Love Op: A Spicy, Cat-And-Mouse, Thriller Rom Com (Love and Other Jobs Book 5)

22. Kael

Ishould have bugged Mattie with a microphone during lunch. Ever since she’d returned from the restaurant, she’d been unusually obnoxious—even for her. From the oversized, wearable blanket she still wore to the carton of rocky road ice cream she had carried around her apartment while loudly delivering a scathing discourse on the experimental, high-end meal she’d been forced to sit through, Mattie had been unbearably Mattie. Or, rather, an insecure, terrified version of Mattie.

I knew her well enough now to recognize her false bravado when I saw it.

I’d asked Tabitha to dig further into Jonathon Cohen, but the only information available conjured a sterling resume for Mr. Cohen, genius CEO of Elysian Robotics. His company had pioneered cutting edge tech for robotic-assisted surgeries, and on top of that, his joint venture with SynthoCare looked brilliant on paper. With their combined expertise bringing together advanced robotic tech with SynthoCare’s clinical research and trial framework, they were poised to deliver targeted drug delivery systems that would rock the scientific community if they succeeded. Their research into nanobot tech, targeted delivery systems for cancers, and enhancing drug efficacy with robots looked world changing—philanthropic, even.

It was unclear why the venture had been delayed by two years. I knew Mattie had something to do with it, but I couldn’t make myself believe that a father—even one as shitty as Augustus Thorne—would take part in something so archaic as a marriage deal with a successful entrepreneur in his thirties. It was baffling, and there was no evidence that they had anything like that planned. Besides which, there was no reason for Jonathon Cohen to engage in a deal hinged on a marriage to a socialite. The venture was beneficial for them both if it succeeded.

And Mattie had nothing useful to say, of course. She’d gone on and on about clams covered in wax and insisted that she’d been served an eel marshmallow. When I had tried to corner her and weasel some useful information out of her, she’d shoved a spoonful of rocky road in my mouth and told me if I didn’t relax, I would get more gray hair.

Now, we were sneaking out of the apartment building to meet Tabitha and give her Mrs. Thorne’s laptop, which held the slideshow she planned to display in honor of Mattie. Naturally, Mattie couldn’t do anything like a sane person—she had to wear her enormous blanket sweater thing, and she kept making Mission Impossible song noises while I dragged her across the busy street.

“You’re a little cranky tonight, aren’t you?” she prodded.

“I’m not cranky, you’re overcompensating.” I held onto the soft fabric of the front of her sweatshirt, looking left and right to make sure we didn’t get flattened by a distracted taxi driver.

She trailed behind me with her hands in the front pocket of the pink monstrosity, hood up and tripping on the length of the thing. “That’s not very nice. My dick is a perfectly normal size. I don’t need to overcompensate.”

We reached the other end of the street and I turned suddenly, grasping either side of her hood and pulling her face close to mine. “What do you have on under this?”

She smiled like a cat. “Nothing.”

“Behave, or I’m taking it off.”

She gasped, smiling in disbelief. “You’d get me arrested for public indecency?”

“I’ll spank your bare ass in the middle of Times Square if it got you to stop pretending like you aren’t scared witless.” I took her chin between my fingers. “Either tell me what you’re hiding or keep quiet from here until we get back to your apartment.”

Mattie’s eyes softened, glassing over as she drew in a slow breath. But then she shuttered a mask over her emotions again, and reaching up a hand, she mimed locking her lips and throwing away the key.

I sighed, ending it with a growl. “Let’s go.” I led her down the sidewalk to a twenty-four-seven fast food restaurant. Without hesitation, I pushed through the doors with a yellow logo and into the quiet, mostly deserted restaurant. Mattie looked around with exaggerated indifference. Ignoring her, I weaved through the booths, searching for a familiar, tall figure. I found Tabitha where she said she’d be, sitting in a booth in the corner with her laptop plugged into the wall and a carton of fries at her elbow.

She looked up when we approached, and her bouncy black curls framed her face around the ponytail baseball cap she wore. She swiped her gaze away from me to Mattie and then back to me. “You babysitting overtime?”

