At Any Turn (Gaming The System) (15 page)

“I want low-level surveillance. No shadowing her.” I couldn’t chance that she’d somehow find out and though Jordan had assured me that this guy was good, I wasn’t going to risk it.

“You say she’s in a condo? How many units in the complex? And is she living alone or with someone?”

“Uh, at least a hundred units. She has a roommate.”

“So some of the normal low-level surveillance techniques probably won’t be effective, like looking through mail or garbage and the like. It’s going to take some time if you don’t want her followed.”

I paused, stared at the wall. “Can you look into phone records, bank payments, that sort of thing?”

“There’s also other online stuff—social media, for example.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I’ve got that covered myself. Dig around and see what you can find out. If it ends up taking too long, I’ll make the call on whether to start having her followed.”

“Sounds good. I’ll keep you posted with updates on what I find. Text messages okay or would you prefer e-mail?”

“Text is fine.”

I ended the call and stared into space for a long moment. I’d been glued to her blog and every comment for days. There was nothing there. And her Twitter account and Facebook page were equally devoid of personal information—even the usual tiny tidbits she was comfortable giving, like complaining about having a cold or moaning about the weather—not that we had weather to moan about in Southern California. But it was almost
meticulously
devoid of anything personal. As if she was hiding something.

She’d found out long ago that I was a regular reader of her blog. It hadn’t affected how she wrote—even about Draco games—until now. Now it was sterilized of anything personal. There was no longer much Girl Geek in the Girl Geek blog.

With each question that came up, that old fear grew stronger. I couldn’t lose her. I
wouldn’t
.

Chapter Nine

I left work early on Tuesday because she hadn’t come in and I texted her to see if she was okay. She said she still wanted to meet me and I told her to come over to my house midafternoon. I’d finish my workday from there. Besides, all I really had to do was test out a new app that was going to be unveiled at DracoCon, so I decided to do it from home. In fact, Emilia could help me.

I was in the middle of my initial testing when she arrived. Cora, my housekeeper, fawned all over her, giving her kisses on the cheek. Emilia came in and plopped down on the sofa across from me in the front sitting room. She wore jeans, a brown T-shirt that read, in big gold letters, BROWNCOAT, accentuated by five-pointed stars that declared her an undying fan of the beloved but short-lived sci-fi TV show
Firefly
.
And on her head, a black baseball cap with the Dragon Epoch logo on it.

“Nice hat,” I said.

She gave me a tired smile, looking like she hadn’t slept since the last time I’d seen her on Sunday. I frowned. “You okay?”

She blinked. “Do I look that bad?”

I got up and moved to sit beside her. “You look really tired. I thought you said you were feeling better yesterday. How was your day with your mom?”

She looked away from me, caught the end of her ponytail and swirled it around her finger. I watched it, my eyes darting between her flitting eyes and the agitated movements of her hand. “Oh. I started feeling pretty crappy after I texted you, so I ended up canceling that.”

I scrutinized her, now under the assumption that everything she’d tell me would be an evasion or even a lie.

“You feeling better now?” She sure didn’t look it. Her eyes looked puffy. I wanted to corner her, pin her down, but I had to forcibly remind myself that I wasn’t taking that approach anymore. I leaned back and just watched her.

She darted me a quick look and bent forward to kiss me on the cheek, throwing her arms around my neck.

“Hey,” I said, pulling her close to me. I buried my nose in the side of her neck, inhaling her. She stayed clasped to me for a long moment without moving, so I held her.

“Emilia, what’s going on?”

She pulled back from me and planted a long kiss on my lips, then tilted her head away. “Nothing. I just missed you.”

I refrained from pointing out the obvious, that if she’d just move back into the house, she wouldn’t have to miss me. I glanced at her backpack, hoping she’d packed for overnight, but even if she hadn’t, I’d had an assistant grab a few things at the local store, just in case. I couldn’t wait to spring my little surprise on her. I’d procured an early digital preview copy of the latest
Hobbit
movie that wouldn’t be out in the theaters until next month. Strings had been pulled and favors called in for that one. We’d watch it in the audiovisual room after dinner. I couldn’t wait to see the look on her face when the credits came up.

