Chapter 11
ELEVEN
SHAE
I exit my office bathroom to find Melissa sitting in front of my desk.
I’d been looking for her desperately, asking everyone on the floor where she went, marching down to HR, and even calling her roommate, all to beg for her to come back.
The reason why?
The sticky note I found on my desk when I returned from my break at the bakery.
In the same handwriting I’d recognize anywhere, Storm Sandoval wrote:
Sorry about hacking your email. It was the only way to get on the schedule. Don’t take it out on your assistant. Good help is hard to find.
- S
After reading the message three times, I logged into my iMac and navigated to my email, only to find that “I” sent Melissa an email at two o’clock in the morning demanding she add a conference with Storm and his team at nine a.m.
The problem? I most certainly never sent that note.
The other problem? Melissa immediately responded, despite it being the middle of the night, confirming that she’d gotten everything sorted.
Every CEO should have a Melissa, and I just fired the only person keeping me from spinning out into the galaxy.
“Oh, thank God,” I blurt out, feeling myself lose control. It’s three p.m., and I’ve been beyond frazzled all day. Not even Gloria’s delicious almond-flavored petit fours could save my mindset.
“Melissa,” I say, rushing to her. By the way her eyes widen, I know I must look a mess—or maybe it’s that my emotions are all over me right now, despite all my trying to shove them in the box in my psyche labelled “Not Fucking Right Now.”
I move to my desk and almost go to the seat behind it but decide otherwise.
“Can we sit over here on the sofa?” I ask, and Melissa’s eyebrows shoot up.
“Ms. Rivers,” she says with a sigh, but I cut her off.
“Please,” I say, my voice soft because goddamn I’m so fucking tired. “I… I want to apologize to you and get some details…and hopefully beg well enough for you to continue working for me. But I don’t want to do that with an office desk between us.”
Melissa’s lips twitch for a second before settling back into a neutral expression.
“All right,” she draws out and moves over to the sitting area.
I blow out a breath and slump onto the love seat; Melissa takes the armchair.
“Okay, so first, I owe you a big apology for behaving the way I did. There’s no excuse for why I berated you like that, and I promise never to act like that again.
” I pause and take a deep breath. “The man, Storm Sandoval…he’s the father of my children.
I haven’t seen him in eight years. So, his arrival definitely sent me for a loop. ”
Melissa’s jaw drops, and it takes her a second before she recovers.
“Oh, my God! I would have never scheduled it, but you asked me to.”
I cringe.
“Yeah, that’s the other thing to apologize for. Apparently, they hacked my email account and sent the email to you. There’s no way you could have known. You were just doing your job. Too well, might I add. Why were you up responding to my emails at two a.m.?”
Melissa stares, her eyebrows drawn as she frowns.
“Wait. They hacked your email?” She looks livid, and I lean back into the couch, a little startled.
“Yeeees?”
She goes really still, but then looks up at me and says, “Interesting. I’m sorry that happened.”
Okay, I’ve hit my limit of strange shit for today.
“Melissa, please don’t leave. You’re doing such a great job. I know I’m hard on you, but?—”
“Ms. Rivers?—”
“Liv,” I say. “Please call me Liv.”
“ Liv, I’ve thought about it, and….”
“And?”
“You need me, so I’ll keep working with you. But I have requirements.”
On the inside, I smile because if I were in her shoes, I’d have a list of demands, too.
“Okay, state your terms,” I reply.
Melissa straightens her shirt before reaching into her bag and pulling out a notepad.
“First, I would like a title change from Administrative Assistant to Executive Assistant. Second, I require a 20—” she pauses, thinking, “—no, a 25% raise. Finally, I need more access to you.”
“Done on all three things,” I reply. “But you already have more access to me than anyone else.”
Melissa shakes her head.
“That’s not true. You keep me on menial tasks. Sure, you have me in the room with you on many things, but not all, and the fact is, you need someone you can trust in your corner to tell you the truth. Because everyone else here is bullshitting you.”
She seems shocked at how much information she’s just divulged, but I don’t let her back down.
“Say more.” I keep my tone light, even though stress and worry start to creep in. Melissa’s talking about people bullshitting me…but are they betraying me, too?
Her lips twist again, and she takes three deep breaths before saying, “The Keystone deal. It’s not right.”
I blink rapidly, a cold wash of anxiety slapping me in the face.
“What makes you say that?”
There’s more lip-twisting.