Mattie scoffed and plopped herself down on the bench across from Tabitha. “That’s insulting, bestie. You know Kael isn’t a baby.”

I had an insane urge to grab a burger and shove it into Mattie’s mouth. Instead, I took the thumb drive out from my pocket and tossed it to Tabitha. “This has Remington’s finds on it. They’re pretty good, actually, thanks to the… er…” I glanced at Mattie’s curious gaze. “Your friends.”

Tabitha had scared the bejesus out of a pair of informants who used to work for Nexusum. I had also tortured them a little, like a year ago. Just a bit. They’d deserved it, and now they were already so terrified of me, they sang pretty songs about where to find the information we needed. Tabitha inserted the drive into her computer. “Good deal. You have Mrs. Thorne’s PC?”

I held it out, and she took the laptop and put it on the table beside her fries. I sat in the booth next to Mattie, glancing around to make sure we weren’t overheard. Fortunately, there was only a pair of teenage boys in the restaurant, and they were on the other side of the room. “Remington coded a virus into the info. He said you need to attach the files to the end of the presentation, and then it’ll glitch to display what he wants instead of the slides.”

“Sneaky,” Tabitha said with an impressed pout of her lips.

“He’s so cute but so scary,” Mattie commented. “Like a Gremlin.”

I cocked a derisive eyebrow. “Cute?”

Mattie gave me a prim sniff. “Cute.”

Tabitha eyed us both with quiet suspicion as she attached a black box to the USB port on Mrs. Thorne’s laptop. “Mattie, open your mom’s computer for me.”

Mattie slid the laptop across the table, opening it so it was between us, and the lock screen popped up. “I don’t know the password, though.”

“You don’t have to.” The other end of the box connected to Tabitha’s computer, and she started the algorithm program that ran through the processor. “This will find the password, but it’ll take most of the night, most likely. You guys can head out.”

Mattie burrowed into her hoodie. “I think I’d rather stay with you.”

Tabitha exchanged another look between us. She fixed a squint on me. “Why?”

“Mattie is lying about an asshole her parents want her to marry, and I’m pissed off about it,” I replied bluntly, scanning the restaurant again.

“I’m not lying. He’s cranky,” Mattie argued.

Tabitha made a disgusted sound. “Get a room, you two. Get out of here. I don’t want your issues distracting me. I’ll text you when it’s ready.”

Sighing, Mattie pushed me until I slid back out of the red booth, and she could shuffle toward the front counter to order food. I stood at the booth, hands in my pockets, and waited for Tabitha to meet my stare. When she did, I said, “She’s in trouble, Tab.”

“Clearly, you’re perturbed by something,” she replied evenly. “But is it possible you’re biased?”

“Biased?” I scowled. “Are you telling me my intuition is off? You know me better than that.”

Tabitha sighed, leaning a dusky brown cheek on her fist. “Ghost—Kael—you haven’t acted normally when it comes to this chick from the beginning. Are you sure she’s in trouble? She seems fine to me.”

I rifled through my memories, trying to reconcile what my intuition told me with what the facts indicated. I shook my head, smoothing a hand over my mouth. “I don’t know.”

“Exactly.” Tabitha returned her attention to her computer. “You’re never unsure. That should tell you what you need to know.”

“You think I should drop it?”

She shrugged. “You’re with her all the time. What could go wrong?”

She had a point. I blew out a breath. “Right. I’ll be back when you’re done, yeah?”

“Yeah.” She darted a look toward Mattie who appeared to be ordering a mini apple pie pastry. “Good luck.”

“I don’t need luck,” I muttered. “I need tequila.”

Tabitha texted me six hours later at four in the morning, just in the nick of time.

Tab:

Finally got it. Unlocked, downloaded, and ready.

Ghost:

Omw

Tab:

Look at you with the cool lingo.

Ghost:

??

