Chapter 51
COLE
Megan doesn’t show up.
I’m not surprised. Nothing my sister does surprises me anymore.
I wonder if she ever actually met Pyotr Tarasov. If she ever ran the lonely-hearts scam. If she ever feared for her safety, or if she just wanted to con me out of a hundred grand and another stay at the Four Seasons.
Grifters grift.
The first of May dawns. It’s a cold and rainy morning, all the spring colors blurred to gray. I stare at the date on my computer, and I know it’s important, but it takes me nearly an hour to remember why.
The press has the attached document.
One hundred mill by May 1, noon, or I send again, all redactions cleared.
Today is the deadline for me to keep the world from discovering I was convicted for fraud.
Part of me wants to sit on the sidelines, waiting to see if my blackmailer actually follows through. They haven’t been in touch since they released the redacted document. Maybe they’ve decided I’m not worth their time.
And maybe the sun rose in the west this morning.
I can sit here and do nothing. Let the criminal document hit the press. Accept that my career is over, that I’ll never find a new Lone Wolf client again.
Or I can pay up. Sign over one hundred million dollars.
Even to a billionaire like me, one hundred mill isn’t a trivial amount of money. But I’ve lost more than that on business deals gone bad. On real estate that went down in value. On start-up tech companies that never started up.
One hundred million dollars preserves the status quo—no one learns about my fraudulent past. I don’t have to worry that I’m making a bad decision because I’m distracted by Kate’s absence. That I’m ruining Lone Wolf because I deserve to be punished. I pay, and everything stays the same.
Not everything.
If I pay today, the blackmailer will come back with another demand. That’s how the con works—pressure, pressure, pressure, until the mark drains dry.
Fuck it.
I’m a billionaire. I can buy anything I want.
Anything but Kate, a vicious whisper slices through my brain.
I click the link for the blackmailer’s cryptocurrency account. I transfer one hundred million dollars and turn off my computer for the rest of the day.
But I’m back at work the following morning. Or, rather, I’m sitting in front of my computer, doing what passes for work now.
I keep thinking back to my first clumsy attempts at programming, to the snippets I wrote for Mr. A in robotics club.
I was terrified of making a mistake. I didn’t want to give him any excuse for throwing me out of the club.
I documented every line I wrote, leaving detailed comments so future students could see exactly what I’d done.
I refused to allow myself the luxury of skipping even a single step, of combining two functions into one, of streamlining my work in any way.
I’m not a child anymore. Those old projects are so simple I could write them in my sleep. I do write them in my sleep—every night, as I lie alone in my bed, stretching out in the middle of the mattress, bathed in absolute darkness.
I test myself. I see how few lines of code I can use to write routines I’ve known by heart for decades. I count individual characters, fighting to use fewer each round. The first thing to go is careful commenting.
It’s easy to become obsessed. I turn off my phone for hours at a stretch, letting client requests go to voicemail. This is the perfect opportunity to teach them to respect my time.
I tell Anna not to bother making meals. I’ll grab something from the fridge when I’m hungry. If I’m hungry. Most days, I don’t think about eating until hours after a normal man’s dinner, when I’m already lying in bed in the dark. It’s not worth going back downstairs.
My ground-floor office is haunted. Every time I sit at my desk, I see Kate leashed to the frame of monitors. I hear her murmuring in her sleep. I feel the yawning emptiness in my gut as I watched her walk away.
The gym on the second floor is the only place I can kill the ghosts.
I have a quarter million dollars-worth of equipment—every machine, monitor, and workout system known to man.
But it’s the heavy bag I’m drawn to—wrapping my hands and throwing hour after hour of steady punches.
Each blow focuses my concentration, pulling me deeper into my body, further into my mind.
After a week, I can no longer ignore the splitting pain in my knuckles, and I switch to the speed bag. My muscles burn, and my lungs are on fire. My entire world narrows to that swinging leather bag. My vision tunnels to black.
I stagger over to the inclined bench. My arms are spent, but I can still do crunches, reps of two dozen with a twenty-five-pound weight held across my chest, over and over until I can’t manage one more curl.
Pain permeates my body—my muscles, my lungs, my brain. It’s sharp. Jagged. Pure. I’ve burned off all the inessentials in my life.
When I can finally force myself to my feet, I stumble down the hall. I stand beneath a stinging shower for over an hour, bracing myself against the tiled wall. After, I stare at the idiot in the mirror, the man who can’t raise his arms to towel dry his hair.
I collapse into bed, spread-eagle on the mattress, and I sleep for eight hours without moving. In the morning, I ache—a pain I know will get worse throughout the day.
Which means it’s time to get back to programming. A random number generator. A password manager. A spreadsheet to analyze Lone Wolf business expenses.
I fight to write perfect code.
In the absolute silence of my house.
Alone.