“You need to look at this latest brewmaker, Vesper,” Conrad said now, still smiling at me. “Your design is still a little glitchy, and we can’t put it into production until all the kinks are worked out.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Funny how it’s only my design when something’s wrong with it. Why, I thought it was your design when you pitched it to Sabine Kent a few weeks ago.”
As if dumping me for a Regal wasn’t bad enough, Conrad had also stolen my ideas for improving the brewmaker and other products and passed them off as his own. Duplicitous bastard.
His smile faltered, then vanished completely under my hot glower. “In case you’ve forgotten, I am the lab supervisor now,” he snapped. “So do us both a favor, and just do what you’re told.”
I raised my hand and snapped off a mocking salute. “Yes, sir.”
Anger sparked in his gaze, but it was nothing compared to the fury pulsing through my heart. Once again, I itched to grab the kitchen knife and stab him with it, if only to see how well the self-sharpening and -cleaning block worked. For science, of course.
Conrad sucked in a breath, but a light feminine voice cut off whatever order or insult he’d been about to hurl at me.
“Conrad! Darling! There you are!”
Sabine Kent sashayed over to us. She was about five years younger than me, in her early thirties, and absolutely gorgeous, with green eyes, pale skin, and coal-black hair that tumbled down her back in fat, glossy curls. Her light gray pantsuit and matching stilettos probably cost more than everything I owned, and the diamond studs in her ears twinkled like stars sneering about how much brighter she shone than I ever could.
I had always believed in karma, destiny, magic, fate, whatever you wanted to call the gods or forces or higher powers or whatever steered everything that happened in the galaxy. I just never expected it to be such a heartless bitch to me. I was the one who had been unceremoniously dumped, whose heart had been trampled and whose work had been stolen, so I should have been the one getting a hot new fling and a promotion and every other good thing that had appeared in Conrad’s life the instant he had gotten rid of me.
I might not be a Regal, might not belong to any House, but I had an excessive amount of pride, and I couldn’t decide which was worse—getting dumped, being duped out of my designs, or getting traded in for a younger, shinier, and much, much richer model. Any one of those would have been humiliating enough, but add in the fact that I still had to see Conrad every single day . . . Well, it was like constantly grinding salt into a fresh wound.
Sabine’s gaze landed on me. Her brow furrowed, and her lips puckered, as though she was trying to recall my name, even though we had been introduced more than a dozen times at Kent Corp events, and we had both dated the same man.
She must have dismissed me as unimportant, because her expression smoothed out and she focused on Conrad again.
“Come, darling,” Sabine cooed. “I have a new suit waiting for you in my office. I want you to look absolutely perfect for your meeting with my mother.”
My ears perked up. So Rowena Kent was on the premises. Well, that explained the guards I’d seen outside earlier, as well as the extra ones in the lobby. Once again, I wondered if anyone had any inkling of what I was planning to do, but I dismissed the thought.
I wasn’t important enough for anyone at Kent Corp to pay attention to—not Conrad, not Sabine, and certainly not Rowena Kent.
“Let’s go,” Sabine said, tugging on Conrad’s arm. “I can’t wait to see you in the new suit.”
He nodded at her, then snapped his fingers at me. “Get to work on that brewmaker. It keeps shooting off sparks.”
Conrad hit the button on the back. Several seconds later, a shower of hot blue electric sparks erupted all around the brewmaker, making me jerk back in surprise. A cruel smile twisted Conrad’s face, and he strode away with Sabine.
I sighed and reached for the off switch, but the brewmaker burped out another shower of sparks. One of the sparks landed on my right hand, making me hiss with pain. Still, that was a small sting compared to the anger, humiliation, and loneliness scorching through my heart.
For the second time in my life, I had been betrayed by someone I thought had cared about me. Some seer I was. Because try as I might, I could never quite see the pain zooming toward me before it shattered my heart yet again.
CHAPTER THREE
VESPER
Hal ambled through the lab, making sure all us rats were actually working. Bodie finally switched off the gossipcast about Kyrion Caldaren and the rest of the Regals, put his head down, and concentrated on the new blender he was designing.
I pulled my stool up to my workstation and examined the faulty brewmaker. It took me less than a minute to discover the solar wiring was frayed, hence the sparks. So the fault was not with my design but rather with the cheap, shoddy materials Kent Corp used in all their products. I huffed and shoved the brewmaker off to the side.
I’d fix it later—if I had a later.
I tinkered with a few more projects. When I was sure everyone was absorbed in their work, I fished an ID card out of the thigh pocket of my cargo pants and inserted it into my terminal. When the login screen popped up, I entered a fake name, along with the matching password.
Three months ago, right after he’d dumped me, Conrad had tasked me with designing some new ID cards for everyone in the R&D lab. Not only did the ID cards grant people access to campus, but they also monitored the workers’ movements through the various buildings and made a record of every file, document, and schematic they accessed. The cards were a good way to track theft and sabotage, and they were an even better way to hide what you were doing.
I’d swiped a dozen blank ID cards, then attached fake names and photos to them all. It had been a slow, painstaking process, but no one had noticed there were suddenly a dozen new employees in the system who very rarely logged in and never did any actual work. Then again, thousands of people worked for Kent Corp, and it was easy for folks to fall through the cracks, even if they were imaginary. I had intended to use the cards to surreptitiously access Conrad’s files and figure out just how many of my designs he had stolen and passed off as his own, but now, I had another plan for them.
I yawned and stretched, raising my arms high and wide. On their way back down, I accidentally-on-purpose banged my right hand against the terminal, knocking the monitor down and away from the cameras in the ceiling. The higher-ups were always worried about corporate espionage, especially given House Kent’s rivalries with the other Regal families, so someone was always monitoring the security feed, much the same way that Hal constantly ambled through the R&D lab like a shark in search of blood in the water.
When I was certain the cameras couldn’t see my monitor, I used the fake ID card to pull up all the files related to the Velorum, including my own report explaining why the ship had crashed, which I had submitted a few weeks ago and which had been summarily dismissed.
The information was the same as the last time I had checked it three days ago, except for one notable difference: Rowena Kent had spent more than an hour sifting through the files this morning, according to the time stamps.
Hmm. An unexpected and troubling development. I hesitated, wondering if I should go through with my plan. So far, the gossipcasts were buying the story that the Velorum crash had been caused by pilot error, but that wasn’t the truth. Then again, most people cared far more about credits and power than they did about the truth.