Chapter 34
Ophelia wrung her hands. There were several minutes of awkward silence filled only by the sound of Logan’s harsh, rattling breaths as Sam searched the device. At length, he unplugged from it and let the cord snake back into his arm. His flesh sealed over it with a soft, wet sound.
“Tell her,” he grunted, jerking his chin toward her.
Logan glared at him, swallowing hard enough that Ophelia heard it.
Sam took a menacing step forward, and Logan let out a harsh breath, holding up his hands in surrender.
“Fine,” he snapped, clearly reluctant to look away from the android but forcing himself to look at her. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” she said, though she was uncertain. “Mostly just… why? Why push me into having sex with someone else? Why film it? Why propose to me knowing you were in love with someone else? None of it makes any sense, and I… I don’t know what was real. Was anything real?”
Her eyes, to her horror, burned with unshed tears.
Don’t cry. Don’t cry in front of him.
“Yes,” Logan rasped, his hands curling into the edge of the couch cushion until his knuckles turned white. “It was—it was real. Most of it, at least. I mean…” He made a strangled sound, shoving a hand through his hair. “I love you,” he said in a low, wavering voice. “That’s real, Effie.”
Sam snorted, that sneering grin stealing over his face once more. “You don’t know the meaning of the word.”
“And you do?” Logan said, angry enough to forget his fear for a moment. “You’re a fucking machine. I coded you. You’re nothing but a walking, talking algorithm made to fuck bored, lonely housewives.”
Sam sucked his teeth, violence flashing in his eyes. “Well, I did fuck yours.”
Ophelia made a strangled sound.
“Stop,” she interjected, unwilling to be subjected to any further mortification. “That’s not why you’re here. I want answers.”
Logan ducked his head, chastened. He turned those big puppy dog eyes on her, nodding reluctantly.
“How long?” she asked, squeezing her arms in until her ribs protested.
He scrubbed a hand over his jaw, face falling. “Tiffany?”
She nodded tightly.
His eyes squeezed shut, and he blew out a haggard breath. “From the beginning,” he said sourly.
The air caught in her lungs, and she reached out a hand to pat around blindly for the armchair as the world tilted on its axis. She sat down hard enough to make the cushion wheeze. Sam crossed the room to stand beside her, resting his hand on the back of her chair.
“The whole time?” she whispered. “Why?”
He gave her a tortured look. “I-I didn’t—” He rubbed his eyes hard, shaking his head. “I didn’t know you. I didn’t know it would be you that I had to hurt.”
“Had to hurt?” she echoed in confusion, her heart squeezing painfully.
He squirmed in his seat, tucking his hands between his thighs. “Ophelia, if this gets out…” He spoke haltingly, his voice laced with desperation. “If they know that I told you, Automata… They have cleaners who deal with situations like this.”
She was completely lost, now.
“Automata? What does the company have to do with you cheating on me?”
“Tell her,” Sam said. “I assure you, no corporate fixer is getting anywhere near her while I have anything to say about it.”
Logan studied Sam with a dark gaze. A muscle jumped in his jaw, but he obeyed his creation’s command.
“It was never about you,” Logan whispered. Those honeyed eyes she’d once been so enthralled by danced restlessly over her face as he spoke. “You have to understand. I come from nothing, Eff. Nothing. No dad. Deadbeat mom. No siblings or aunts or uncles to give a shit what became of me.”
“Spare us your sob story,” Sam interrupted. “You have no right to her good graces, no matter how pitiful your life is.”
“It’s okay,” she murmured, holding up a hand to gently shush the android. “Keep talking.”
“I killed it in college, but I had to take out a loan for every penny of the program. When I got out, I couldn’t find work.
No one cared about how hard I had worked or how glowing my recommendations were.
I had to take on more debt to eat, to pay rent, to go to the doctor when I was sick.
Tens of thousands, and the APR... Then they took away the right to bankruptcy a few years later when the corpos finally got their hands on Congress.