She glanced at my laptop. “What are you working on?”

“Hmm. I was going to say ‘top secret’ because I know how much you love that.” I chucked her under the chin when she rolled her eyes. “But I actually need your help with it. It’s a new app we’ll be unveiling at the Con and I need to do the last bit of testing on it.”

Her eyes brightened “A phone app? Like a brand new game or…?”

“It’s a companion app to go along with DE. You can interact with the game even when you aren’t logged in and playing.”

She frowned at me. “From your phone? This is a finished product and I’m only finding out about it
now
?”

“Fear not, little blogger. I’ll give you first scoop on it. In fact, I’ll tell Mac to give you the job of doing the write-up on it for the Con.”

“What does it do? Does it let you chat with your friends in the game?”

I pulled out my phone and opened up the app. “Yeah, there’s a chat feature, but that’s the least of what you can do. You can set offline commands for your character to do things, like work on their noncombat skills or—”

“Oooh, Eloisa can finally become an expert weaver! I have no patience for that crap in the game. I’d rather go hack orcs than do skills. No offense.”

I laughed. “I didn’t develop the noncombat skills in the game. None taken.”

I demonstrated the app and she was immediately immersed, a huge grin on her face. “Oh, this is so cool! I can sell stuff to other players at the auction house.”

“Yep, you can trade or sell equipment in-game even when you aren’t logged in.”

Her brows rose. “What about security issues, like what happened with that kid in New Jersey?”

“You have to register your phone when you create your account before you use this app. There are classified ads so you can advertise for stuff you want to buy. Also, you can send out push notices, so if you want to get your friends to log on to do a raid, you can have the app send text messages to their cell phones.”

“Badass. You’re a fucking genius.” She started pressing commands. “Quick, log on to FallenOne, I want to see if I can make him do stuff from the phone.”

I turned to my laptop and logged in. We spent the next half hour running the app through the gamut of commands. Emilia was thrilled, asking me a million questions. “Shit, I can’t believe I slept with you every night for months and you were hiding this from me.”

“Business is business,” I said. “You bat for the other team.”

“Ha!” she said, but as she continued to press buttons, a frown crossed her face. She looked distracted, deep in thought.

“What’s wrong?”

She looked up at me with almost fearful eyes. “Um. Well…”

I frowned at her. “Is it the app?”

“No. The app is awesome.” She straightened, handing the phone back to me. I set it next to the laptop. Maybe now she’d come clean?

But as I watched her, I noticed that she’d suddenly gone very pale. She cleared her throat and then coughed. “I came over because I wanted to hang out with you. But also because we need to talk.”

I stiffened. The “we need to talk” phrase
never
ended well. My breathing froze. Had she come over to break up? Was
this
what all the evasive behavior was about? Shit. I needed a minute to gather my thoughts, formulate a plan. “Can I get you a glass of water?”

She cleared her throat again. “Um. Yeah. Please? And—umm, maybe some wine?”

Water
and
wine? I got up and went into the kitchen, grabbing a cup and filling it from the cold water dispenser on the fridge. My mind raced. Change the subject? That wouldn’t work. Why would she want to break up? That nagging fear that there was someone else reared its ugly head. But she hadn’t come in to work for two days and had been very clearly under the weather this weekend

I had no information and wouldn’t have any until the PI got back to me. She had the upper hand and I had to find a way to avoid a confrontation right now. My mind raced.
In war, the way is to avoid what is strong and strike at what is weak
.

I removed a chilled bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from the fridge and uncorked it. The wine hadn’t been touched since she’d moved out. I came back into the room, a glass in each hand, and set them down on the coffee table in front of her. She didn’t look up, having taken up the phone again, messing with the app.

She reached out for the glass of wine and downed the entire thing in one gulp without taking her eyes off the phone. What the hell? “I’m glad the app is such a hit,” I said.

