me as he does.

  I can’t help my deep, appreciative inhale. He didn’t change his sheets before I crawled into them. I don’t think he even thought of it. The linen smelled of soap and musk, exactly like he smells sitting next to me. I dreamed of that scent—I was bathing in it, in his shower, in the dream. It was the best shower of my life.

  This doesn’t feel like the best moment of my life though, with him so close and my stomach in a double knot. My pulse is vibrating sickeningly through my fingers, making them want to tremble.

  I pull air in through my nose, flex my fingers. I’m out appears in the message window. Need a meeting place. Here—have no transportation. And soon.

  It’s short, blunt, almost like what a man would write. All the better to hide my identity, although I wrote emails almost as curt as this when I was at Corvus. Something like that from a superior, one who was at the right hand of God like I was, and a woman too, scared people. They’d think they were in trouble somehow. And I used that fear to my advantage.

  Elliot shifts next to me, the table vibrating under my elbows as he does. “That’s it?”

  “Does it pass inspection?”

  “It seems short. How will they know it’s you?”

  Five years is a long time. I’ve almost forgotten who I used to be, which doesn’t bode well for Deena remembering.

  “She’ll know,” I say.

  “She?” He pounces like a cat on a bug.

  Shit. I didn’t mean to give that away. “Or he,” I lie. “I’m not sure which of them will see this email first.”

  “So there’s several of you? In whatever scheme this is?”

  I determinedly don’t meet his eyes. This interrogation wasn’t part of the bargain. “Is the email okay? Can I hit Send?”

  There’s a beat where I sense him preparing another question, maybe a whole series of them. “If you want to waste your one shot on that, go ahead. Although you could have just gone to the library to send that.”

  My skin crawls as I remember just how many cameras Corvus installed in and around every branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Civic-minded people go to the library, groups congregate there to plan to make the world better. Of course Fuchs would want to keep an extra close eye on that.

  “Fine.” I hit Send, and in an instant the email is gone, fluttering through the ether like a sparrow made of ones and zeros.

  I wait for Elliot to move, to let me out, but he doesn’t. I could elbow him, but that would
require physical contact. Bad idea.

  “You worked for Fuchs for five years.”

  “You googled me. I’m flattered.”

  “Before that, you worked at a chip maker. And before that, a mobile phone manufacturer. Nothing exciting or splashy. All very middle-of-the-road, stodgy companies.”

  He’s searching for something, but I’m not sure what. I actually didn’t do any of those things—we seeded the internet with fake facts about Minerva, an employee profile here, a LinkedIn connection there. Enough to make Minerva real but not enough for anyone to get suspicious about. She wasn’t supposed to stand out because Fuchs doesn’t want anyone in his company to attract attention.

  “Right.” I drum my fingers on the table as if I’m impatient to end this. “And before that, a computer science degree from UCSD.” Not a great school but a good-enough one. Again, exactly what Fuchs was looking for, even though he went to Stanford.

  And again, that was not what I’d actually done. I started a CS degree at Berkeley, then dropped out with a year to go. There hadn’t seemed much point in finishing, not when I was learning so much more in the real world.

  I bet if I told Elliot I’m a college dropout, he’d faint dead away. He probably thinks anything less than the Ivy League is slumming it.

  “I’m just trying to put the pieces of you together in my head,” he says. It’s not a kind or even curious tone. He sounds like he’s going to disassemble me as soon as he can after. “Where do these friends come in? And what in you made you leave in the first place? You enjoyed obeying Fuchs’s orders. A lot. Don’t deny it.”

  I can’t. I suppose I could argue that it was Minerva who liked it, not me… but that’s not the whole truth. Power is addictive, like any other drug. And too much of it can make you sick, like any other drug.

  “I told you,” I say quietly, looking at the table, “one day I just couldn’t take it any longer. These friends, I knew them before Corvus. They’ll help me get this information where it needs to go.”