Page 65 of The Refusal

Then she leans closer to me and my eyes flick down to her chest—I just can’t help it—I’m already hard and this conversation isn’t helping.

“How about my mouth all over you?” she says, so quietly I wonder if I’ve heard right. “Hot, wet suction. Licking,”—she hums a little, making me wait—“rubbing that bundle of nerves with my tongue.”

I groan and bury my face in my hands, moving to ease the tightness in my jeans. I’ve had so many fantasies of Jo doing that to me; on her knees in front of me, my fists in her hair: I want to tell her them all. When I lift my head, I find she’s holding her hands in the air and wiggling them in a little victory dance. Hing Ko’s eyebrows are knitted together: I hope to hell he didn’t hear any of that.

“Think I won that round, don’t you?” she murmurs, and I roll my eyes at her.

“You’re a menace,” I say. “I’ll exact my revenge later.”

“You’d better.” She laughs. “Now get your head in the game and explain to me what we’re looking at here.” And she tips her face toward the screen.

* * *

I stretch myself out in my seat and examine the white trims on my sneakers under the table. The three earnest faces sitting opposite me are steady, unwavering. I like the team here; they seem straight, professional.And I’ve got a P.I. digging into their backgrounds.Ugh. This hack is causing me to distrust everyone.

“So, what have we found out so far?” I say.

“Well, we’re pretty sure they got in via a password breach.” Matt’s voice echoes down the line from New York.

“Seriously?” I lean forward, resting my chin in my hands. “Do we think that’s what happened in the US?”

Jo shifts in the seat next to me. “They were in and out and left no clues. We’ve been through mountains of data and not managed to pinpoint it,” she says, making a face that shows just how unhappy she is with that statement.

“Goddammit, we could just be leaving ourselves wide open here. How did you find it here?” I say.

Matt’s face looms large on the screen at the end of the meeting room. “The team’s much smaller, so it’s been easier to look for anomalies in the data. Hing Ko’s done an amazing job on forensics.” Hing Ko beams at me across the glass table. “It could easily be passwords here in the US, Janus,” Matt continues. “I talked to James yesterday, asked him to use Hing’s work to look for anomalies in the US data around the time of the hack.”

“We did change all the US passwords at the time, even though we weren’t sure,” Jo adds.

“Change them again.” I growl. “Matt, I want passwords changed in every office, company-wide.”

“I thought you might say that,” he says dryly. “Bob’s on it. Communication is going out this morning. We’ve got a couple of people lined up here to coordinate it all.”

I nod at this, and Hing Ko is nodding at me quickly. “I can help. We have been very secure with the passwords, Mr. Phillips.” He gives me a faltering smile.

I keep telling him to call me Janus, but he doesn’t seem to settle happily into that. And I get this comment: he’s worried I’ll be pissed.

“All of the passwords have been changed here now, properly generated,” Sonia, Hing’s number two, pipes up from where she’s sitting next to him, and I look at her short black hair and trendy red glasses. I like her, she’s a real straight shooter.

Hing Ko stiffens and turns toward her, frowning. “They were properly set up when we opened the office.”

Sonia shifts in her chair and looks down at her hands, like she knows what people do with passwords, and this isn’t quite the truth.

Jo looks down at her notepad, and I glance over at her, doing a double take at the detail of what I assume to be a drawing of the Hong Kong system. “There were a number of passwords that were outside the password management system.”

Hing Ko’s eyes go wide as he straightens in his chair. He’s not used to this kind of directness. This kind of scrutiny. “If there is a mistake, I will resign,” he says.

I inwardly roll my eyes, reaching out to pat his arm. “Hing. Chill. We’re not losing you on top of everything else.”

My patience is wearing thin. It’s been a long day. I need the staff to be over their worries of making some kind of mistake I don’t fucking care. It’s done. We need to sort the problem in front of us. I stare at Matt’s blond dreadlocks on the screen again.

“I’m thinking there’s a reason that Hong Kong was targeted specifically,” I say and they all look at me, surprised. I try and doodle a cartoon dog on the pad in front of me, failing completely. “What’s here that isn’t anywhere else? Why here?”

“You said this office was new,” Jo says. “It could just be simply that.”

“I know, but they’d have to know it was new.”

“It has not been a secret,” Hing Ko adds. “We got a lot of publicity around Janus Industries opening in Asia. Well-respected US company.” He smiles at me.

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