Page 26 of Promise of Destruction
It’s hard not to stare at her as she walks away, but I turn to face my employee. As soon as the door shuts behind Soren, the stocky guy folds his arms across his chest.
“What?” He demands, abandoning the formality he should be using to regard his boss—or rather, his former boss.
“We have a very strict anti-harassment policy. You’ve stepped over the line. Congratulations, Kit. You are the example for the rest of your co-workers about whatnotto do.”
His mouth drops open, immediately filling with excuses. “You can’t be serious.”
“I assure you I am quite serious.” I lean back in my seat and regard him coolly, wondering whether he has any sense of self-preservation.
When he opens his mouth again, it clears up any doubts I had about that.
“No.”
He says it like a petulant toddler, crossing his arms over his broad chest.
“No?” I nearly chuckle but manage to reign in my amusement.
“No.” He agrees. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Something tells me HR would disagree. Particularly when I give them the file I’ve already had my people compiling on you… all the stuff that you didn’t disclose in your application.” I tut my tongue and shake my head. “Thank you for your service, Private. Unfortunately, you sullied the good name of the three hundred ninety-eighth battalion with a dishonorable discharge. You’re lucky the Army deals with their own. I doubt a jury of your peers would have sent you off with a slap of the wrist for what you did.”
His eyes narrow on me, like he’s trying to decide how much I know.
All of it, obviously.
“Jenny was my girlfriend.”
“I don’t care if she was your government-sanctioned wife. If she didn’t want to have sex with you at any point, it wasn’t for you to decide that it didn’t matter. And if she didn’t want to have an abortion, she shouldn’t have been driven to the border and forced into the back of a whore house to be held down and have her baby ripped out of her womb. And she shouldn’t have been left alone in that seedy motel to bleed to death with an infection.”
His jaw ticks as he seems to contemplate arguing any of the facts I’ve just spilled. Even if he hadn’t made an inappropriate comment toward Soren, I’d have cut him loose. The only reason I didn’t take care of him in the first batch of the merger was because he had been there longer than anyone else and that had made me willing to give him a shot, to try and determine if the information I’d gotten my hands on was biased or falsified.
What a mistake that turned out to be. He’s not worth the time it’s taking me to talk this through with him.
“I know everything, Ken.” I tell him, waving the back of my hand at him in a show of my dismissal. “You’ll be lucky to get a job flipping burgers for a worn-out Alexander Hamilton passed to you beneath the table.” I laugh. “The only thing I don’t know about you, Keith, is who you blew to get this job in the first place.”
His mouth opens and closes like a damn fish, and combined with his red face, I can’t help but laugh a little.
“Right,” I stand, fastening the single button of my jacket with a flick of my hand and tucking my notes under the opposite arm. “Take care, Cody.”
The door is almost shut behind me when I finally hear him speak. The sound is desperate, hilarious.
“It’sQuinton.”
eighteen
Soren
Ipressmyshakinghands under my thighs, trapping them between my legs and the chair in a futile attempt to make them stop shaking. But it does nothing to ease the anxiety pulsing through me, nor does it assuage the flight or fight response I’m suppressing.
The adrenaline is nauseating, but I can’t calm down. Not when I’m considering doing something as stupid and dangerous as taking a job offer from a murderer—a murderer who seems bent upon revenge after the hit piece I published on him a few days before.
Declan Evers is a murderer, but he’s also rich. Like,fabulouslyrich. He comes from old money, the kind that passed through the hands of the Vanderbilt’s and Kennedy’s, the kind that the Federal reserve was built to house.
It’s terrible to admit that I may be swayed by whatever he can offer me—I’d never sacrifice my dignity for any sum of money. At least, at one time I’d thought as much.
But that was before Vin died, before I was faced with the idea of having to sell the house that he’d been so proud to bring mehome to. That was before I was a twenty-five year old widow with no degree, no talent, and no hope for the future.
I’d love to walk out and leave him waiting, almost as much as I’d love to sit here patiently waiting for him to present me with an offer that I’d barely grace with a glance before I walk away without looking back.
