Chapter Thirty
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Stone Solutions has “requested” that we kill your feature piece, “The Empathy Industrial
Complex or: How the American War Machine Learned to Leverage Fear and Feelings for Profit,” and leadership has agreed.
It sure is interesting what kind of stories get censored when the people who own the corporations also own the media.
—Internal note at the Emerald Tribune
The night’s storm had left Seattle blanketed in a thin layer of snow that had quickly turned ice-edged and slushy. Kickoff
wasn’t until noon, but as the wet, gray morning stretched over downtown, the early crew was already trickling into Lumen Field:
sports analysts settling into the press box, vendors starting up their kitchens, ushers prepping for the fans’ arrival, local
news reporting live from the field’s bright green Astroturf coated with its patchy layer of white.
Lennox stood in the aisle of the club seats at center field, looking over with narrowed eyes at the floor-to-ceiling glass
that enclosed the Stone Solutions’ luxury box.
Guarding a dozen empaths was about the most unnecessary thing Lennox had ever done for Charles Stone. After their call with Charles, the empaths had been huddled in weepy circles, and Lennox had been so bored he’d dozed off.
When he’d woken, however, the camera in the suite had been dark.
Now he craned his neck, trying to catch a glimpse of the empaths through the box’s glass walls, but they must have been huddled
too deeply in the suite to be seen. Charles had been right about that too, then; they weren’t trying to draw attention from
reporters or anyone else, just meekly hiding in the box as instructed under threat of violence to the others.
Stupidly easy to manipulate or not, Lennox still needed eyes on them. He’d been planning to try to catch the players warming
up, and now he’d have to deal with the annoying little fucks first.
His eyes were still narrowed as he climbed the stairs from the club to the suite level, and then strode with quick, irritated
steps down the hall to the Stone Solutions’ box, unlocking the door and ducking inside.
Sure enough, the empaths were huddled together around the coffee table, some of them on the couch and chairs, some on the
rug, a couple of them in each other’s laps. Beyond them, the glass surrounding the dual rows of recliners framed a slice of
downtown’s skyscrapers and the snow-spotted green field below.
The empaths hadn’t looked up when he stepped inside, involved in their own whispered discussion. Lennox yanked the door shut
behind him with a loud bang. “Hey!”
The empaths still didn’t look up. They didn’t even twitch.
“Hey,” Lennox said again. “Fix the camera.”
Not a single head even turned his way. Lennox rapped his knuckles on the wall, harsh and loud. “I’m talking to you,” he snapped. “The camera is down. And you will be so fucking sorry if I have to come over there and fix it myself.”
No response again. He might as well have been invisible.
Lennox cracked his knuckles pointedly. Looked like he was going to get a target for his irritation, at least. And empaths
were the easiest targets he’d ever faced: a couple of slaps to one of them and the rest would be begging him to stop and rushing
to do what he wanted.
“If that’s how you want it,” he said, fists curling automatically. “I don’t actually like hitting you little freaks, you know.”
All of the empaths looked up and over at him as one.
The hairs on the back of his neck rose.
“That was a lie,” one of the empaths said, in a whisper that filled the suite.
“What?” Lennox started to say.
But the empaths were on him.
The chime of her phone woke Gretel from a restless sleep. She stared for a moment at the living room ceiling above Jamey’s
couch, her thoughts immediately taking off like a sprinter, as if she hadn’t slept at all.
She reached for her phone. Her dad’s friend from the Stone Solutions board of directors, Roger Spade, had responded to her
email.
To: gretel@
From: r.spade@
It’s good to hear from you, Gretel. Yes, I told your father I thought the October 8-K was suspicious. Cedrick had discussed the acquisition of two small suppliers to me in July, but the 8-K listed three. When I asked which company had been added and why, no one would give me an answer.
I’d be happy to speak with you further. I’m so sorry for your loss.
She pushed the blankets off and got to her feet as silently as she could. The rest of the house felt still as a church, with
everyone else asleep after their late night. Jamey in particular had been out late, disappearing in Liam’s car and then returning
a couple of hours later, looking disheveled with suspicious red stains on her clothes but promising she’d found some more
documents that might help.
Gretel crossed the wood floor noiselessly, throat tightening as her eyes fell on the dining table, still covered with their
work from the night before: her dad’s laptop opened in front of two chairs where Liam and Aisha had been searching for clues;
the nearby pile of financial data and files from Stone Solutions that Diesel had made sure to neatly organize and stack; the
handwritten delivery list that Jamey had appeared with the night before.
