Page 7 of Scars He Gave Me (Bratva Crime Syndicate 2)

“Just me?”

Leila shrugged. “She knows me already. It won’t be bad. Pinky promise.” She’s aiming for a reassuring tone, but my stomach rolls nonetheless.

I don’t like telling strangers, business contacts or not, about “me.” I keep the distinct parts of my life compartmentalized.

Work is work.

Alvin is Alvin.

Home is home.

But there isn’t much I won’t do to make sure Sentinel Security Corp succeeds, and there isn’t anything I won’t do to get Leila to stop harassing me into compliance with her latest devious plans.

So when I nod, Leila smiles like she’s won something substantial.

“Fine,” I grumble.

It’s not like I have a choice. We’ve got a lot riding on this, so we need to knock it out of the park. Francine’s mega-corporation, Dunlow International, is going to make us a force in the online security world. That means, if Francine says, “Jump,” all I should be saying is, “How high?”

Leila grins again, clearly over the moon with how compliant I’m being today. “Faaantastic. So let’s practice talking about you!” She pulls a stack of notecards from her pocket, pitches her voice in the best mock ‘concerned client’ tone she can muster, and says, “What do you do outside of work?”

I retort immediately, “Oh, nothing much. Crush coal into diamonds, scale tall buildings in a single bound. Sometimes I rescue kittens from trees.”

She scowls. She doesn’t need to say anything—I already know my sarcasm is extremely not appreciated.

I shake out my hands and sigh. “Okay. Why don’t we try this: ‘When I’m not at work, I spend time with family and friends.’”

Her nose wrinkles even further. She looks like one of those hairless cats that rich old widows always seem to love in the movies. “You sound like one of those vapid beauty contest contestants. Try to be more organic.”

Organic? “Like without pesticides. I got it.” I nod and bite my lip to stop from smiling because I know it’s going to drive her crazy.

She rolls her eyes. Any harder and she’d be looking directly into her frontal lobe. “Just be natural. Like you’re just having a conversation with a friend.” This is her area, her specialty, the reason she’s the one in charge of accounts. She has the business sense and the social skills to read people and know how to win them over.

I … uh, don’t.

“Okay. Just having a conversation. I can do that.” I deep breathe, and remind myself of the importance of this meeting. When a billionaire client asks to meet the software designer, that designer straps on her eBay-purchased Manolos and her borrowed Prada purse and she meets the client.

“Talk about your book club or how you love playing golf on Sundays. Don’t be so vague. She likes details.”

“But I shouldn’t mention my pole-dancing class, right? That’s a no-no?” I smile because she’s so serious right now and it’s making me nervous. Her cocked eyebrow and pursed lips make her look like tech-company Barbie in the pre-political correctness era: long blonde hair, implants in her boobs, lips, and cheeks, and an haute-couture wardrobe that the royal family or the Real Housewives would be jealous of.

“Ignoring that. Take number two,” she sighs. “Aaand … action.”

She repeats the question—“What do you do outside of work?” This time, when I answer—“I like to cook and read, and I just took up knitting”— she smiles. “Perfect. Moving on. How did you get into technology?”

I’m fairly sure Mrs. Dunlow doesn’t want to hear the actual truth: about my crippling shyness or the fact that my only friends for the first thirteen years of my life were a cat named Cougar and a dog named George, until my seventh-grade computer science teacher decided to make me her pet project. So I fudge the details a little bit.

“I had a teacher who taught me that if I had an art project due, even if I couldn’t draw, I could design a program to do it for me. And then the sky was the limit.”

Sort of true, and reasonably endearing, right? Most importantly, it’s light, fluffy, and doesn’t make me look like a loner and/or psychopath.

She smiles. “Excellent answer.”

The unspoken part still lingers after I’m done speaking, though. The part about how, if it wasn’t for being able to lose myself in the computer, in a world of 1s and 0s where everything goes the way it’s supposed to, I wouldn’t have survived everything that happened back then.

As usual, I push those thoughts away. I’m stronger than the girl I once was.

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