“Melissa,” I press, my tone hardening but not from frustration with her, but more from fear of what she’ll say next.
“I’m going to tell you something, and I don’t want you to freak out. Okay? And if you fire me…again…after I tell you, that’s fine. But it’s important you understand what’s going on and who I am.”
My eyebrows go up and then slam down, and I know if I were looking at myself from the outside, I’d laugh at how quickly my expressions change.
“I’m…a hacker. Not for bad and not ever to damage Orisun or any of its interests. I mainly…um….”
I make a choked sound, looking her up and down. Sweet Melissa is a hacker? What?
“No, keep going. I’m not freaking out. I’m confused, but— Keep going.”
Another breath.
“I only go after the bad guys. The last few years, I’ve been breaking into cells that peddle child sexual abuse material. It’s a deep, dark web. There’s so much of it. And if I can get some of it off the Internet and get those perverts thrown under the jail, I’ll have done some good in the world.”
She looks so fierce as she says this, her jaw hardening, her eyes turning flinty, that I realize there’s so much I don’t know about Melissa.
I’ve always suspected that Melissa has some kind of inside scoop on things because she always manages to bring me information that no one else could access.
But…sweet little Melissa is a computer hacker?
I shake my head to focus.
“That’s excellent, Melissa,” I reply. “But bring this back to Keystone. Why do you think the deal is bad?”
“Right,” she replies. “So… Okay, so first, you need to get a new head of IT because your systems are so porous. But I installed a few patches to keep things secure. Like, if I hadn’t, I’m sure the FTC and SEC would be all up your ass before the year is through.
Anyway. I installed a patch, and when I did, I found you already had a bug.
I squashed it, but the line went back to someone tied with Keystone. ”
I nod, listening intently, even though that’s a bombshell I wasn’t expecting.
At all.
God damn it all to hell if Storm is actually telling the truth.
“And you’re sure? What were they looking for?” I ask, not sure of the inner workings of what she’s talking about, but following along enough to know this is bad.
“That’s the thing, they weren’t looking at anything. They hadn’t pulled any data that I could track, but their plant was tied specifically to your servers. And only your servers.”
Wow. Fuck. Fuck.
My eyes go to my desk and the sticky note Storm left behind, then to the digital clock on the wall.
The tick of the second hand feels like the countdown on a bomb.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” I rasp, feeling sick.
“I-I didn’t know how. I left the information for the head of IT.” She rolls her eyes. “The man’s an idiot—I flagged it for him and he didn’t even blink. He needs to go.”
I grin, even though I don’t feel at all jovial.
“Are you sure you don’t want his job?”
Melissa makes a pinched face.
“Oh, God no. Managing a team of sad workers dealing with complaints about computer logins and printer screw-ups? No, thanks.”
I hum in response, and we fall silent.
“Liv,” Melissa says, “I can be an asset to you if you let me. You do so much on your own, and you’re amazing at what you do. But I worry about you, because I don’t think you realize how many people have knives positioned at your back.”
I look at her, stare into her eyes. She’s still holding back information.
Just then, Zane knocks on the window next to my door, peeking his head inside.
I’ve been avoiding him all day, primarily out of embarrassment over my behavior toward him in the conference room, but also from the fact I know I’ll have to explain myself to him, and I want to put that conversation off for as long as I can.
“Liv,” he says, his face serious. “Got a minute?”
I could push him off for another few hours or even another day, but the way his jaw tightens tells me avoidance time is over.
“Yeah,” I say, blowing out a breath. “Come on in.”
Zane enters the office and stands in front of my desk, silently staring at Melissa. My assistant looks at me with an unreadable expression.
“Melissa, thank you for your grace. Can we pick this conversation up tomorrow? Why don’t you head out for the day?”
Melissa smiles, but it looks more like a grimace.
“Sure thing, Liv,” she says, heading for the door. Right before she leaves, she turns and gives Zane a hard look before catching my gaze as well.
She doesn’t trust him, but Zane is my business partner, my friend. What would it mean if I couldn’t trust him, either?
The door shuts behind Melissa, and Zane looks me up and down before sighing and pointing to the seating area Melissa and I just used.
He sits on the sofa, and I finally unfreeze my body and sit in the armchair across from him.
“So,” he starts, a wry grin on his face. “Busy day?”
I cringe, not wanting to play at whatever this is.
“That was Storm Sandoval,” I say. “I’ve told you about him.”
His eyebrows come down in a severe frown.
“What? Why was he here? Does he want to see the kids?”