After retrieving it from her just outside the apartment building, I placed the laptop back on the end table in the living room where it had been when we’d pilfered it, and with a weary sigh, I headed back to the apartment for the last time. Thank God. I would have rather spent the night with the moody goddess in the room across from mine, but she’d pleaded a headache and said she wanted to go to sleep early.

My bullshit meter had gone haywire, but I hadn’t pressed her. Whatever was going on with Mattie, I would find out eventually. It was hard to be patient—I clearly hadn’t been patient after interrogating her earlier in the afternoon—but I had to try. Whatever plagued her mind and heart would either surface when she was ready, or I’d come face-to-face with the issue. And when I did, I’d wipe it off the face of the earth, because I never wanted to see that look on Mattie’s face again.

I punched the code to her door into the keypad, and the green light from the buttons lit up the dark, quiet penthouse with an eerie glow. Inside the apartment, silence wrapped around the small space, and I wandered over to the electric fireplace that Mattie had left on after watching TV before bed. I switched it off, leaning against the mantle and looking around the sleepy quarters. This close to dawn, the autumn air held a certain chill that always seemed to creep past heaters and insulation, snaking around my ankles and hanging in the air like mist.

This was ghost hour—the darkest moment between night and dawn where specters were most likely to emerge from the shadows to haunt our dreams. It was my hour. I often woke before dawn to slowly join the world of the living, going from ghoul to man and preparing myself mentally to live another day as me. As the person I’d chosen to become and the nightmares I had chosen to live.

Only, I hadn’t felt like that since meeting Mattie. I hadn’t woken in a cold sweat and wondered who I was and what I was doing with my existence. I hadn’t spent hours questioning what I had become or what I would do with the well-honed machine that had become my body once the killing had ended. She didn’t leave any room for thoughts like those.

Blissfully.

My thoughts were consumed by her, by her problems, by her laughter, and by the frustrating mystery that surrounded everything she did. I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt this whole. Not in a very long time, anyway. And certainly, never like this. In the same way that Mattie never did what I expected, she kept my life so unpredictable, I couldn’t possibly fall back into harmful patterns. I felt more. I felt different. I felt… human.

Like my supernatural thoughts had conjured a spirit from the underworld, a shriek filled the apartment. I started, arms unfolding, and swiveled my head to find the source. My ears picked up on a softer sound. Not a yell like before, but a muted cry of distress. Mattie’s room.

The distance between the living room and hers was so short, I was there in one panicked breath. I opened the unlocked door and reached for the light switch. It blinked on, illuminating her disturbingly childlike bedroom. The windows were shut, I detected no other bodies in the room, and nothing looked amiss.

But Mattie cried softly in the middle of her bed, and I realized the sound had come from her—from one of her nightmares. I released the breath I’d been holding, and my muscles eased out of fight mode with creaking joints. This is going to kill me, I thought with a thudding heart as I crossed the room to her. She’s going to send me to an early grave because my heart can’t handle the Mattie rollercoaster. I don’t even want off the damn ride. I’ll probably die frightened and annoyed.

“Turn off the light,” Mattie said, her voice muffled. She’d stopped crying suddenly, and I had to assume that she’d woken up fully from her nightmare.

I backed up a few steps and flicked the switch off. “Better?”

“Yes. Now go away.”

I snorted softly, reaching her in a few strides and sitting on the edge of her white and pink bedspread. “Yeah, right.”

She sat up, her body swathed in heavy shadows. I still made out the halo of her messy hair around her head as she stared at me. “It’s not funny, Kael,” she said, her voice thick with tears. “Get out.”

Ignoring that inane command, I toe-heeled my shoes off and climbed onto the bed next to her. “Come here.”

“Kael,” she protested. “I mean it. I don’t want the interrogation right now.”

“I’m not interrogating,” I murmured, leaning back on the fluffy wall of pillows against her headboard and drawing her cold, shivering body into my arms. I positioned her against my side so her face lay on my chest. “I’m hugging you.”

“That’s weirdly human of you,” she croaked into my shirt. Despite her acerbic tone, she snuggled into me, and I tightened my arms around her.

“I have my moments. Usually around you,” I admitted.

