Chapter 45
COLE
“What the actual fuck?” Kate asks.
All last night, I was so careful. By force of habit, I locked down my computer when I collected pillows for her, when I grabbed the throw she likes from the chair in her office.
I automatically reviewed every screen I threw to one of the monitors on the wall, reminding myself repeatedly that Kate couldn’t be allowed to see the Winter Reckoning admin screens.
I’ve had these precautions in place for weeks, from the moment I let her enter my home.
But this morning, I fucked up. She moaned when she woke, aching and disoriented, and I sprang into action like some sort of dark savior superhero.
And now it’s time to pay the price.
I cross the room like I’m still the one in charge. I reach for the mouse, so I can close the screen, so I can hide the evidence it doesn’t take a master coder like Kate to read. She bats my hand away, using her forearm, pivoting her body to keep me from reaching my goal.
It would be easy enough to defeat her. I could shove her out of the way. Grip her arms and lift her off her feet. After the past two weeks of conditioning in the dungeon, she’d probably drop to her knees if I bark out one sharp command.
But my wife deserves better than that.
“I can explain,” I say.
“You run Winter Reckoning.”
That’s a shorter explanation than I was going to give her. Fewer facts. A lot less nuance. But I say, “Yes.”
“And you know I play the game as CyberGhost.”
The evidence is there on the screen. I’m through with hiding. “Yes,” I say again.
“And you gave Ice Knight status to everyone else on my team.”
“Yes.”
“You’re a fucking shitehawk.”
“You’re my wife.” I start to explain.
“You gave Ice Knight to MaskedMarauder. To Shaddow. To feckin’ IceKiller and DarkMoney!”
“I didn’t trust you.” That’s part of the explanation.
“Trust?” The word doesn’t sound like English when it rips across her throat. “Who cares about trust? It’s a fucking game!”
“It’s how I find employees for Lone Wolf. I make offers based on how players solve the puzzles.”
“So you’ve hired my whole feckin’ team?” Her voice cracks on the last word.
I’m not sure when I started being able to tell what she’s thinking, without her even saying a word. Kate would feel betrayed if her team had become Lone Wolf employees. But the blow would be a thousand times worse if her team members hadn’t told her, if they’d kept Lone Wolf employment a secret.
But for the first time since this miserable conversation began, something is finally going my way. I can truthfully say, “Not yet.”
She’s immediately outraged on behalf of her fellow raiders. “Why the fuck not?”
“Instinct.” I sigh. “Fate. I don’t know.”
“What’s wrong with my team?”
“You’re being ridiculous,” I say. “You were set to go nuclear if I hired them. Now you want to bully me into giving them an offer?”
“Ridiculous?” She tosses her head like a mustang fighting a bridle. “You think I’m being ridiculous?”
“You’re tired.” I rephrase. “You had a bad night. It’s no surprise you’re getting emotional.”
“Emo—” She cuts herself off before she proves my point. She swallows hard. She jams her hands into the pockets of my jacket, pulling the fabric close around her.
I was wrong before. I can’t tell what she’s thinking. Not always. Not now.
Glaring at me like she’s trying to melt my bones, she measures out her words. “You made every one of the Red Cap Raiders an Ice Knight but me. Why not me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit.” There’s no heat behind the word, just a simple statement of rejection. “Why not me?”
“What do you want?” I ask. “Should I make something up?”
“I want you to tell the truth. Why didn’t you make me an Ice Knight?”
I understand this matters to her more than any other fight we’ve had—more than my rules about cutting, about eating, about staying on the property. Somehow, this drills down to the very core of who she is, of who I am, of what we can be together.
I saw potential in the rest of her crew, and I wanted to study them closer. I made a business decision that has nothing to do with Kate, with who she is, what she believes, how she behaves.
“Don’t lie,” she says.
“I wasn’t going to—”
“There. You’re doing it again. You look straight at me without blinking, just before you lie.”
I have a tell, and my wife’s the one who’s found it. I’m deeply embarrassed, like I’m fifteen again, and she caught me with my hand down my pants.
I wonder if Nutmeg knows, if she’s used it against me forever. I wonder if Shannon knew too, if she had a few seconds’ warning before I told the cops I ran her collection agency con.
