Chapter 36
Ophelia wove through the crowded sidewalk, her hair fluttering behind her shoulders in the brisk morning wind. A man halted to double-take at her, and her skin prickled self-consciously. His sudden stop made another man behind him collide with his back.
“Watch it, asshole!” the second guy said. “You’re not the only person on the…”
He seemed to lose his train of thought as she darted around them, both their eyes following her. The argument renewed as they shrank into the distance.
She looked at herself in the mirrored windows of Optima’s office building, wondering what was so distracting.
In her snug, structured black dress and tights, she’d been aiming for business casual—something her father would take seriously.
She frowned at her reflection. Was the fabric a little too tight over her hips?
Shaking off the doubt, she forced herself to head for the door.
Jazz music filtered through speakers in the lobby, just loud enough to dull the cacophony of heels against marble and dozens of overlapping conversations. She strode to the front desk, where the same woman she’d encountered last time was managing the check-ins.
Lacey looked up from her computer with a bored air. “Good morning, how can I help—”
Ophelia pushed her sunglasses off her face and Lacey jumped to her feet like a soldier standing at attention.
“Miss Sinclair,” she exclaimed, her eyes widening. “I-I didn’t know you were coming today.”
“I don’t have an appointment,” Ophelia said sheepishly, offering a smile as she leaned against the counter. “I was hoping to speak with my father for a few minutes.”
“Of course! Head right up. I’ll let his secretary know you’re coming.”
Ophelia patted the counter, nodding. “Thanks again, Lacey.”
The woman’s eyes widened further, as though she was surprised Ophelia had remembered her. Was that was her father’s doing? He never bothered to remember anyone unless they had something he wanted.
She went through security and stepped onto a crowded elevator, feeling eyes bore into her back as she pressed the button for the top floor. By the time she reached it, she was the last one left. People stared as she stepped into the hall, clutching her purse with white knuckles.
Squaring her shoulders, she forced herself to look straight ahead. Her father’s secretary leaped up as she entered his office, stammering as he asked her to wait a moment.
Her father was in the middle of some important phone call—as he had been nearly all her childhood, as far as she could remember. This time, she wouldn’t be brushed aside.
“Tell him it’s urgent,” she called after the harried man.
A few moments later, he emerged with sweat beading on his lip. “He’ll see you now,” he announced in a wavering voice.
“Thank you,” she said, stepping past him.
Her father was wearing a thunderous expression, his hands steepled under his chin. “Ophelia. This is your second unannounced visit in as many weeks. When I told you I’d like to have lunch, I did intend for you to schedule it through my secretary.”
“I’m not here to ask you out to lunch,” she said, sinking into the seat across from him. She had to swallow hard to clear the lump in her throat before she could continue. “I need your help with something.”
He sighed, sitting back as he eyed her curiously. “If this is about your mother again, I meant what I told you before. If she’s sent you back to beg on her behalf, I have my lawyer on speed dial.”
“It’s not about her,” she said, half-truthful. “It’s… It’s about me. I’m in trouble.”
He frowned, his silvery brows furrowing as he sat forward again. “What kind of trouble?”
Her face began to burn. She squeezed her purse in her hands, dreading this next part.
It was a necessary evil, she told herself, but it didn’t make it any less mortifying.
With a shuddering breath, she unzipped her purse and pulled her phone out.
When she had the video pulled up, she set it on the desk and spun it to face him.
He gave her a suspicious look before he tapped the play button.
It was the very beginning of the blackmail tape Logan had made, edited to blur the salacious bits—being buck naked in front of her father had been a step too far for her, even under the dire circumstances.
He let out a hiss of disgust, shoving the phone back to her. She caught it before it slid off the edge of the desk, frantically tapping the screen to stop the playback.
“What is this?” he demanded.
She dropped it back down on the desk with a clatter, clearing her throat. “I-I’m being blackmailed. They want money to keep it quiet.”
He sneered. “Blackmailed for what? Consenting sex?”
“Um.” She twisted her hands in the strap of her purse. “That’s not my fiancé.”
His expression turned thunderous, but he smoothed it over with the placid mask he surely used in business negotiations. “Infidelity then? No matter. People are progressive. It will be little more than fodder for gossip.”
He rose from his seat, pacing toward the wall of windows with his hands on his hips. “You aren’t married, so we don’t have an infidelity clause to worry about.”
Panic clawed at her, but she forced herself to take a deep breath. She’d known he would be resistant. This wasn’t a curveball.
“Daddy, please.” She didn’t have to fake the tears that brimmed in her eyes. “Please, don’t let them release it.”
He turned toward her, dumbstruck at her invocation of the moniker she hadn’t used since she was six.
His eyes darted over her as though he was seeing her for the first time.
They softened a little, like maybe he was seeing her at six years old with pig tails in her hair, begging him to let her stay up one more hour.
