Page 68 of Perfect Order
Because I’m starting to understand the sentimentality of the woman just beyond my reach, I ask, “What did you do with her piece of the carpet?”
She looks away. “The last I know, it was hanging in a frame in my office. I’m certain Ivan’s had it removed and shipped to my parents.” She puts her food to the side and leans her head on her folded arms.
My ears prick up, even as my heart aches over her obvious pain. “Who is Ivan?”
After she collects herself, she mutters, “Ivan Forfa, Castor’s chief data scientist. Sometimes friend, often a pain in the ass. Overall, a solid employee with creative ideas.”
I jot down his name and make a note to have him run through Hudson’s systems. “Where did you meet him?”
“MIT. He was in a few of my classes my senior year. Pissed him off he couldn’t catch up to my GPA.” Her voice holds a note of smugness.
“You know, I did look you up. I assume certain elements are true,” I remind her. Once Leanne informed me of who she really was, I wanted to see how much of that was available through a Hudson background check. I had one pulled and dropped into the file, explaining it away as, “There might be something in here that could lead us to the answers we need.”
I was wrong. As she expected it would, on paper, Leanne came off as the young, brilliant CEO of a successful software firm. There’s nothing in her dossier that would trip anyone performing a deep background investigation of her extracurricular activities. So, either she’s right about her sister’s death being something to do with Kylie, or it’s buried here in one of these contracts.
“Of course there are. I just do special things with these.” She wiggles her fingers in my face.
Yeah, I know what I’d like her to do with those. To keep myself under control, I clasp my fingers behind my head. “So riddle me this. How did you not manage to graduate valedictorian of your class? Who in the hell is possibly smarter than you?”
One breath, two. Then Leanne topples sideways in stitches. “Oh, God, Kane. You just did the best imitation of my dad.”
Disgruntled, I mutter, “That wasn’t exactly what I was going for.”
She rights herself and declares, “I’ll tell you exactly what I told him. I didn’t need to be valedictorian. I already knew what I was going to be doing with my life. In fact, I was thrilled to remind him I was graduating college with quite the hefty nest egg between the collection of bug bounties and the software I’d already designed. Plus, well, there was the other thing,” she concludes.
Right, the government work. I flip open the file next to me, and my eyes bug out. “You were a millionaire at twenty-one?”
“It’s not uncommon. People do remarkable things to earn money. Some are athletes and earn sponsorships. It wasn’t too much longer before Kylie was singing and garnering the attention of the media. Success requires hard work and luck.”
And her image fades away as I recall a dull metal barrel pointed at my chest. My head drops before I mutter, “And sometimes it’s helped along by cheating, lies, and outright deception.”
“Hey!” she exclaims indignantly.
My eyes flick up to meet hers. She’s leaning up on her knees, and her hands are on her hips—a modern-day Valkyrie ready to go to battle. “It wasn’t meant as an insult to you. But the real world, Crash, isn’t ones and zeros. It isn’t a computer program to be manipulated for gain. It’s warfare. And in the sociopolitical mess soldiers like me were left to clean up, sometimes saying you made a mistake doesn’t make everything all right.”
My breath rasps out as she stares through her screen into my soul. For long moments, she doesn’t say anything, and I think,Fuck it.I’m about to call it a night when her soft voice asks, “What caused you to join the Marines, Kane?”
Not what caused me to leave.
“I went to school on a NROTC scholarship. Up until the time I got there, I was certain I was going to go Navy.”
“What school?”
“NC State. And let me tell you, for a boy from a flyover state, living somewhere I could go to Myrtle Beach for spring break was the shit.”
She smiles but doesn’t interrupt me further. “Semper Fidelis. Always faithful. It was my eternal commitment to protect not only this nation but the people I fought alongside.”
“What feels different?”
“If you’d asked me this a month ago, I’d have said my honor.”
“What changed that?”
I pause to think about the necessity of the work I do, the bond the team I work with has now, and admit, “Me. I suppose the only thing that’s changed over the last few years is I let go of the pain and resentment.”
I thump myself against my heart. “Something happened on my last mission, which made me question who I was here. It took me this long to realize I wasn’t the one that changed, even if I’m no longer in uniform. But you know what’s helping?”
“What?”
