Page 36 of The Shadow

I pull my hand away slowly. “I need to do this on my own,” I say softly and his eyes darken again.

“Your own?” He steps closer to me. “You’re not doing this on your own, Aspen. There’s no way in fuck I’m letting you?—”

“Letting me?” My brow knits together. “Harvey, I’m not asking you to… I’m demanding it,” I say calmly. “I’m not saying I’m doing this all on my own, but right now, I am. You asked me to trust you and that’s what I need from you right now.”

“Fine, but you’re not leaving that apartment.” He points toward my door. “How long?” He starts walking me toward it. “How long do I have to be without you?”

I look up at him, my knees threatening to give out the way he’s looking down at me right now. He runs his lips over mine gently, back and forth a few times before kissing me. The kiss grows instantly heated. His hands in my hair, his hard length pressed against me as he commands every aspect of my mouth. When he pulls away, we’re both panting, our foreheads resting against each other.

When he unlocks my door and opens it for me, I step inside, offering him a small smile before closing the door behind me. I close my eyes and lean against it, taking in several deep breaths.

“You’ve got this.” I nod my head. “You can figure this out.”

I lock my door and walk back to my bedroom, falling to my knees to open the bottom drawer of my desk where I stuffed the thumb drive.

“Why would he incriminate himself like this?” I stare down at the drive, rolling it over in my hand. “He wouldn’t, there’s no way.” I slowly pull myself up to sit in my chair, signing in to my computer before picking the drive back up. I hold my breath, praying that I’m right as I plug it in.

I scan it for viruses first but it comes back clean. There’s only one folder on the drive. I open it and see a video. My stomach drops and rolls. I grab my trash can just in case but I can’t walk away. I can’t let this man have control over me. I have to know what did or didn’t happen to me.

With a shaking hand, I slide my mouse so my cursor hovers over the video, then I hit open.

The screen is black but I can hear the sound of shuffling over the microphone. Slowly, the black fades to a flesh color when I realize that someone’s hand is covering the lens and they slowly begin to pull it back. The image comes into view, a man fuzzy and out of focus and then just as quickly, it adjusts and Connor is sitting in a chair, somewhere I don’t recognize. He has a smile on his face, that slimy one that stretches wide and shallow across his face.

“I bet you wondered how I was going to get away with it, didn’t you? You didn’t actually think I handed you a video of myself committing a felony, did you? Actually”—he leans forward in the chair, chuckling—“let me rephrase that… You didn’t actually think I touched you, did you? That I wanted you?” The way he says it is filled with disgust.

“No, no, no.” He shakes his head. “You were just an easy pawn. I knew the second you looked at me you were my mark.” His laughter is cruel. “All I had to do was merely suggest it to you and you were too scared to open the drive, weren’t you?” He stands up slowly. “In the end, I’m not the one who actually committed a crime here. It was you and now”—he walks right up to the camera, crouching in front of it so his face is right in the screen—“you have no leverage. There’s no video, no assault, no trail.”

He fiddles with the image of the camera, the screen going black before he comes back one more time. “Oh, and before you wreck your brain trying to figure out why, I’ll at least spare you the courtesy of that and tell you. It’s just business, nothing personal.”

The screen goes black and the video ends. Tears spring to my eyes and my stomach continues to swirl and flip-flop. I’m relieved and confused at the same time. Anger rushes up through me so fast and hot I’m afraid I’m going to scream so loud the entire building will hear it.

“Think, think!” I stand up and pace my room, my brain running through multiple scenarios, trying to figure out what I can do with this information, this video.

I’ve got to have him by the balls now. He didn’t expect that I would watch that video. I laugh out loud to myself. The asshole is so arrogant he actually thought I would be too scared to even open the drive, let alone fight back.

“Jaxson,” I whisper his name. A name I haven’t said in almost seven years. “No, I can’t. I can’t involve him again. I promised him after things with my mom…”

My entire life I’ve been quiet, shy, reserved. All things that are true about me, but they weren’t things that came naturally… They were beaten into me from a young age by a man who should have protected me.

My father.

The only person who knew, the only person who got to see the real me, the side where I wasn’t afraid to be confident, to be myself was Jaxson. We met when I was nine. He moved into the trailer next door and for the first time, I didn’t feel like I had to explain my situation to him because like my family, his was also dysfunctional and broken. His dad was barely home and when he was, he was drunk, stumbling around trying to pick fights with the authorities when they’d show up and try to talk him off another ledge.

But unlike me, Jaxson didn’t have a mom to try and protect him or pack his lunches. It was just him and his dad, so most of the time it was just Jaxson all alone in that trailer. That’s where I’d find him, lying on his back on the living room floor, watching one of those lights that turns your ceiling into the sky.

We learned about the constellations that way. We also learned that we had a lot more in common then, confessing some of the trauma that we currently experienced at home. Nothing was off-limits with us. For the first time in my life, I finally felt like I was understood.

That’s when I learned about computers, codes, hacking, and so much more. Jaxson would show me everything he’d learned in after-school program he was fortunate enough to get into. Neither of us had computers so we’d sneak away to the local library, practicing things we learned until finally at twelve, we both got banned for hacking into the main system of the library.

We’d also confide in each other about our dreams of running away some day and our even bigger dreams of going off to college. Actually, that was Jaxson’s dream. I wasn’t brave enough to dream that big. Kids like us didn’t go to college… but somehow, we both managed to do just that.

I sit back down in my chair and try to think through how I can do this on my own. I know I can’t just march into his office with the drive, telling him the jig is up and I won’t be helping him with his financial fraud after all… Then again, why couldn’t I just do that?

What’s stopping me from marching into his office and confronting him face-to-face on Monday morning?

I smile at the thought, imagining the look of shock that would register on his face when he realizes he doesn’t have the upper hand anymore. But it seems too simple.

“He would fire me,” I say to myself, thinking about the mountain of medical debt I’m still paying off since my mom’s death. There’s no way I could find a job that pays as much as this without any experience, or at least experience I can put on a resume. My only saving grace with getting this job was that like Connor said, I was a pawn so it didn’t matter to him that I was coming in with no experience. I’ve barely been in the job for four months; a company would wonder why I left so abruptly with no references and that’s if Connor didn’t retaliate in some way.

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