Page 90 of The Refusal

“He’s been a mess these last two weeks, Jo. Don’t throw him away.”

Throw him away? “I’m not, really … I … What about Aubrey?”

He’s still frowning. “What about her?”

“There was an article about her leaving her husband; she was in Janus’s apartment. She came to a tech event with him. I thought—”

“I don’t know about all that,” he interrupts, tilting his head, “but I can tell you the only woman he’s interested in is you. He doesn’t do this often, Jo. He’s pretty demanding in his life, of himself; he has to think something is worth it to go all in. I’ve only seen him like this about one other thing: his company.”

His eyes roam my face for several pregnant seconds as his comments sink into my skin. Is that true?

Then he nods, growling, “Now quit staring at him and stop distracting me. Let’s work this thing out.”

49

Janus

Aloud shout echoes over the floor and my head jerks up to find Fabian hunched over the back of Jo’s chair, watching her screen. A huge smile is splitting his face, and they’re almost touching. Jo’s sleepy face in his T-shirt blurs before my eyes and I clench my fists, muscles tightening. My feet carry me to where he’s standing before I’ve even thought to move.

“Genius, woman,” he says and high-fives her, before hurriedly sitting down. “Okay, we haven’t got long before they realize. Let’s put that code in there.”

“You in?” I say, willing my body to relax. He’s my best friend, and I’m being an asshole; they’re sorting my system out for fuck’s sake.

He nods, and I know better than to distract them further, standing behind their chairs as they work on the code. I’m being possessive, but I can’t tamp it down. Jo’s got some map of their servers around the world on the screen. My eyes flick to the software she’s using to do it. How is she doing this so fast?

After about twenty minutes, she puts her hands in the air, waving them around.

“Oh yeah!” she says.

“Run it!” Fabian says, swinging toward her, and the gleam of excitement in his eyes is contagious.

“As soon as it starts, they’ll know we’re in there,” Jo says, eyes fixed on him.

His eyes swing to me, then James, as he stands, looking over the screens. “James, how well protected are we elsewhere? Can they access other parts of the system?”

He shakes his head at him. “We’ve isolated all the bits we can,” he says.

Fabian comes to stand with me behind Jo, and the code starts to run and spread through their network, infecting their servers one by one. This is fucking complicated; they’re all over the world—howdid they do this so fast? After about five minutes, my phone vibrates, andblocked numberappears on the screen. Turning it around, I show it to Fabian, who nods at me. So I press the handset symbol, put it on speaker, and lay it down carefully on the desk between them.

A heavily accented voice growls through the line: “You need to stop what you are doing.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Jo start some call-tracing software on her laptop.

“So do you.” Fabian’s face is a storm waiting to erupt, jaw tight. His voice vibrates, the earlier elation evaporated.

Some voices mutter in the background and then the voice says, “We will get you eventually, Fabian Adramovich. We will not forget.” And the line goes dead.

Jo shakes her head. “I recorded it, but nothing else.”

We all stare at each other. I run my hands through my hair. “Jesus. What now?” I say.

“Keep running the code, Jo,” Fabian says, not taking his eyes off the monitor for a moment.

Minutes tick by as we watch code stream up the screen.

“Oh, here we go,” James says, and we race around to his desk as his fingers fly over the keyboard. “The backup system is back.”

“We’ll need to run some checks—see how they got in, what they’ve been doing.” Fabian views me apologetically. “I don’t underestimate how hard that will be, Janus. The system is big, and it’ll be like trying to find a needle in a haystack; they’ll have covered their tracks.”

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