Here, now, I close my eyes. I swallow hard. And this time when I look at Kate, I’m aware of every time I blink.
There’s an answer. It’s the truth. A truth. Something I can deliver, careful and precise, like I’m nailing the lid shut on my own coffin. “I don’t like your code.”
There’s a moment when she processes what I’ve said. And then her face betrays her, the way it always does. She flushes, scarlet fury washing out the freckles across her nose. “You what?” she asks.
“I don’t like your code.”
“My code is more efficient than—”
I cut her off. She asked for the truth, and now that I’ve teased it out, I won’t hold back from delivering it. “It’s elegant. It’s beautiful. But you take too many risks. You rely on intuition.”
“My intuition was enough to get Red Cap into Banque Wagner! If Mask hadn’t hesitated, we would have walked off with millions.”
“But he did hesitate, didn’t he? And your code wasn’t robust enough to recover. You’re all emotion. All fire. You have no discipline. No control. That’s why you got into a fight with MaskedMarauder after the raid.”
“I got into a fight with MaskedMarauder because—”
She sees my mistake the same time I do. She’s staring at a screen from Winter Reckoning. She’s learned that I own the game. But I only know about her fight with MaskedMarauder because I monitor every keystroke she’s made within my house.
“How long?” she asks.
“How long what?” My brain has gone into a search pattern, testing and discarding escape routes one by one. I’ll figure this out. I have to.
“How long have you been monitoring my accounts?”
“I’m not—”
“So help me God, I’ll have Da kill you, if you don’t give me one straight answer.”
I don’t know if she has that power. I don’t know if Barry Lynch will order a hit at his unruly oldest daughter’s request, not when the kill would cost him his new-trained hacker lapdog.
But I’m not willing to take the chance to find out.
“You’re in my house. Using my equipment. I have every right—”
“You have no right at all!”
I reach around her, pulling my keyboard to the edge of my desk. My fingers fly, and I’m vaguely aware that typing should calm me down, that I should be slipping into the ice chest where I code.
Instead, every screen I pull up tosses fuel onto the fire inside my chest. “StarCoin,” I say, pulling up her conversation with the Red Cap Raiders. I throw the view to a screen at the front of the room. As she stares, I load another screen with a record of her father’s poor investment.
“I didn’t know,” she says.
“Some unnamed bookie.” Another screen fills with her online chat. A fourth holds her father’s transactions with the same criminal.
“That was before—” she argues.
“NightSaber.”
The data boils up like lava, breaking free from the stony crust I’ve built over weeks. She’s my wife. She’s supposed to be my ally. I throw Barry Lynch’s records across the room.
“Your father’s deep in debt to all three. But you already know that.”
“I don’t—”
Cutting off yet another lie, I wave at the screens, at the ugly proof. “You’re a hacker. My job is to stop coders like you. To protect my clients. To protect your father. I can’t trust you, Kate. That’s why I didn’t make you an Ice Knight. I don’t want you on my team.”
I see the way every statement affects her. I watch her anger crystallize into something harsher, something uglier, something far more brutal.
I wait for her to explode. She’ll curse. Swear. Call me names. Shout at me in English and Irish, emptying the tank until she’s nothing but a shivering, exhausted child.
As she grows hotter, I’ll grow colder. She’ll boil over as I set limits.
I’ll count, or I won’t. I’ll take her down to the dungeon, and I’ll show her why I’m right, why order and logic and control win out every single time.
With all the rage she’s locked inside her, she’ll come harder than she ever has before or maybe for more times. I can do that—for her and for me.
I can make things right.
But this time Kate doesn’t play her role. She doesn’t fly apart, doesn’t spark, doesn’t kindle.
Instead, she pulls all her energy deep inside herself. Her face turns to marble. Her eyes change to glass. When she speaks, her words are so soft I have to read them on her lips. “Control this,” she says. “You broken, soulless robot.”
Precise as a soldier on military parade, she turns on her heel. Her spine is ramrod straight. Her gaze is perfectly level. Her steps are measured with pinpoint accuracy as she carries herself out of my office.