Chapter 73: Shift Change

The reply from her detail had come in at 11:31 the night before. Lucas read it again at six fifteen in the morning, lying on his back with Victoria’s hair across his arm.

Understood. Shift change at 0600. We’ll be in the gray Suburban across the street.

He had not known a security team could sound so neutral about a CEO sleeping in his one-bedroom apartment.

The light through the window was the color of dishwater. The brick wall across the gap was wet. Victoria was awake. He could tell by her breathing, which was too even to be sleep, and by the fact that her thumb was moving slowly back and forth over his wrist.

"How long have you been up?" he asked.

"Since five." She did not turn over. "I don’t sleep past five. I tried once in Lisbon. I lay there until six being angry about it."

"You could have gotten up."

"Your floor is cold, and you were holding on." She stretched under the sheet, and her bare back pressed against his chest. "I’ve been thinking."

"About what?"

"About what this costs. Somebody has to, and you’re not going to do it before coffee."

He got up and made the coffee. He had a drip machine he’d bought on sale and a bag of grounds from the corner store. Victoria came out of the bedroom wearing his gray sweatshirt and her own underwear and nothing else, her legs bare, her hair pushed back with one hand. She stood in the kitchen doorway and watched the machine as if it had personally disappointed her.

"That’s not coffee," she said.

"It’s what I’ve got."

She took the mug anyway, sat at his small table, and drank it without complaint, which he understood was a concession.

"All right," she said. "Let’s do it properly."

"Do what?"

"The risk memo. Out loud. You start."

He sat across from her. This part he was good at, and she knew it.

"Vertex has a civil action against Richard’s trust," he said. "I’m a fact witness in it. You’re the CEO of the plaintiff. Richard’s defense will be Elena, or whoever replaces her. Their first move is to make me look unreliable. Page forty-seven already does half of that for them."

"Go on."

"Richard has a photograph of us outside your building. It’s in an evidence bag now, but they know it exists. If his lawyer can show we were sleeping together while I was giving statements, they’ll say my timeline was written to protect you. Not by me. By us."

"Was it?"

"No."

"I know it wasn’t. I’m asking how it sounds."

"It sounds bad," Lucas said. "Not fatal. Morgan built the timeline on bank records and Ward’s invoice. My statement mostly agrees with paper. But a jury doesn’t read paper. They look at people."

Victoria nodded slowly. She turned the mug on the table a quarter turn.

"My side," she said. "I’m the CEO of a company in the middle of a fraud investigation. I suspended a contractor for altering a document. The same night he stopped being a suspect, I was in his bed. My board chair will find out, because my detail logs where I sleep and those logs go to the GC under the litigation hold. If the board learns it from a log instead of from me, I lose the room for a year."

"So tell them first."

"I intend to." She looked at him over the mug. "And you’ll tell Reed. Today. Before the GC sends the revised instruction. Not after it lands and you find a clever reading of it."

"I was going to."

"I know you were going to. I’m saying it so it’s said."

He thought of the night before. I’d tell you before you took your shoes off. She was holding him to it in a language they both spoke.

"There’s one more thing," he said.

"There always is with you."

"You might not want to keep doing this once it’s on paper. That’s allowed. I’m not going to make it hard."

Victoria set the mug down. She looked at him for long enough that the coffee machine finished its last sputter and clicked off.

"Lucas," she said. "I put it in writing to my own security team at eleven thirty last night. From your phone. I’m not looking for an exit. I’m looking for a way to do this that doesn’t let Richard use it from a cell."

"Okay."

"Okay," she repeated, and her mouth moved at one corner. "You say that a lot when you’ve lost an argument."

"I say it when I agree with you."

"Same thing."

She stood and came around the table. She did not sit on his lap. She stood in front of him, between his knees, in his sweatshirt with her bare legs against his, and put her hands on his shoulders.

"What time do you have to see Reed?" she asked.

"He hasn’t said. Usually he calls at eight."

"It’s six forty." She looked down at him. "I have to be at Vertex by nine, showered and in a different suit, which my assistant is bringing to the Harbor Grand at eight fifteen. The car can be here at seven forty-five."

"That’s an hour."

"That’s an hour," she agreed. "Unless you’d rather spend it on your coffee."

He put his hands on the backs of her thighs, under the hem of the sweatshirt. Her skin was warm from the bed and cool at the surface from the kitchen air.

"You’re sure," he said. "You were just doing a risk memo."

"I finished the risk memo." She bent and kissed him, slow, tasting of bad coffee. "I’m sure. Are you?"

"Yes."

"Then stop asking me in that voice and take me back to bed."

They did not make it all the way to the bed the first time. In the narrow hallway she pushed him back against the wall and kissed him hard, and he pulled the sweatshirt up over her head and dropped it on the floor outside the bathroom. Her breasts pressed against his chest. He turned them so her back was to the wall and kissed down her throat while her hands worked at the drawstring of the sweatpants he had pulled on to make coffee.

"Shower," she said. "I need one anyway. Two birds."

"It’s small."

"I saw it last night. I’m not asking for a spa."

