A stray thought flickered through her mind. It must be so nice to have someone like him watching your back. Someone competent. Decisive. Someone who has his shit together. Too bad he is an enemy.
Earlier that morning, Ramona had sat in her office alone and viewed the two recordings of Gabriel, the first showing him stealing their data and the second of him meeting Cassida. She remembered the exact moment her brain processed what she was seeing. She felt a blinding pain, and then she went numb.
There was no time to feel or to come to terms with anything. She had to save the family. The emergency was so dire it pushed all her emotions out, leaving room for nothing else.
She had to hunt Gabriel down. She had two brothers, her parents, two aunts, an uncle, and a handful of cousins, and yet she had no one to turn to. Karion might have joined her, but she needed him to hold on to the family while she was gone. Santiago, her younger brother, was barely twenty and lacked patience. He would fly off the handle, and that was the last thing she needed now. None of the other relatives were secare, except for her retired parents, and she would rather die than get them involved.
She was on her own. At the time she had simply accepted it, but now, as she listened to Matias, she felt a crushing realization—she was alone. Utterly, completely alone. She would never let it stagger her, but it hurt.
The CSO and VP departed, Solei giving her a cold, flat stare before he left the room. Matias tapped the corner of the desk, and the ethereal light screen materialized on the wall. An older woman appeared, sitting on a garden bench against the backdrop of heavy dahlia blooms, her skin a deep brown tinted with red, her silver hair braided into a thick plait wrapped in an elaborate gold mesh.
“Aunt Nadira,” Matias said.
After Matias’s father died, his mother sank into her grief, abandoning her post as the leader of the family. Nadira jumped into that pilot seat before the Baenas had a chance to drift off course and steered the family for another eight years, until Matias was ready to take over.
She looked so harmless now, just an older woman in a beautiful emerald sari, surrounded by dahlias blooming in every color. And if an intruder broke into that garden, they would die before they ever sensed her presence.
Nadira smiled. “And how is my favorite nephew?”
Matias leaned forward. “Incredibly concerned and saddened by your recent illness.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Am I sick enough to require your immediate presence?”
“You are.”
“And am I refusing all visitors except my precious nephew because he is the only one I will allow to view me in my sorry state?”
Matias nodded. “Exactly.”
“The shit has hit the fan, I take it?”
He moved his fingers right to left. The sensor in the vid screen obeyed, tilting it toward her. Ramona met the older woman’s gaze.
“Oh,” Nadira Baena said. “That bad?”
He tilted the screen back and nodded.
“How long?”
“As long as it takes.”
“Very well. I’ll have Sylus inform the family.” Nadira leaned toward the screen and fixed her nephew with a sharp stare. “Watch yourself. Come back alive.”
“Always.” He kissed his fingers and offered them to her.
The display vanished.
“I can’t simply disappear,” Matias said.
It was an issue she was intimately familiar with. “The problem with spearheading a family business is that most of the corporate officers are also your relatives, who view you as the ultimate arbiter of their disputes.”
“Yes. And in my case, they make no distinction between an argument over the precise calibration of the Kelly-particle agitator or the choice of a faucet for a new heated bubble tub.”
“Same.”
They shared a look. They were still enemies, but even enemies were allowed latitude when it came to complaining about family.
He rose. “The aerial is ready. Do you need us to stop anywhere?”
She had taken care of her affairs this morning. If her plan to convince him to cooperate had failed, she would have gone at it alone. “Everything I need is in my vehicle. I’ll give your people the code. They can bring it up.”
“Perfect.” He approached the door and waited as it slid open. She walked through the doorway, presenting him with an unobstructed shot at her back. If he struck, it would be now.
Matias turned left. “This way.”
They headed down the hallway to the same private elevator she had taken this morning, except this time there wouldn’t be six armed guards in it. Just her and Matias Baena.
She had lost her damn mind, but she’d made the right decision. She came to this man she had meticulously avoided all her life, a man who had no reason to trust her, and told him that his wife had betrayed him with her husband. There were a hundred ways he could have reacted. He could have lashed out at her; he could have refused to believe her; he could have shut down, gone into shock, or simply had her thrown out. Instead, they were riding an elevator, determined to fix this disaster before it became a catastrophe.
She was no longer dealing with it alone. She didn’t trust him, but she trusted the rage she’d seen in his eyes when his wife kissed her husband. For the first time since she saw that cursed recording, Ramona had room to take a deep breath. She did, and when she exhaled, she felt angry. Unbelievably, overpoweringly angry.
Gabriel. How dare he? How fucking dare he? She gave him everything. She turned a blind eye to his womanizing, to his endless vacations, to his consistent failure to carry out the simplest tasks. She freed him of all responsibilities. Literally, the only thing she asked for was loyalty. Not to her as a spouse—that was beyond him—but to the family that enabled his carefree existence.
She’d worked so hard on this project. She gave it her all, her every waking hour, her sleep, and her peace of mind. She lived and breathed it for the last three years. Her life had become a grind, a constant search for just a little bit more money, enough to keep the project going while overcoming never-ending technological setbacks. The relentless pressure of knowing that if she failed, or just wasn’t fast enough to outrun the other two competitors, the family faced financial ruin was her constant companion. It kept her up at night and woke her up in the morning.
The two of them, Cassida and Gabriel, thought they could simply take everything she’d worked for. They thought she would roll over.
Ramona laughed. It sounded like a promise of murder.
“We’ll catch them,” Matias said, his voice cold like the space between the stars. “I give you my word.”
CHAPTER 2
The aerial waited for them on a private landing dock on the seventh floor, sleek, silver with black accents, its lines refined and perfect. A large model, with a walk-in cargo hold, it looked like a bird of prey, designed for precision and speed, a hair short of a military ship. She liked it.
Ramona raised her eyebrows. “A little high profile, maybe?”
“As you said, time is a factor.”
Her belongings waited in a neat pile by the aerial: a large waterproof, fire-retardant bag with necessities and a few changes of clothes, a weapon case containing her favorite energy rifle, and a hideous chartreuse gown vacuum sealed in resilient plastic.
Matias frowned at the gown.