Gretel reached the table and carefully tugged the handwritten delivery list closer, gaze on the words Metallic Tailors, circled with its question marks.
“Where there’s murder, there are other crimes,” she echoed under her breath. “You really think an obsessive weirdo like me
doesn’t know all about shell companies?”
Jamey had likely disagreed with every word Gretel had ever written on Eyes on Empaths. But when the worst had happened, Jamey and her friends had been there for Gretel, made sure she had company and a warm place
to sleep, given their best efforts to solve her parents’ murders.
She scratched out a note on a spare piece of paper, then carefully closed her dad’s laptop and tucked it under her arm. She grabbed up the records, and two minutes later, she’d packed her few items away and was slipping out Jamey’s front door.
As she took her seat in her car, she pulled Vivian Marist’s business card from her purse. My personal number, Marist had said. Call anytime.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Gretel muttered, dialing the number as she pulled out of Jamey’s driveway and into the street.
Dawn had finally arrived, setting the truck’s snow-covered windows and windshield aglow with a silvery sheen. Grayson knew
damn well that they couldn’t stay in the forest forever; they needed to get up, try to get the truck running, and get the
hell back to civilization. And they would.
As soon as he managed to let go of Reece.
“We can’t,” Grayson said against Reece’s mouth as their lips locked on to each other yet again. “We got to get out of here.”
“But what if I’m still a hypothermia risk?” Reece was fully on top of him, his smaller, slighter body a heavenly weight on
Grayson as he lay on his back flat against the seat. “Shouldn’t you just stay right here and keep me warm?”
Grayson groaned, even as he was unable to resist running his hands over that soft skin. “I don’t think we got far enough from
the lab to relax. There’s gonna be a response team.”
“There sure is.” Reece arched into Grayson’s touch even as he shifted to kiss the sensitive skin of his throat. “But I’ll
handle them.”
“You can’t thrall folks just so we can keep fooling around.”
“I really can.”
Grayson tightened his arms around him. “Mr. Davies.”
“You really think the formal name treatment is going to turn me off?” Reece lifted his head, and then pressed one long, lingering kiss to Grayson’s lips. “Fine,” he whispered, like he hadn’t just left Grayson dazed and dizzy. “Let’s see if we can fix the truck.”
It took a few more minutes, but finally they emerged from the sleeping bag. As Grayson had suspected, their clothes were still
damp, despite being spread out on the dash in an attempt to dry them. But it turned out that under the truck’s back seat,
Reece had kept not only the sleeping bag they’d bought on their trip to Vancouver but also Grayson’s backpack from that same
trip, which still held enough of his purchases that they managed to get a full set of dry clothes each.
Grayson had always kept basic safety equipment on hand, but in the few days Reece had the truck, he’d also acquired an emergency
battery charger and a specialized diagnostic code reader. Grayson scraped the windshield and windows as Reece examined the
damage.
“Flat tire first,” he finally said. “Then we’ll try and get the engine running.”
Grayson had changed a flat more than once but never on a steep and snowy mountainside, so he shut his mouth and followed all
of Reece’s directions as they jacked up the truck and changed out the punctured tire for the spare under the bed.
Wheel in place, Reece popped the hood. “I think this tough girl mostly took cosmetic damage,” he said, sounding pleased as
he scanned the engine. “With any luck, we’re dealing with a drained battery from the lights running while we were unconscious.”
He raised his head. “Can you get behind the wheel?”
“Really?”
Reece gave him an amused look over the engine. “So you can start her up when I tell you. And then you can move right back
into the passenger seat where you belong.”
“The hell I will,” Grayson muttered under his breath, squeezing himself into the driver’s seat with difficulty, set as it
was for Reece’s much shorter frame with no power to move it back.
After one false attempt, the V-8 finally kicked in with a deep rumble that shook the trees.
“Yes,” Grayson heard Reece crow. He dropped the hood into place, looking over it to Grayson. “She’s going to need a body shop
for those dents, but she’ll get us back to Seattle.”
Grayson was already moving the electric seat backwards as Reece headed to his open driver’s door. “So we ready to go?”
Reece put a foot on the truck’s step, stepping up so their eyes were level, deceptively cute and harmless-appearing in a recycled-fleece
pullover big enough to fit Grayson. “As soon as you get out of my seat.”