She didn’t say anything for a long moment. She cleared her throat again and glanced up at me with a strange look on her face. “You got a text just now. From someone named Miguel.”

My blood ran cold. Swallowing, I tried my hardest to hide my fear. I held out a hand for my phone, but she didn’t give it to me. I clenched my jaw and lowered my hand.

There was a definite chance that his text was innocuous. She might not even realize that Miguel was the PI I’d hired to dig up information on her. It could be a very unfounded fear. But if that was the case, why was I hardly breathing?

She frowned, glancing at the phone again. “Yeah, so Miguel wants to know if it’s okay to attach a GPS tracker to my car even though you don’t want me actively followed.”

She set the phone down and stood up, glaring at me. Bending to grab her backpack, she turned, but she never made it more than a few steps to the door. I intercepted her, taking her arm.

“I can explain.”

She pulled away from me. “What the
fuck
, Adam?”

“I was worried about you—”

“Says every other creepy stalker on the planet. I need to go,” she said in stiff, clipped tones.

“You said we needed to talk,” I said, moving in front of her again.

“Why do we have to
talk
?” she ground out. “You can just have your private dick follow me around.”

“Emilia—”

She pushed back from me. “Back the fuck off! Are you really
that
mystified because I turned down your proposal and moved out? Like every other woman in the galaxy wouldn’t fall all over herself to stand in line to marry the hot young gazillionaire. You can’t wrap your mind around the fact that I’m not groveling with gratitude at your feet to become probably the first in a long line of Mrs. Adam Drakes? Is that the big mystery you need solved? Because I’ll tell you why right now. And you don’t need to waste money on stalking me.”

I drew back from her and folded my arms across my chest. I called out to the housekeeper, who I knew was in the next room hearing every word. Cora was a wise woman. After I told her she was good for the day, she emerged about two minutes later with her purse over her arm and didn’t look at either one of us as she made her way out the door.

Emilia fumed and—weirdly—she had tears in her eyes. She never cried. I was in full panic mode, my mind racing to figure out what the fuck to do. There was no nice quip from
The Art of War
about what to do when the other side found out about your spies and were pissed as hell about it. And, from the looks of her, this was about to turn into an all-out war.

I shifted my stance. “I fucked up.”

“At least I can agree with you there.”

“Can we sit down and talk about this?”

She clenched her jaw and wiped a tear with a brusque swipe of her hand. Then she shook her head. “I’m too pissed off at you right now.”

I let out a long breath. I wasn’t going to make the mistake of backing her into a corner again but goddamn if I was going to allow her to leave like this, either. “You have a right to be pissed off. But I did it—”

“
Don’t
say you did it out of love! Don’t you
dare
say that. You didn’t have a right.”

“I don’t have a right to know what’s going on with you, why you are acting so weird?”

Her eyes widened and she dropped her backpack on the floor next to where she stood. “You could have, I don’t know, done what
normal
people do and
ask
.”

“I
did
ask. Over and over again. At the restaurant, at Heath’s place.
Here
. An hour ago. You wouldn’t tell me. And you wouldn’t tell your mom. And I have a sneaking suspicion that you were avoiding both of us on Sunday and you
never
had plans to go out with her last night.”

“This has nothing to do with you being worried about me and
everything
to do with your need to control me and my entire life. If you can’t even acknowledge that, then we are done.”

“I’m not some kind of control freak—”

She huffed in disbelief. “That is
absolutely
what you are! Ever since before we even met in person, you’ve tried to control me. You took control of the auction, you strung me along, you held that money over my head. But that was
okay
, right? Because you were
saving
me. And I tolerated it because I fell in love with you in spite of it all.”

“I fell in love with you, too. I never planned that.”

“And you used it as your excuse to keep on controlling me. This is how it’s been between us since the beginning and I never should have allowed it. It’s how you treat everyone in your life. We all move according to your carefully orchestrated plans, like part of one of your codes, and if anyone deviates from what you want, you try to reprogram us. So Mia wants to go off to med school in Maryland? I’ll program her to become Mrs. Adam Drake and she’ll stay here instead.”