Page 47 of Ugly Truths
Silas waits for the part that actually matters.
“We haven’t triggered any security alerts that would notify William yet. The obfuscation layers are holding, and as long as we keep operations isolated in the sandbox, we don’t anticipate any immediate red flags. Ben and Corey think we’ll be able to deploy soon and start working on decryption.”
Silas nods again. “Do you have any idea how long it’ll take once you deploy?”
“Depends on how deep it goes,” I admit, biting the inside of my cheek. “If the encryption is static, a week or two. If there are adaptive layers—and I’m assuming there are—it could be a while.”
Another deep, exhausted sigh escapes the man sitting across from me. He leans back in his desk chair, pressing into the side of his temple with several fingers. “Fantastic,” he mutters.
He looks like shit. Not in a disheveled, I’ve-had-a-long-meeting way. More of a something-is-eating-me-aliveway. His skin is paler than usual, exhaustion etched into his face. His usual perfectly trimmed beard is overgrown, and his suit is slightly wrinkled.
Silas Wells doesn’t do unkempt.
I tip my head slightly. “You want to talk about it?”
“No.”
I raise an eyebrow. “It’s not normal for him to get under your skin like this.”
He says nothing, shows nothing.
I shrug. “You two bicker all the time, and the COO demands aren’t anything new.” I watch him closely. “What’s different this time?”
Silas levels me with a glare. “Fuck off, Davey.”
“Sure,” I say with a smirk. Silence settles over us before I can’t stop myself from adding, “Natalie mentioned you stopped by the house the other day.”
His jaw clenches. “Drop it.”
I hum, dragging out the pause. “She said you spent a lot of time in the guest room.”
The hand lying on the armrest flexes once. “I’m telling you.” His voice is low, controlled. A warning. “Don’t push it.”
Of course, I already know why he showed up at my house. As if I needed Natalie to tell me after getting the security notification for movement at our front door. I followed him on our cameras as he went up the stairs, down the hallway, and through the door to the guest room without knocking. He stayed much longer than was necessary for a friendly conversation before leaving, wide-eyed, and not so much as a goodbye to my wife.
There’s no chance in hell he’d tell me what happened, so I’ve been biding my time, but he’s already unbearable. The shame and anger have been radiating off him in waves for two days straight, and there’s no sign of it letting up.
“You could just let it go,” I suggest. Silas’s gaze snaps up, but his incredulous look doesn’t deter me. “See how things unfold. Let nature take its course. Whatever the saying is.”
My best friend blinks at me. “You can’t be serious,” he mutters.
I shrug.
It pains me to admit it, but Silas was happier in the spring. Subtly so. Carrying himself a little lighter, not spending every waking second in this damn building. Whether I wanted to acknowledge it then or not, it started when he began dating Elena.
As for Elena, knowing her story makes her choices easier to process and, if I’m being honest, I like her better for it. She was trying to survive. It doesn’t make anything she did right, but it’s preferable to some of the alternatives I was assuming when Scarlett’s background check came back too clean.
Silas, though, is still wading through it. I barely tolerated Elena when she was Scarlett, so there was no love lost for me, but I’d have to be blind not to see how it crushed him.
My gut says he’d be better off if he let himselfhavethis, even if only for now. Cillian and I agree: without Peter, Elena’s main risk is her technical skills, and right now, she’s being monitored like a prisoner on work release.
My instincts rarely steer me wrong, so I push.
“Holding onto all of that anger isn’t doing you any favors,” I respond, stretching my arm to check the time. “It just keeps you miserable by your own design.”
A spark flares behind his eyes before he barks out a laugh.
“You’ve actually lost your mind,” he says, disbelief dripping from every word. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were conspiring withher.”
