Linden
Quentin Rusk, my oldest friend and a pain in my ass by mutual consent, waits in the vestibule between my legal call and board prep. He asks, "If the vote vanished tomorrow, would you still want Aubrey?"
I stop with my hand on the inner door.
The office behind me is set for the next meeting. Packets out. Water poured. All the instruments of corporate murder arranged in straight lines.
Quentin leans against the opposite wall, looking too fucking entertained for a man who just walked into Manhattan traffic and lay down. "That's not a complicated question."
"Fuck you," I tell him.
"There you are."
"I have nine minutes," I growl.
"You have nine minutes because you designed your day to prevent anyone from getting a blade between your ribs." He checks the time. "Consider me goddamn municipal decay. Slow, inevitable, expensive to ignore."
I force a smile. "Charming."
"Answer," my friend grits.
I take my hand off the door handle. That's a mistake. It gives him the room he wants.
Quentin's eyes stay on mine. "No mother with a knife under the napkin. Aubrey Bell walks in tomorrow as a woman with a day job and no strategic use to you, no goddamn lever to pull. Do you still want her?"
The answer is already in my mouth.
That's the humiliating part.
I can argue with nearly anything. Market assumptions, legal exposure, governance models.
But this one just sits there.
"Your premise is defective as shit," I say.
Quentin shakes his head. "Christ, Linden!"
"The vote's not just going to vanish..." I stall.
He throws up his arms. "Fine. The vote gets hit by a bus."
I grin. "Votes don't just get hit by buses."
"Work with me, you miserable motherfucker," Quentin growls.
I sigh. "If the board issue resolved tomorrow, the marriage instrument would still govern the goddamn minimum term and dissolution procedure."
Quentin shakes his head. "Listen to yourself."
"Hey, I'm answering," I say defensively.
"No," he says. "You're hiding in clauses because the real answer has fucking teeth. Twenty-two days left in the public window. You used to talk about that number like a goddamn deliverable."
"It is a deliverable."
"And now?" he presses.
Now every dropped day makes me want to break the fucking calendar.
And I can't help but wonder if Aubrey will seek an early dissolution to our marriage after I've secured my claim to the family fortune. Or if Aubrey will press to dissolve it before I've even earned that place.
I also wonder if I actually care about the fucking family fortune anymore.
Fuck me.
I say nothing.
Quentin pushes off the wall. "That's what I thought."
He passes me toward the outer door, then stops beside my shoulder. "Try not to build a goddamn prison around the first person who made you want to stay in a room."
"Get out," I hiss.
"Gladly. Your meetings are depressing as shit."
He leaves me in the vestibule with my nine minutes reduced to three and a half and his question still in my head.
Aubrey is in the penthouse before testimony prep, sitting at the far end of the dining table with her witness packet open and three pens beside it.
She wears black pants, a T-shirt, and her usual hoodie. Her hair is up, mostly, with pieces coming loose around her face. Her tote slumps against the chair leg with paperwork sticking out of it.
She doesn't look up when I enter.
Her left hand rests in her lap. Her right hand twists the wedding band on her left ring finger. Around and around, hard enough that the skin beneath the ring has gone red.
That's a goddamn boot to the fucking throat.
"Aubrey," I tell her.
Her hand stops. Then starts again.
"I'm fine," she says.
"No, you're not," I insist.
She looks up then. "Wow. Great testimony prep. Very collaborative. Do you want to ask questions in that tone tomorrow? I can practice not throwing a stapler."
I cross the room slowly because if I move the way my body wants, I'll be on my knees in front of her chair with her pussy on my lips.
I stop beside the table. "Give me your hand."
Her eyes narrow. "That sounds less collaborative."
"Give it to me anyway."
She holds my stare, then puts her left hand on the tabletop.
I touch her wrist first. The crescent scar on her inner wrist shows.
I've never asked her about it. I won't. I have my suspicions, but know well enough that whatever caused it has to be volunteered willingly, because asking will only inflict great pain.
And that's the last thing I want to do to her.
So instead I slide my fingers down and cover the ring with my thumb.
Her hand is warm. The band has left a mark.
We both look at my hand on hers.
The ring was supposed to be proof. For cameras. For my mother. For the board. For a world that trusts metal more than words.
Under my thumb, it's just her hand.
"You're hurting yourself," I say.
"I'll survive," she retorts.
"That's a low fucking bar," I growl.
Her mouth moves, almost a smile, then doesn't make it.
I let go before she has to pull away. It costs me.
She draws her hand back and flexes her fingers. "Prep starts in ten."
"Prep starts now," I instruct.
"Great. Ask me about opt-outs and procurement language. I love a sexy little hellscape."
I sit across from her, not at the head of the table. Her eyebrows lift.
I keep the packet open but don't look down. "What's Sentinel really asking women to survive, outside the goddamn deck?"
Aubrey goes still.
I've heard her argue policy. I've heard her dismantle a donor's smug little savior routine in three sentences.
"What?" she asks.
"The commission will ask about bias, governance, third-party access. We have answers. You have objections. I know the public version." I press my palm flat on the packet and keep it there. "I'm asking you what Sentinel is really asking women to live through. Because I want to know."
She studies me. "Are you asking so you can prep against me?"
"No."
"Are you asking so you can find the softer phrase and make the same shitty thing sound less awful?" she presses.
"No."
"Because I can do optics bullshit for exactly fourteen minutes before I start breaking down," she clarifies.
"I'm asking because I don't fucking know enough," I explain. "But I want to."
She looks down at the ring, then lays both hands flat on the table.
