Chapter 18 #2
I tried to put my socials, my website, my paused career, and the rest of it on the back burner and stay alert for anything on the screen that made the clue make sense.
Hours later, having found nothing, with a headache pounding behind my eyes, my stomach growling, and the taste of coffee sour in my mouth, I sighed in relief when Eli shut his laptop and stood. “We’re done. For now, at least.”
“I can’t believe all of this, and we didn’t find anything,” I said, closing the laptop in front of me.
“Sometimes that’s how it goes,” Eli said. “You burn time ruling shit out. Now we know that whatever that clue was about, it didn’t reference any of these files. We’ll keep looking.”
Maddox stood and stretched, his back popping. “Yeah, but I think we’ve got something in those first files you went through—the IP addresses in the communication logs.”
“What did you get?” Eli asked.
“Not exactly sure yet.” Maddox closed his eyes and rolled his neck. “We have to cross-reference it with some other things, but I think we’ve got proof—” His eyes slid to me and then back to Eli.
“Of what?” I asked.
“Not sure enough yet to say, but we’ll know by tomorrow morning.”
I let out a huff of air, realizing that they were going to talk in cryptic circles around me and not tell me anything for what felt like the hundredth time. “You guys know I signed an NDA, right?” I asked, pushing in my chair and rubbing my fist over my very empty stomach.
Eli grunted low in his throat, his eyes narrowed on Maddox, who looked from me to Eli and raised an eyebrow. Eli shook his head.
“This is getting really fucking annoying,” I said, picking up my empty coffee cup and carrying it over to the trash can. “I’m going back upstairs. My bladder is about to explode, and I feel like I’m sweating coffee.”
“Wait up,” Eli said, but I shook my head.
“No, you guys need to have a conversation where you don’t have to talk around everything you don’t want to say in front of me. When you get back, we’ll figure out dinner.”
Eli reached out a hand as if to grab mine, then dropped his arm. “I won’t be long.”
I shrugged and left, not wanting to walk away. I wanted to know what the fuck they were keeping from me. And more than that, I wanted to tuck myself into his side, to borrow a little of his certainty. To just lean a little so it didn’t feel like I was carrying all of this by myself.
But this was Eli’s work. And I was not a client, but not one of them either. And hadn’t I just given myself a lecture about business and pleasure not being the same thing? He wasn’t mine. We’d had sex. Great sex, yeah, but that was all it was meant to be.
Eli wasn’t my emotional support human. He wasn’t mine at all.
At the end of the day, I was dealing with all of this by myself. A few orgasms didn’t change that.
I was glad Alice wasn’t at the front desk when I left. As much as I liked her, I just wanted a few minutes alone.
I was washing my face when my phone beeped with a text.
Going to pick up Indian. Any requests?
Mango lassi. Butter chicken, medium spice, with plenty of naan.
He’d be a while if he was headed out to get food.
I looked down at my phone, thinking. I needed to call my parents.
I’d been putting them off with vague texts, not wanting to worry them, but they were too smart for that to work for long.
We didn’t talk every day, but a few times a week was the norm.
I might as well take advantage while I had a minute. I picked up my phone and dialed.
“Sylvie!” My mom’s voice held both happiness and relief.
Shit. I should have found the time to call before now.
“Where are you? I saw the message on your socials. It didn’t sound like you.”
I let out a long sigh and headed for the kitchen. I needed tea for this conversation. I wanted to protect my parents, but I didn’t usually lie to them, and I didn’t want to start now. Looking for a happy medium, I said, “That’s because I didn’t write it. Someone hacked my accounts.”
“What?” my mother exclaimed, followed by, “Jim, pick up the other phone. Sylvie’s in some trouble.”
“Everything is under control,” I said, wincing at how far I was stretching the truth.
I waited until the click and echo of my father picking up an extension of their landline.
I imagined my mother sitting at the kitchen table and my dad in his den, his ancient plaid recliner tipped back, the cordless phone on speaker sitting in his lap.
His voice sounding as if it was coming from farther away than my mom’s because of the speakerphone, he said, “Sylvie, lay it on us. What did you dig up this time?”
My mom was the worrier, while my dad was more like me.
Glad he was on the line to keep my mom level, I told them a sanitized version of current events, leaving out the fate of my van.
Not only would the destruction of the van we’d built together break my father’s heart, but it would probably scare the crap out of both of them. That part could wait for later.
I was glad I’d made that decision when even my father was unsettled by my getting locked out of my bank accounts. “You should come home, Sylvie,” he said gruffly. “I have plenty of guns and a security system. No one is getting to my girl.”
I stifled a laugh, knowing he wasn’t kidding.
He was a hunter and liked to shoot with his buddies at a local range.
That didn’t put him on the same level as the team at Sinclair Security.
“Dad, I’m in a safe house at the Sinclair Security headquarters in Atlanta, and I don’t go anywhere without one of their people with me.
We’re all safer if I stay exactly where I am. ”
“I don’t care who they are?—”
“When we get off the phone, look them up,” I said. “You’ll feel better, I promise.”