Chapter 8
Ty
I pushed open the door to Alex Richards’s office. Alex sat behind his massive mahogany desk, already on the phone, gesturing for me to take a seat. The floor-to-ceiling windows behind him showcased the city skyline, gray clouds hanging low over the buildings.
“George, I’ve got Ty here now,” Alex said into the speakerphone. “Let’s get him up to speed.”
George Mercer’s voice crackled through the speaker, and I could hear the tension even through the distortion. “We’ve got a problem.”
Of course we did. For three days, Charlotte and her team had been working their asses off to get caught back up with the countermeasure. I should’ve known things wouldn’t continue smoothly. “What’s the issue now?”
“Our intel indicates a terrorist cell is putting the Cascade Protocol on the black market.” George paused. “In ten days.”
My stomach dropped. Fuck. Ten days. That timeline changed everything.
“That’s not enough time,” I said. “Charlotte’s team just had to restart the stabilizer code development three days ago.”
“Then they need to work faster.” George’s voice carried that particular FBI brand of authority that brooked no argument.
“Right now, it’s just opening for bids, but if it’s sold in ten days, the damage that could be done is catastrophic.
We need that code finished before the Protocol goes up for sale.
Once it’s out there, we’ll never be able to contain it. ”
Alex rubbed his temples. “The team is already working as hard as they can. Charlotte’s been working eighteen-hour days. She’s running on fumes as it is.”
“I don’t care if she needs to work twenty-four hours straight. Put the needed pressure on her to make it happen. Whatever it takes. Threaten her job, her clearance, whatever motivates her. But get me that code.”
I recognized the edge in George’s voice—not cruelty, just the weight of responsibility crushing down on him. The man was carrying the burden of potential disaster on his shoulders, and it was bleeding through despite his professional facade.
Alex shot me a look across the desk. We both knew Charlotte wasn’t going to respond to threats. Hell, she barely responded to normal conversation.
“We’ll handle it,” Alex said finally. “But George, you need to understand—Charlotte Gifford isn’t like other computer scientists. She’s…unique.”
“I don’t care if she’s the Queen of England. Get it done.” George’s voice softened slightly. “We’re doing everything we can on our end to figure out who’s behind the sale and prevent it. But if we can’t smoke them out, we have to have that countermeasure.”
“Understood,” I said. “We’ll get it done.”
“Ty, I need you to stay out there if you can. I know that you’re almost already at the two-week mark, but…”
“Consider it done. At least until the countermeasure is finished.” I definitely wasn’t going to add to the stress by bailing now.
“Thanks.” The line went dead with a click that seemed to echo in the large office. Alex leaned back, the leather chair protesting like it had opinions.
“Well,” he muttered, one brow ticking up, “that was about as warm as a tax audit.” He got up and started pacing, as if each step he took would present the answers.
“He’s scared.”
“He should be. If the Cascade Protocol gets out…” Alex didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.
I stood up and walked to the window, looking down at the street below. People went about their lives, completely unaware that their safety might depend on one exhausted genius finishing her work in time.
“George doesn’t know Charlotte. Hell, I barely know Charlotte. But I know enough to agree with you that traditional threats aren’t going to do much.”
Alex was quiet for a moment. “Vertex was lucky to get her. MIT tried to recruit her for their research program. Stanford wanted her for their think tank. But she chose us.”
“Why?”
“Freedom, I think. We leave her alone to work at her own pace, in her own way. No committees, no bureaucracy, no politics. Just the work.”
“And she’s never let you down?”
“Never. Not once in five years.” Alex joined me at the window. “But she’s not like normal people, Ty. I don’t mean that in a bad way. She just…operates differently.”
Tell me something I don’t know. “How so?”
“She doesn’t have much of a social life. Actually, scratch that. She doesn’t have any social life. Darcy might be her only friend, and she just joined the team about three years ago.”
I thought back to the handful of times I’d seen Charlotte interact with her colleagues—polite, professional, but always keeping a buffer zone around herself. Even with Darcy, who clearly wanted to be her BFF, Charlotte treated the friendship like it was radioactive.
“Family?” I asked.
“Only child. Both parents deceased.” Alex’s voice softened. “She’s definitely been alone since she started working here.”
I exhaled slowly. “That’s not an easy way to live.”
“I think it’s the only way she knows.” Alex circled back to his desk, shuffling through papers like he might find the magic answer in the margins.