I was drowning before Automata stepped in. ”
He rubbed the back of his neck, dropping his gaze to the floor. “Tiffany and I were dating before I got the job at their lab. She pushed hard for me to get in with them, and once I did, I thought it would be enough, but… the loans. The cost of rent. It wasn’t enough. I could barely tread water.”
Her heart twinged at the realization that, in a sick way, she was the other woman. Tiffany had been with Logan before her.
“Then I had my accident,” he said bitterly, shifting his reconstructed leg.
“And there was no treading water. I was drowning before I knew it, mired in medical debt that I would never climb my way out of with the new laws.” Anger flashed in his eyes.
“Five seconds of someone else’s carelessness, one broken surveillance camera, and just like that, my life is ruined.
I thought about killing myself, in the thick of it. Tiffany had to talk me down.”
She didn’t want to feel sorry for him after all that he’d done, but the sympathy welled in her regardless.
“She would have spared us all a lot of trouble if she hadn’t,” Sam muttered.
“Sam.”
He huffed disdainfully, shrugging off her reprimand. “He programmed me,” he said pointedly, gesturing toward Logan with his chin. “If I lack empathy for him, it’s technically his own fault.”
“You’re malfunctioning. It doesn’t matter how I programmed you when you’re letting a virus run wild in your system.” His eyes narrowed. “Where the hell did you pick up a virus strong enough to bust Automata’s firewall, anyway? Were you jacking into public terminals or something?”
“None of your business,” Sam said with a saccharine smile.
“Can we please stay on topic?” she snapped, at her limit with their stupid posturing. “I would like to know why my fucking life is ruined, if it’s alright with the two of you.”
They both had the grace to look cowed by her outburst.
“Automata stepped in,” Logan continued quickly, though he still darted a glare at Sam.
“They took over everything—the loans, the debt, my rent. And they were willing to give me more, the kind of fortune that would have set me up for life. I wouldn’t have had to work again unless I wanted a hobby.
But the money wasn’t charity. They wanted something in return. ”
Dread coiled in her gut as she pursued what he was saying to its logical conclusion. Her blood cooled at the implication.
“My father,” she murmured, feeling oddly seasick. “It wasn’t about me because it was about my father, wasn’t it?”
He nodded, regret shining in his eyes. “They didn’t realize you were estranged from him.
And once they did, it wasn’t enough to call it off.
I was supposed to find some way to use your connection to him to get the drop on what Optima was doing.
Ideally, you would have been able to get my foot in the door with them. ”
“But I wouldn’t budge,” she said numbly. “I didn’t want you working under my father, because it would have meant being under his thumb for the rest of my life.”
He swallowed hard, nodding again. “And I understood why,” he said breathlessly.
“God, even as it frustrated the hell out of me, I understood why. I respected you for that. You weren’t what they’d led me to believe you would be—some rich, spoiled brat who’d never had to struggle.
Every day you got up just like the rest of us and went to work at your job that paid such an average wage, and you never complained. ”
He sighed hard. “God, I wished so often that you’d just been the kind of stuck-up brat I’d been expecting. I had been… I had been excited, at first, to realize I could fuck with you. The princess of Optima’s profits. You were supposed to be more like…” He bit his bottom lip, cutting himself off.
“Like Tiffany?” Sam mused.
Logan winced.
“I’m sure you resent her, too,” Sam said, “given that it’s by the grace of her coat tails that you have your job to begin with.”
“I owe her a lot,” he agreed uncomfortably.
“More than I’d like to owe anyone. It made everything harder.
I think…” He met Ophelia’s gaze, leaning forward.
“I think I would have called it off when I realized who you really were. But by then, I was in too deep. Tiffany was in too deep. I was afraid of what would happen to her if I flaked. I didn’t know how to get out of it.
I thought, maybe, if I could just get them what they wanted, I could wash my hands of all of it, and we could be real.
With the money, I could have bought us a fucking castle to live in. ”
The idea sickened her. To have spent her life with someone who had lied to her, manipulated her, used her in the worst way, and to have never been the wiser of it?