The bathroom was white tile and a shower stall barely wide enough for one person to turn around in. He got the water running and tested it with his hand while she pushed her underwear down and stepped out of it. When he turned back she was standing on the bath mat with her arms loose at her sides in the bare overhead light, nothing soft about the light at all, and she did not try to hide from it.

"Get in," she said. "Before I lose my nerve about the tile."

They got in together. The water was hot and the stall made them stand close whether they wanted to or not. She tipped her head back under the spray and her hair went dark and heavy down her back, and he put his hands on her hips and kissed her wet shoulder.

[Target: Victoria Sterling.]

[Target State: Deliberate. Seeking intimacy on her own schedule, inside a plan she has already made.]

[Secondary Sensitivity Zones: Lower back, inner thighs.]

He did not need the overlay to tell him about her lower back. He had found it the first time at the riverside apartment. He pressed the heel of his hand there now, low and firm, and she leaned back against his chest with a long breath.

"That," she said. "Do that."

He kept his hand there and slid the other one down over her stomach and between her legs. She was already slick. She widened her stance as far as the stall allowed and put one palm flat on the tile in front of her and held still for him. He stroked her slowly with two fingers, circling, listening to the change in her breathing over the hiss of the water.

"You’re very patient this morning," she said, a little unsteady.

"We have an hour."

"Fifty minutes."

He moved his fingers faster. She stopped correcting him.

When she came, it was quieter than the night before, a shudder that went through her whole body and a low sound she let out against the wet tile. Her hand slid down the wall. He held her up with an arm across her waist until her legs worked again.

Then she turned around in the stall and pushed him back against the other wall and went down on her knees on the tile.

"Victoria."

"I want to," she said, looking up at him with water running down her face. "Let me."

He let her. She took him in her mouth slowly, one hand wrapped around the base of him, and he had to brace one palm flat on the ceiling of the stall because there was nowhere else to put it. She was unhurried and thorough and plainly enjoying the effect she was having on him. When he said her name in warning she pulled back, stood up, and kissed him.

"Bed," she said. "I want you inside me and I’m not doing that on this floor."

They went back to the bedroom dripping. Neither of them bothered with a towel. She lay back across the blue sheets with her wet hair spread over his pillow and pulled him down by the wrist, and he reached into the nightstand drawer with his other hand.

When he pushed into her this time she was looking right at him. She did not close her eyes once. She wrapped her legs around his waist and set the pace herself, rolling her hips up against him, slow and then not slow. He followed her lead. The bed creaked. Through the wall the neighbor’s alarm went off and was slapped quiet.

"Faster," she said. "We have a car coming."

He laughed into her neck and gave her what she wanted. She came first, tight around him, with her fingers digging into his shoulders. He followed a few strokes later with his forehead pressed against hers and her hand on the back of his head holding him there.

They lay tangled and damp for a few minutes. The light outside had brightened a little. It was still the color of dishwater.

[Target: Victoria Sterling.]

[Bond Deepened: The target chose intimacy after weighing the risks aloud. The decision was made clear-eyed.]

[Reward: 150 AP.]

[Current AP Balance: 4350.]

"You’re doing it again," she murmured.

"Doing what?"

"Reading." She didn’t sound angry. She sounded like someone making a note in a file she intended to open later. "Seven twenty. I need my clothes and you need a shirt that isn’t on a chair."

They dressed in the small bedroom without much talk. Her charcoal suit had creased overnight. She looked at it in his mirror, pulled the jacket straight, and decided it would do for the ten minutes it took to reach the hotel. She pinned her hair up without looking at her hands. By the time she finished she looked like a woman who had spent the night in a hotel suite. Only the mouth was wrong. It kept wanting to soften, and she kept making it stop.

At seven forty his phone rang.

Reed.

Lucas looked at Victoria. She nodded once.

He answered on speaker.

"Where are you?" Reed asked. No greeting.

"Home."

"Alone?"

Lucas did not look away from Victoria.

"No," he said. "Victoria’s here. She stayed last night. We were going to tell you this morning."

There was a short pause on the line. It was not a surprised pause. It was the pause of a man adjusting a document in his head.

"Good," Reed said. "Because the GC called me at seven fifteen. Her detail’s overnight log went into the litigation hold at six, as it does every morning. The GC read it at seven. He would like to discuss it before he finishes the revised instruction." Another pause. "And you should both know that Richard’s bail hearing has been moved up to eleven, and at six fifty this morning Elena Garrity filed a motion to withdraw as his counsel."

Victoria’s head came up.

"Withdraw," she said.

"Withdraw," Reed said. "Which means somebody new is going to read his file today. Including the photograph."

[Priority Quest Generated.]

[Objective: Give a complete and accurate account of the relationship with Victoria Sterling to counsel before the revised no-contact instruction is issued.]

[Reward: 300 AP.]

[Failure Penalty: Witness credibility compromised; the relationship becomes defense material instead of a disclosed fact.]

[Current AP Balance: 4350.]

"We’ll be at your office by eight thirty," Lucas said.

"Separately," Reed said. "Please."