Her ribs rose and fell under my arms as she sighed. Her hands clutched the jersey fabric of my T-shirt, and slowly, her tremors eased away. I reached down and pulled the blankets up around her bare arms because for whatever reason, she’d put on a tank top and short pajama set that was too cold for late October. She angled her head up to me. “This is weirding me out. Where are the hundred questions?”

I shrugged, leaning my head on her upholstered headboard. “I had an epiphany.”

“Which is?”

I flicked a look down at her, and even in the semi-darkness, I managed to snag her gaze. “I already caught you, Bunny. You’re not going anywhere, so whatever has hurt you, I’ll face it with you. If it’s not a problem, then I’ll hold you until the nightmares stop. If it’s a problem, then I’ll maim, threaten, or eliminate whatever it is.”

Her hold on me tightened. “You are a little scary, you know that?”

I smiled, closing my eyes and resting my head back again. “And you’re completely unhinged, babe. You need someone a little scary to handle that.”

I felt her nod against my chest. “True.” After a few quiet moments, she lifted her head again. “What if I don’t know whether it’s a problem or not?”

“Then you tell me just to be safe,” I replied, opening my eyes again and sitting up with her, “and we can decide together.”

“Is this another interrogation tactic?” she asked skeptically.

I pulled her into my lap. “It’s me caring about you.”

Mattie curled up in my lap like a cat, resting her head on my shoulder. She fit so perfectly against me, it was a wonder I’d lived this long without her. After a few beats of silence, Mattie whispered, “He wants me.”

I resisted the urge to go stiff. Three words, and it was like the code to the atomic bomb had been punched into my heart. I was two seconds away from smacking the red button and going nuclear. But I forced myself to remain calm as I asked, “Who does?”

“Jonathon,” she whispered. “I don’t—I don’t understand it. This world, the one my parents live in—it’s twisted. No one does things that make sense to the rational world, and he’s decided he wants to collect people. Me.”

Despite my best attempts to stay calm, my arms tightened around her. “What do you mean collect?”

“I don’t know,” she rasped brokenly. “Wh-when they first brought it up, it was after they’d forced me to drop out of med school. My parents were tired of keeping me locked up. They were scared of me, and I swear to God… I thought maybe they wanted me dead. But then we visited Jonathon, and they changed.”

Dread squeezed my throat so tightly, I could barely find the words to encourage her to go on. “You’re telling me, your parents instigated this thing with Cohen?”

“I think so. They took me to his house for a visit, and they kept talking like I’d be staying for a while. I thought they meant we would be staying, but then they left.” Her voice cut off, strangled with tears. I felt her shift and heard her swallow as she said, “It was the most scared I’ve ever been.”

“What did he do to you?” I asked roughly. This was so much worse than I’d imagined. She hadn’t ever hinted at something like this. She’d kept it buttoned up so tightly, it was like it had never happened at all.

“N-nothing. At first. He just watched me.” She inhaled brokenly, clearly fighting hard against her fear. “He said he was happy to ‘have’ me. He seemed content just to w-watch me. He didn’t even talk to me.”

“What the fuck?” I croaked. “Mattie are you—” I cut myself off. “I’m sorry. Keep going.”

“It wasn’t until I escaped the first time that he—that he brought out a knife.” She tensed in my arms, curling into herself tighter. “I think he just wanted to scare me.”

“So, he did what?” I asked a little too forcefully.

Mattie held up her forearm where I’d first noticed the silver scar running from her wrist to her elbow. “He threatened me. Told me if I left, he would bleed me and turn me into a mummy.” She shuddered. “He kept talking like I was just a—a thing. A collectible. He said he didn’t care whether I was alive or mummified.”

Rage, so potent it acted like a chemical reaction in my blood, burned through me. I shoved it down, determined to let Mattie finish before I found this piece of shit and skinned him alive. “Then what happened?”

“I got away,” she whispered. “My parents tried to convince me to come back. They told me I was ruining a multi-million-dollar deal with Jonathon. That he wouldn’t follow through if he didn’t have me. That was when I decided to go completely dark and avoid phones and social media. I think that’s when they sent you after me.”

