Page 134 of Rules of Association

That was the kicker. Ceci wasn’t really the only one who knew I wanted to build my own company someday. The first had been my mom. She had been there when the dream was born. A dream born after the model of the woman herself. A mix between what I thought was the best part of me and the best part of her. And the response I got…

We’ll. Fucking. See.

And ever since then, I’ve been living life one foot in each direction. The direction of my own dreams and the direction of the ones dreamed up for me.

In middle school I was in the robotics club but also on junior varsity. In high school I got a job at a computer store, but also interned in my family’s accounting department. In college I majored in Computer Science and Analytics but double and triple majored in Business Operations and Finance. We teased on Clint all the time for being the way that he was, but really I was the worst of them all. Because all the while I was supposedly chasing my own path, I’d been waiting for permission from others to do so.

Waiting on approval to fully live my life.

I shook my head out of the memory. “I’m going to be enough for one of us, Mom. And I think the timer’s out on it being you.”

I saw her open her mouth to say something else, but I was already looking at my older brother instead. Without words, I nodded at Clint and he nodded back. We understood each other.

I would take care of this. And then I would start taking care of me.

Chapter Twenty-nine

CONNOR

Despite the room being extremely familiar, it was dark in a way I had never seen it before. The smell of cigar smoke permeated the air, but that was all too familiar too. All of this was, and that’s what made me feel sick.

I swallowed as I stepped inside, shutting the door behind me. Down the long line of the room, I could make out a desk at the end, half shaded in light from the nearby window.

“Ah,” a deep voice reverberated from the direction of that desk. It stopped my progression, causing my sure steps to falter. I must have stopped completely, because at the end of the room the silhouetted figure that had been lounging in the chair turned slightly, raising an eye in my direction expectantly. “Vamos. No te preocupes.”

Don’t worry?Well, that was going to be hard considering the fact that, in my hand I was harboring the damning evidence of this summer’s little hacking excursion right in front of the culprit himself.

It had taken me days holed up in my computer room to actually track them. Hours poring over past breeches and hits in my security system only to find out, the reason I hadn’t been able to find the outside threat in all this time was because the outside threat was me.

Well, me in a sense. My own IP…from years ago. So many years ago, I had forgotten it even existed.

And there was only one person who could have access to that now.

At first I thought it was Mom. It added up perfectly. Her recent adamance about my role at the company had seemed sudden and almost obsessive. And while she’d always been tough, she was never tyrannical…but on second thought—she'd never had the time to fully focus all her attention on us before. Maybe now she'd decided to use that extra time to finally force her sons to do what she wanted. But the thing was, mom didn't have the finesse or the patience to run a secret scheme against her own company behind everyone's back. If she wanted to sabotage me, she would just do it to my face.

She was sort of like Ceci in that way.

No, it wasn't mom, and the errant thought that it could be, departed my mind almost as soon as it surfaced. Which just left...

"Siéntate, mijo," he instructed. "Nosotros tenemos mucho de qué hablar.”

Stepping up to the clean wooden desk, two large leather chairs directly across from it, I was momentarily stumped. It was one thing to suspect; it was another thing entirely to confirm that the man behind the voice, behind the desk, and behind this whole scheme, was my father.

“Papa—” I started but didn’t know where to go from there. So many questions ran through my head at once. How? When? For how long? But most of all I just wanted to know one thing. “Por que?”

Turning in his own leather chair, he finally faced me. And to my surprise he looked no different. He didn’t look evil, or changed, or suddenly this person I didn’t know or trust. He still looked like my dad. Yellow brown skin that freckled where he caught the sun most as a child. Light-brown eyes that he passed down to all of his children. Dark alabaster hair that was starting to salt around the ears. And that same mild expression he always kept. No matter what was happening, no matter how bad or good, he always stayed this same constant calm.

That calm remained intact as he nodded an insistent gesture toward the seat across from his desk and repeated, “Siéntate, Connor.”

With lead weight in my feet, I did. Moving to sink into the large wingback chair across from my father with measured care, my eyes met his and for a long moment we just stared. Then my eye caught onto something dark and clunky sitting wide open in the corner of his desk, and I scoffed.

“Is that what you’ve been using this whole time, Papa? That old thing?” I asked, surprised to see one of my old computers from high school displayed open on his desk.

He smiled, his closed lips merely lifting at the corners as he looked fondly between the open laptop and me. In Spanish he started, “Did you know you first built something like this when you were eleven?”

Despite the pit in my stomach and the rapid, nervous beat of my heart, I smiled a little too. “Yeah. I remember.”

He nodded, gazing back down to the laptop wistfully. “This isn’t one you built. You grew out of that phase quickly. But thisisa very special device to me, mijo. Know why?”

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