“I’m not?—”
“So help me God, I’ll have Da kill you, if you don’t give me one straight answer.”
I don’t know if she has that power. I don’t know if Barry Lynch will order a hit at his unruly oldest daughter’s request, not when the kill would cost him his new-trained hacker lapdog.
But I’m not willing to take the chance to find out.
“You’re in my house. Using my equipment. I have every right?—”
“You have no right at all!”
I reach around her, pulling my keyboard to the edge of my desk. My fingers fly, and I’m vaguely aware that typing should calm me down, that I should be slipping into the ice chest where I code.
Instead, every screen I pull up tosses fuel onto the fire inside my chest. “StarCoin,” I say, pulling up her conversation with the Red Cap Raiders. I throw the view to a screen at the front of the room. As she stares, I load another screen with a record of her father’s poor investment.
“I didn’t know,” she says.
“Some unnamed bookie.” Another screen fills with her online chat. A fourth holds her father’s transactions with the same criminal.
“That was before—” she argues.
“NightSaber.”
The data boils up like lava, breaking free from the stonycrust I’ve built over weeks. She’s my wife. She’s supposed to be my ally. I throw Barry Lynch’s records across the room.
“Your father’s deep in debt to all three. But you already know that.”
“I don’t?—”
Cutting off yet another lie, I wave at the screens, at the ugly proof. “You’re a hacker. My job is to stop coders like you. To protect my clients. To protect your father. I can’t trust you, Kate. That’s why I didn’t make you an Ice Knight. I don’t want you on my team.”
I see the way every statement affects her. I watch her anger crystallize into something harsher, something uglier, something far more brutal.
I wait for her to explode. She’ll curse. Swear. Call me names. Shout at me in English and Irish, emptying the tank until she’s nothing but a shivering, exhausted child.
As she grows hotter, I’ll grow colder. She’ll boil over as I set limits. I’ll count, or I won’t. I’ll take her down to the dungeon, and I’ll show her why I’m right, why order and logic and control win out every single time. With all the rage she’s locked inside her, she’ll come harder than she ever has before or maybe for more times. I can do that—for her and for me.
I can make things right.
But this time Kate doesn’t play her role. She doesn’t fly apart, doesn’t spark, doesn’t kindle.
Instead, she pulls all her energy deep inside herself. Her face turns to marble. Her eyes change to glass. When she speaks, her words are so soft I have to read them on her lips. “Control this,” she says. “You broken, soulless robot.”
Precise as a soldier on military parade, she turns on her heel. Her spine is ramrod straight. Her gaze is perfectly level. Her steps are measured with pinpoint accuracy as she carries herself out of my office.
46
KATE
Ifeel like I’m watching a film about a woman named Kate Lynch.
She’s supposed to ignite like petrol fumes—waves of rage and heat rolling up and out and over, smothering everything she touches. She’s supposed to catch fire like a leaky gas stove, like bone-dry prairie grass struck by lightning.
ButIcan’t do that. I can’t give in. Because if I let myself be Kate, I’ll dissolve into betrayal and anger and hate and the fire will never burn out. I won’t come out the far side. I’ll be lost forever.
Besides, I know something Wolf doesn’t know.
I know he left the keys to his Toyota Camry in the pocket of his Armani jacket—the jacket I’m currently wearing. And I know the Camry has the appropriate credentials to clear the mansion’s iron gate.