“Fucking hell,” I hissed. “And you didn’t think this might be relevant? Mattie, are you serious?”

She sat up, angling away from me to look at me in the darkness that had lightened to silver gray as dawn crept through the windows. It illuminated the moisture on her cheeks and her stricken expression. “It’s not relevant. We’re taking them down, aren’t we? He won’t care about me anymore if there’s no deal to be made. If there’s no money, then there’s no deal.”

I took her by the arms and gave her a little shake. “Are you being intentionally obtuse? Of course, he’ll care. Men like that, they don’t care about money. They care about winning. If he wants you, then he will fucking have you unless someone puts a stop to it.”

Mattie’s face crumpled. “I know, I just—if you knew, you wouldn’t have let me do this.”

“Damn right, I wouldn’t,” I shot back angrily. “Mattie, hiding this wasn’t just reckless. It was dangerous. You don’t know what kind of man you’re playing with here.”

Her throat bobbed. “I know what he is.”

I stared down at her, too consumed with fury to find the right words. She stared back, my beautiful disaster, with her hair disheveled and brown-sugar eyes glassy with tears. I’d always known that her flippant disregard for safety, for reason, had scarred roots buried deep in something dark, but this? This was far darker, far more twisted than I could have imagined. I’d figured that she’d grown up alone. Maybe her parents had been unkind or negligent. But she was being trafficked. By her own parents. It was too horrifying to fathom.

Mattie’s eyes did a worried dance over my features. “Say something.”

“You don’t want me to, trust me,” I replied tightly.

“Because you’re mad at me?” she asked, her shoulders wilting.

I laughed, low and dark. “Mad. That’s what you’re worried about? That I’m mad at you?”

That lit a fire in her, and she straightened, rolling to her knees and pinning me with a teary-eyed glare. “I’m sorry, what should I be worried about?”

“Nothing,” I said honestly. “You shouldn’t be worried about a goddamn thing. Because after I humiliate your DNA donors in front of their peers, I’m going to drain their accounts into sex trafficking charities until they have nothing left, and then I’ll let the authorities have at them. They can imprison whatever is left.”

Her mouth hinged open slowly. “Oh.”

“Then I’ll bring you Jonathon’s dick in a cute, little wooden box so you can burn it.”

Mattie blinked. “Um.”

“And I’ll ruin anyone who makes you look like this,” I emphasized, taking her soft face between my hands, “ever again. You shouldn’t be worried about my anger, or what those monsters plan to do with you, because I’m right here with you. And if you’d trusted me earlier, I would have told you that.”

She covered my hands with hers. “It’s not your fight, Kael.”

“You’re pretty smart, Bunny, but that’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever said,” I said dryly. I smoothed tears away from her cheeks. “You’ve been my fight for the better part of a year.”

“And you love it,” she repeated with mocking solemnity.

A smile pulled at the corners of my mouth. “Against all reason, I do. And you’re safe with me. Are you letting that sink into your thick, stubborn skull?”

She stared, sobering again. Her lips quivered. “Yeah.”

I pulled her closer to me. “Yes?”

She nodded. “Yes. I believe you.” She leaned her forehead against mine, and with our knees touching and breath mingling, she whispered, “Admitting I needed you felt like losing.”

I shook my head, rolling my forehead against hers. “You can’t lose with me, Mattie. You won every part of me a while ago.”

She gusted out a laugh briefly, and then she climbed back into my lap, burying her face in the crook of my shoulder. I pulled her close, holding her with a foreign kind of desperation that felt suspiciously close to fear. She snuggled into me, fitting perfectly in my arms like she always did. “So, now that you’re pissy, are you going to help me finish this thing tomorrow?”

“Oh, we’re finishing it,” I said with dark confidence. “And then some.”

“I knew you were a good person.”

I hugged her tight, and I felt my expression harden. I wasn’t a good person. I was a bad person, and the people who had fucked with Mattie were going to get a first-hand demonstration.