A muscle worked in his jaw. He scrubbed a hand over his mouth, letting out a harsh sigh. He muttered, “How do I know this isn’t all your mother’s doing?”
“If Mom were smart enough to scheme something like this up, she would have done it a long time ago,” Ophelia said softly—and it was true.
Her father knew it too. He huffed, crossing his arms over his chest. “This is a fucking mess, Ophelia. Let me call my lawyer. We can get the company’s cleaners involved, figure out the source of these threats.”
“No,” she said quickly, jumping to her feet. “God, please, Dad. It’s too embarrassing. Can’t this stay between us?”
She had her hands clasped together beneath her chin, leaning into her tactic of childlike begging. He cursed, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Things like this don’t end,” he said tightly. “Whatever they ask for, it won’t be the last we hear of them. The price will go up as soon as it runs out.”
“If they come back, you can call in the whole cavalry,” she said desperately. “Please, can’t we try to bury this first?”
He glared at her, but he crossed back to the desk and dropped into his office chair.
“What are they asking for?” he asked gruffly.
Premature relief surged through her.
“Um, they left this,” she said hurriedly, picking her purse up off the floor and fishing out a piece of paper she’d printed the night before.
It had a figure on it along with an untraceable routing number that would lead her father’s fixers on a merry chase through a litany of shell companies. She’d used her whole savings to hire someone off the web to set it up for her. Supposedly, it would be foolproof.
If her plan didn’t work, she was in very, very deep shit financially.
Her father dragged the paper toward him, snatching his reading glasses off the desk before straightening the page with a jerk of his hand.
A disbelieving breath huffed out of him.
He took the glasses off again and set them down gently, followed by the paper, and then he massaged his temples with his eyes closed.
“I’ll pay you back,” she said in a tiny voice. “Every penny, if that’s what it takes.”
He gave a bitter laugh. “Where do you intend to find that kind of money?”
“Wherever I have to,” she said, and she meant it.
She just needed to get through this moment in time, where she desperately needed his wealth to enact the next step of her plan. Then, she’d spend the rest of her life earning it all back if she had to—with Sam at her side, safe from the threat of being decommissioned.
“Two million,” he muttered, rapping his fingers against his desk. “That’s not something to scoff at.”
It wasn’t, but it also wasn’t a sum so big that he would miss it from his vast fortune.
If she’d only needed a few hundred thousand, she thought he would have lent it to her outright—but two million?
He would have refused, and he would have insisted on knowing why she needed it.
If he knew she was trying to buy a corrupted Automata android, he would have helped her do it…
and then he would have dragged Sam kicking and screaming into the Optima labs in the bowels of the building and dissected him to figure out how he ticked and how that information could be used to further his own ends.
No, this was the only way to get what she needed from him.
“I’ll pay it back,” she repeated.
He gave her a skeptical look.
She sat forward in her seat, reaching across the desk to grab his hand in her own. He started down at their joined hands as she squeezed, an unreadable expression on his face.
“I never ask you for anything, and I’ll never ask again. Just, please, this once… I’m begging you to help me, Dad.”
His resistance crumbled before her.
“Never again?” he mused. “Then should I presume this is the last I’ll see of my daughter?”
Her brows drew together in consternation, and her heart skipped a beat at the knowing look he gave her. No, he couldn’t…
“I… no, of course not.”
His fingers curled around hers, his thumb brushing over her knuckles as a wry smile tugged at his mouth.
“You were always an easy child, you know that? Even as a baby. You slept through the night. Hardly cried.” He huffed a laugh as his eyes went distant. “Oh, but your mother did enough of that for the both of you. Wheedling and whining for this or that.”
Her stomach clenched. However flawed her mother was, she was still her mother, and Ophelia didn’t like to hear her being disparaged.
“She can’t help it,” she said, shifting uncomfortably. “Mom, she… She needs help.”
Her father hummed, releasing her hand. “Help she’ll never agree to get. She’s a stubborn woman, your mother. A trait you got from us both, I suppose.”
He sat back, his leather seat creaking beneath him. The look on his face was strange—wistful rather than furious. “Alright, Ophelia. I’ll wire the money over this evening. Will that suffice?”
“Yes,” she said, stunned that he had capitulated so easily. “I’ll pay you—”
“No, you won’t,” he said firmly. “Consider it an advance on your inheritance.”
She stared at him, at a loss for words. He shifted his sleeve to check his watch, then gave her a somber look.
“I have a ten o’clock meeting. Is there anything else?”
She blinked. “Um… no.”
He nodded. “Then I’ll speak to you later. You still owe me lunch.”
“I… yes, of course.”
“Later, then.” He turned away, typing fast on his phone.
Dismissed, she clutched her purse and rose woodenly to her feet. At the door, she hesitated, looking back at her father.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
Another nod was all the acknowledgment he offered.