"Okay," she says. "Then don't interrupt."
I close the packet.
Her eyes flick to it. Back to me.
"Don't fix my phrasing," she says.
"I won't."
"Don't tell me about audit trails," she adds.
My teeth meet. "I won't."
Aubrey sits back, but she doesn't relax.
"A woman leaves. That's the part people like to picture.
Bag packed, door closed, shelter bed waiting.
Nice and linear. But also total bullshit.
Leaving is usually twelve attempts, two broken phones, a borrowed MetroCard, a cousin who says yes and then gets scared, a kid with asthma medication left in the wrong apartment, a payroll app that still lists an old address, and a man who knows her habits better than any algorithm because he trained her to have them. "
I keep my mouth shut.
"Now add convenience tech," she says. "Location sharing she forgot was on because he set up the family plan.
A car app. A delivery account. A pharmacy text.
School pickup software. A shared cloud album.
A fitness tracker. A doorbell camera at his sister's place.
She thinks she's being paranoid because everyone tells women they're dramatic as shit until the guy shows up outside the laundromat. "
She rubs the mark under her ring, then stops herself and puts her hand flat again.
"Lantern House sees women who do everything right and still get found.
They change names. They leave phones in dumpsters.
They stop using debit cards. They miss court because the court notice went somewhere unsafe.
Then some system flags them as unstable, noncompliant, high-risk.
Your systems don't need to hate women to hurt them. "
My stomach turns hard.
A defense lines up in my head because I built the damn thing and my mind is a vicious motherfucker. Sentinel separates individual identifiers. Sentinel has governance gates, red-team reviews, retention limits.
My fingers shift toward the packet. My mouth opens on the first clean sentence. I shut it. Every one of those sentences sounds like bullshit with her sitting across from me, telling me what happens after a woman has nowhere left to go.
Aubrey watches my hand, then my lips. "The product brochure is trying to crawl out of your mouth, isn't it?"
I lean back. My hands stay on the table. "I'm keeping it in."
"Good." She looks down at her packet. "Because here's the part you're not going to like. Predictive tools don't just predict harm. They create targets. If a city agency, landlord, benefits office, or vendor can query a woman's likely movements, they've got a goddamn map."
"Sentinel doesn't expose individual movement trails," I explain.
"Not in the version with the nice goddamn words and expensive lawyers.
But models get repurposed. Dashboards get copied.
Vendors get breached. Police cousins ask favors.
Abusers work in IT, Linden. They work in billing.
They date clerks. They don't need the whole system.
They need one access point and one woman with nowhere else to go. "
She's right. It pisses me off that my first instinct is still to find the controllable fucking variable.
But controls don't change what the system is built to do.
"What would make it survivable?" I ask.
She gives a humorless sound. "For who?"
"For the women."
"Some data should stay messy. Some gaps are goddamn safety. For example, false names are safety. Broken timelines are safety. A woman being hard to find can be the only reason she's alive on Monday."
I look at the closed packet under my hand. The rollout schedule sits in my head in columns. Hearing calendar. Final approval sequence. Partner access tiers.
It's a beautiful, brutal, arrogant-as-shit piece of work.
Now I can see who it hurts.
I reach for my tablet, then stop. "I need to review the survivor-services exclusions."
Her shoulders tighten.
"Not to win the argument," I say. "To change the fucking exposure."
She doesn't answer right away.
Fair. I wouldn't trust me that fast either.
I unlock the tablet and pull up the rollout notes. The first item looks obscene as hell now. Civic vulnerability integrations, Phase II.
I mark it.
Then another.
Third-party enrichment pathway. I mark it: delayed pending harm review.
Vendor query inheritance: freeze.
Pilot expansion into family-services adjacency: remove.
Aubrey is watching my hand. "Are you actually changing that?"
"I'm marking what needs to be stripped down or killed," I tell her. "Fuck the rollout."
"Killed," she repeats.
"Yes."
"Oh your board will love that," she says.
"The goddamn board can go to hell."
That gets the smallest smile out of her. It disappears fast, but I see it. I'm pathetic as hell enough to want to earn another one.
Testimony prep turns into a fight. She answers the questions I ask. Then she answers the ones I don't want to ask. We work through procurement language, retention limits, emergency exceptions, and the filthy little fucking loopholes people hide in the phrase "authorized user."
By the time prep ends, it's dark outside and the table is a wreck of marked pages.
Her phone lights up but she turns it facedown, then stands, favoring her ankle which should be fucking healed by now but is still giving her problems. She refused to see my doctor but I had him take a look anyway.
His prognosis: try not to put much weight on it for at least another week. But did she listen?
No. Of course not.
I'd admire her stubbornness if it wasn't causing her harm.
"Sit," I say.
She opens her mouth to protest, but then sits.
Aubrey looks at me from the end of the table. "What?"
"I don't fucking want the marriage to end when the paperwork says it should." The sentence feels foreign in my mouth because it has no leverage in it. No clean goddamn place to file it.
She goes still. Then her hand moves to the ring. She covers it instead of twisting it. The red mark under the band is still there.
"Linden..." she says.
"I know." I keep my hands on my side of the table. "I'm not asking you to solve this little problem tonight. Just... something for you to consider."
Her eyes stay on me too long. Then she looks down at the packet, at the ring under her palm, at my phone turned facedown between us.
Then she gets up.
"Where are you going?" I ask.
"My guest suite," she replies.
"You're going to bed?"
"No," she replies. "Just need some space."
With that she retires to the guest suite.
It takes all my restraint not to follow her up.