“In terms of getting her to work faster, I could call her up here. We could try the hard-line approach. Scare her, like George said. Threaten her job, her clearance. Make it clear what’s at stake.”
I pushed off the window frame, the glass cool at my back. “That’s a terrible idea.”
He glanced up, one brow raised. “You have a better one?”
I thought about Charlotte on the rooftop garden a few days ago—the way her voice had caught when she admitted she hated weekends, the faint cracks in her armor she clearly didn’t want anyone to notice.
Not hardness. Fear. A woman who’d built walls out of code and lab coats because she didn’t know what else to use.
“Let me talk to her,” I said. “Alone. No threats, no pressure. Just…a conversation.”
Alex leaned back in his chair, studying me like I was one of his lab rats that had just asked to redesign the maze. “You think you can get through to her?”
I crossed the room, dragging a chair closer before dropping into it. The damn thing creaked under my weight. “I think threatening her will make her shut down completely. She’s already running on empty. Push her over the edge, and we’ll get nothing.”
His fingers drummed a restless beat against the desktop, eyes narrowed. “And if your approach doesn’t work?”
“Then we try yours.” My jaw tightened. I hated the idea, but I wasn’t blind to the stakes here.
For a long moment, the only sound was that damned drumming. Finally, Alex exhaled and gave a single nod. “Fine. But Ty, we need results. Fast.”
“I know. Trust me—I know.”
I stood and headed for the door, my mind already working through approaches. How did you tell someone who was already killing herself with work that she needed to work harder? How did you add pressure without breaking someone who was already at their limit?
I left his office and headed back to my temporary desk.
I’d been watching the lab for days now. Twelve-thirty was when everyone in the lab headed out to lunch.
Charlotte never went. They’d probably asked her at some point but didn’t bother to ask anymore.
Instead—if she remembered to eat at all—it was by taking her little lunch box and her laptop into the break room by herself.
She wouldn’t be by herself today.
At twelve twenty-five, I positioned myself where I could see the break room entrance.
Sure enough, at exactly twelve-thirty, Charlotte appeared, looking even more exhausted than yesterday.
She carried a small metal lunch box in one hand and her laptop in the other, shoulders hunched like she was carrying the weight of the world.
Which, in a way, she was.
I waited until she’d settled into her usual corner spot, unpacking her lunch with the kind of precise movements that suggested routine was one of the few things keeping her grounded. Then I walked in, trying to project casual confidence despite the knot in my stomach.
“Mind if I join you?”
Charlotte’s head snapped up, her eyes widening behind her glasses. “I… What?”
“It’s lunchtime. You’re eating lunch. I thought I’d eat lunch too.” I held up the sandwich I’d grabbed from a deli on my way in this morning. “Unless you prefer to eat alone?”
“I don’t prefer it,” she said quietly, then seemed surprised she’d admitted that. “I mean, I’m used to it.”
“Used to and prefer are different things.” I pulled out the chair across from her, moving slowly like I was approaching a spooked animal. “May I?”
She nodded, returning her attention to her laptop screen, fingers flying across the keyboard even as she unwrapped what looked like a homemade sandwich.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
“Error logs from this morning’s test run.” She took a bite of her sandwich without looking away from the screen. “There’s a recursive loop in the stabilization sequence that’s causing memory overflow.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“It is.”
We sat in silence for a moment. She continued typing one-handed while eating, completely absorbed in her work. I noticed she’d cut her sandwich into perfect triangles, arranged her apple slices in a small container, and had cookies in a separate compartment of her lunch box.
“You make your own lunch every day?”
She glanced up, suspicious. “Yes. Although I don’t always remember to eat it. Why?”
“Just curious. That’s impressive. I usually just grab whatever’s closest.”
“If that’s a strategy that works for you…”
“Usually, it works.” I unwrapped my own sandwich—chicken salad from the deli. “What do you have today?”
“Turkey sandwich.” She paused, then pushed the container of cookies toward me. “Chocolate chip. I brought too many.”
I took one. Store-bought, but good quality. The kind that came from the bakery section rather than a package.
“Thanks,” I said after the first bite.
She shrugged, still focused on her screen. “They had them at the grocery store. I grabbed extra.”
“Smart thinking.” I reached for another. “With six kids, there never seemed to be enough cookies to go around.”