Page 29 of Embrace Me Forever

I tilt my head. “You were in Denver?”

“What do you think?” he replies nonchalantly.

Perhaps he couldn’t find me because he never thought I’d be hiding out in a children’s hospital. Even Magnum P.I. would’ve struggled with that one.

“What else do you want to know, Blake?” I struggle to find what I should say next. I’m methodical when it comes to crunching numbers, but structuring a confession is clearly not my forte.

“You lied about your contract with Obsidian Moon Interactive,” he asserts with unsettling clarity.

A shiver courses through me, but I quickly quell the rising panic. If I told him about Cristo, I might as well tell him about Sebastian—but I’m not there yet. “A friend intervened on my behalf,” I reply.

“And his name?” Blake’s gaze remains unyielding, searching for truth in the shadows of my reluctance.

“Christian Cartwright.” The name comes naturally. One I remember from a piece of snail mail from Cristo confirmingmy fabricated career as a software engineer in the gaming and simulation industry.

Blake gives me an approving gesture as if my answer passes muster. He then continues his questioning. “In that motel room just now, what was the password they sought?”

“The key to a folder containing a backup of my work on the project. They’ve labeled it Project Mock—Mary O’Connor-Knight.”

“Was that your full name?” Blake asks. “It must’ve been significant that Bertram titled the project after it.”

“My mother combined her surname with my father’s when they married, but after he passed away, she dropped it faster than a bad habit and acted like a single woman on the prowl. I lost count of the men who came and went, and I’m a mathematician!”

Blake gives me a look, not hiding his surprise at my rising tone. “You really hate that name, huh? Where’s your mother now?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care.”

Somehow, it feels good that someone besides Anne knows about my mother. She was never faithful, often reducing Dad to tears. He put up with her because of us, his daughters.

Blake adds, “You mentioned a backup folder. What happened to the original?”

“I can only guess why they needed access to it. Perhaps they thought I had hidden additional information in that backup, or the existing data didn’t add up for them.”

“And you’d endure torture rather than surrender?”

“As long as I’m valuable to them, they’ll keep me alive. And I need to stay alive right now.”

“They’ve gone to great lengths to track you down. And it seems, if I may say, your bosses were perhaps obsessed about your work.”

Obsessed is the right word. “One individual in particular—the head of the company, Abner Bertram—had the most interest. He’s ruthless, greedy, and unstable. I made the mistake of beginning the model on a small scale, using his profile. My intention was for the model to fail, to demonstrate that predictions are just that. Predictions. But it backfired.”

“So you were creating an algorithm that could predict his life?”

“Yeah,” I admit. “And it turned out to be pretty accurate. Unexpected details surfaced in the results. Illnesses, accidents, financial fluctuations. Facts about him I hadn’t known.”

He scoffs, a hand on his forehead as he leans back. “I’m not sure if this truth is scarier than my initial assumptions about you. But here’s my truth. I thought one of Hartley Marine’s rivals had paid you to deliver those presentations, then infiltrate our system.”

I raise my gaze for a second, startled by his conjecture. “Oh no, I would never do that. My work is legit. I worked my butt off developing QEOPA, and it’s secure. No one else knows about it.”

He leans forward, elbows resting on his knees.

I continue explaining. “Believe me, those men had no interest in what I offered to Hartley Marine. QEOPA pales in comparison to Project Mock. Bertram tasked me with devising a new series of algorithms, leveraging global insurance data dating back to the 1980s. While some records were clear, others were encrypted. They needed me to decipher everything and update the models using AI advancements, aiming to forecast the insurance sector’s trajectory for the next century.”

“You know Georgia-May, I’m glad I’m not a mathematician,” Blake says. “It’s staggering how much you know.”

“At Bertram, too much knowledge can be lethal. That’s the crux of my dilemma.”

“Billions in insurance dollars on the line, and a man too self-absorbed to see past his nose, convinced you hold the key to his own existence and his empire. You’ve chosen one hell of an adversary,” Blake remarks.

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