JUSTICE TWILL
Justice Twill
“This is fucking bullshit, and you know it. They’re perfectly fine pushing me to the edge, goading me, when there’s a new IPO that’s going to put zeros in their offshore accounts. I will tear—”
“And this, my darling Justice, is exactly the problem.” Daisy’s sharp tone stopped me mid-sentence. “You’re three seconds from trashing that hotel room, aren’t you? What are you smashing this time? A bottle of booze? A mirror? Marble countertops?”
I eyed my reflection in the mirror. My arm was cocked back, ready to launch the glass tumbler. My vision dimmed with rage because she fucking clocked me. We didn’t have a pack bond, never would, but she didn’t need to feel my aura to predict my behavior. And that was the fucking point.
I put the glass back on the wet bar, next to the miniature globe, using two shaking fingers to nudge it back into place.
“It’s not a hotel room. It’s a fucking cabin,” I said, not bothering to hide my disgust.
“A stateroom, to be precise,” she corrected. I could picture her behind her vast desk, her beat-up combat boots propped on the corner. Daisy was a designer-suit-and-shitty-boots kind of alpha. “I’ve got taste, remember? I’d never stick your claustrophobic ass in a cabin.”
I cringed at her choice of words. Then I took a slow, measured breath to shove down my pounding pulse. “This kind of sadistic punishment…”
“And you deserve to be punished, and not in the fun ways,” Daisy cut me off again. She was the only person on earth who could pull that off.
“You’re forcing me…”
“Damn right. Listen, cupcake,” she said. I didn’t even crack a smile at her pet name. “This is what you get after firing your entire staff and taking a crowbar to the server room.”
“If they had only just…”
“A forced vacation or a mental hospital with tasty, tasty drugs to shove you into rut. You choose.”
“Daisy,” I growled, pitching my voice low.
“Justice,” she whined back, her only effective way to end our brewing dick-measuring contest. “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be right ?”
The last word stung more than my eardrums. Fuck you for throwing my own words back at me. Sometimes you had to sacrifice being right in the moment, to be right at the end of the game. But I wouldn’t admit she was right. Her gloating would be unproductive at this point.
I stalked around the stateroom. It was spacious enough not to trip my dislike for small spaces. There was a sitting area with a wet bar and a small dining table. Two bedrooms branched off to the left and right, and a balcony wrapped around the collection of rooms. My luggage was already stacked in the walk-in closet. The room steward or butler or whatever had said he’d be back to unpack for me. I grabbed my backpack and pulled out my laptop, fishing out the bundles of cords.
“ Right ,” I finally said. It was the only answer that mattered.
“Okay. Now get your shit together. Relax for twelve days so the board doesn’t fire your ass.”
“They can’t fire me.” I muttered, knowing that wasn’t fucking true. “And it’s fourteen, not twelve.”
“Maybe not, but they can limit your options, including your stock options. You and I both don’t want those consequences.”
I hit the speakerphone button and set my phone on the dining table as I sorted through the cables. There was a short white one I didn’t recognize. Frowning, I opened my backpack wider. A small black package with a white ribbon tied around it caught my eye.
“Leaving me secret admirer gifts?” I asked. Daisy and my executive assistant, Glenn, had packed my bags for me last night. Glenn sure as fuck wasn’t leaving me gifts tied with bows.
“Relax, cupcake. It’s an e-reader. Fully charged and loaded with every bestseller your workaholic ass has ignored for the past decade.”
I tore the paper off, taking time to coil the ribbon into a neat bundle. I felt along the edge and toggled it on. I scanned the page.
“Chantell Dominico? Does this thing have her entire backlist?”
“Hey, don’t knock it till you try it. Coming out of this trip with a newfound fetish for smutty pack romance novels would do you a world of good.”
I rolled my eyes loud enough for her to hear over the phone.
“Don’t worry, I’m not an asshole. Glenn put Bob Rider’s entire sci-fi collection on it too.”
I swiped to the main menu. “There’s no browser.”
“My guy, it’s an e-reader, not a tablet. I know your distaste for dedicated devices, so that’s exactly what we got you. All you can do with it is read books. We got you the kiddie version with no bells and whistles.”
I stacked up all my gear and left it on the table to hook up later, then strode to the sliding glass doors. The cabin… no, stateroom… was on a high floor. I had a view of one of the pool areas and the bow of the ship. Ceto Bay and the Port Haven skyline sparkled in the mid-afternoon sun.
“Justice. I’m worried.”
I squeezed my fists at the tone in Daisy’s voice. She’d been riding my ass and bitching me out since our auras had presented in college. She was the only person in the world who gave one single fuck that I was losing it.
“It’s fine. I’m fine,” I lied.
I could hear her shuffling papers and typing on her keyboard.
“So, here it is, Justice. You’re taking all that sparkly unlimited PTO you like to brag about. You’re going to read some fucking books. Have drinks with little umbrellas in them. Fuck some hottie on a beach and come back with your head on straight.”
I nodded. I knew she couldn’t see the gesture. I just couldn’t bring myself to say anything. The fact was, I was worried. Maybe even scared.
“All right, asshole. Go relax. I’ll see you in two weeks.”
“Make sure the QA team—”
“Justice?” she cut me off again.
“Yeah.”
“Boom, baby.”
I turned just in time to see her call cut off. Then I watched in horror as the screen exploded into a cheesy fireworks graphic.
“No. Fuck no.”
I dove for my phone. I held down the power and volume buttons to initiate a hard boot. Nothing happened. The cascade of fireworks just looped again. I reached for my tablet. Same graphic. I ripped my laptop cover open with so much force I almost tore it in half. Fireworks sparkled across this display, too.
I put both hands on the bar and took shallow, shaky breaths. “Boom Baby” was the first bit of code we wrote together. It was inelegant, messy, and effective. Too effective. The program was born out of our shared revenge fantasies. A little app that could hold your phone or laptop hostage. It did nothing more than drain the battery with that ugly graphic and couldn’t be removed without the remote device that had installed it.
We’d never used it. We quickly discovered it was much more fun to make our bullies envy us. We retooled the code and turned it into a productivity app that would lock down your device so you could focus and get work done. It made us our first millions, and that was way better revenge.
I wiped my hand across my forehead. It was sticky with sweat. Packing me up in the wee hours of the morning and forcing me on this stupid fucking cruise was extreme. But bricking all my devices? With the code I fucking wrote? To force me to “relax”?
I crossed my arms and dug my fingers into my biceps. Closing my eyes, I visualized my sequence for the Great Roof pitch on El Cap, mapping every finger lock and jam, each cam placement, the exact spot where I’d make that delicate traverse to the anchor. In my mind’s eye, I looked down the three thousand feet of exposure below me. I cracked my neck and shook out my arms. Free soloing El Cap, going up that sheer rock face with no ropes, nothing but your fingers and toes, seemed more rational than this stupid fucking cruise.