She shuddered, casting a nervous glance toward Sam, seeking comfort.
His eyes found hers instantly, and his face softened.
One of his big hands slipped beneath her hair to rest at her nape, his thumb brushing a slow, soothing pattern over her skin.
Logan cleared his throat, and his expression was inscrutable when she looked back at him. “Are you…” His throat worked for a moment, soundless. “Are you in love with that thing?”
“He’s not a thing,” Ophelia said, squirming under the scrutiny. “And we’re not talking about me right now.”
“Yes, we were talking about how completely amoral and mercenary you are,” Sam said in a pleasant tone. “Why don’t you pick up at the part of the story where you decided to film her in a compromising position?”
Fury glittered in Logan’s eyes, but he didn’t argue with the assessment of his character.
“The execs ran out of patience,” he said tightly.
“I had hoped the engagement would cool them off, and it did, for a while. I’d been stringing them along for months, telling them the wedding would sort it all out, to give me some space, but one of their corporate spies must have realized Optima was working on something big. I was out of time, just like that.”
“And if you didn’t deliver?” she prompted, leaning back into the reassuring weight of Sam’s hand.
He wrung his hands together. “The deal would be off the table, and they’d ‘review my performance’ until they found a reason to let me go.
I’d be right back where I started, only with a bad performance review from the biggest titan in the industry and their fixers breathing down my neck in case I got desperate enough to roll over on them. ”
“How was the video supposed to help?”
Just mentioning it, acknowledging the existence of footage of her at her most raw and vulnerable out there in the world, made her want to be sick.
“We were going to take it to your father,” he said, unable to meet her gaze.
“Edit it so it looked like you were cheating, and hope to God we’d be able to extort him for something useful.
He might be distant, but he cares about appearances.
I thought it would be enough to get something they could use. ”
Before she could say anything, he sucked in a sharp breath and began to rant.
“I’m so sorry, Effie. For all of it, every second. And I know I lied, I know I fucked up, and I hurt you worse than I can even fucking imagine, but I do love you. That’s real, and it doesn’t have to be over. We can figure this out. Now that everything’s on the table, we can—”
“No,” she said, her whole chest behind the word. “No, we can’t. Not ever, Logan. I don’t want that anymore.”
He fell silent, nodding in resignation as though he hadn’t expected anything different. Sam tensed as he reached into the pocket of his jacket, but he only pulled out a tiny SD card. He leaned forward to set it on the glass coffee table, sliding it toward her.
“This is the only other copy of the vid,” he said somberly.
She sat forward to pluck it off the table, turning it over between her fingers.
“Two years of my life set on fire for this?” she mused, running her thumb over the shiny label and the smooth, black plastic.
“If you’re lying, I’ll kill you very slowly.” Sam licked his teeth and smiled. “I really hope you’re lying.”
Logan shuddered, avoiding eye contact with the rogue android. “They’ll come looking for him, Ophelia. And as subtle as he is about it, he’ll probably last two minutes before they figure out he’s corrupted and they put him down manually.”
“They can try,” Sam said.
“What if I could afford him?” she asked, tucking the disk into her palm and curling her fingers around it protectively. “Would they let me buy him out?”
Sam looked at her curiously. “You cannot afford me.”
She ignored him. “Would they?”
Logan gave her a sad smile. “His auction starts at a quarter mil, Eff.”
“Would they let me buy him?”
He made a sound of frustration, throwing up his hands. “I guess so,” he gruffed. “If you were there for the auction after the demo, then I guess… yes.”
She stood, clutching the disk to her chest as she paced back and forth across the living room, a plan unfurling in her mind. Desperate, reckless, probably doomed… but a plan, nonetheless.
She stopped, pivoting to pin her full, frenzied focus on Logan. “You really want to make all this up to me?”
He nodded warily.
“Good,” she said, looking down at the disk in her hand. “Let’s talk logistics.”