Page 58 of Pressure

"And I decided to go with my gut and come apologize in person this time," he said.

Marissa stalked to the closet where she'd stashed her clothes and pulled on a pair of sweats and a t-shirt, not bothering with underwear.

"I'm sorry, Riss. For everything."

"I just want to get through this job, Lance. I want to talk about us. I want to figure things out. I want a lot of things that it feels like I can't have."

"Baby, please. I'm sorry I've been putting off talking about us. I guess I'm worried. I want to get through this job too. But not because I'm ready for you to leave. Because I want to address our problems. It just seems like that would be easier when we're not working on a big project together."

She laughed. "That was always our problem wasn't it? We always made promises to talk things out after the next big project, but instead we wound up in bed or in the dungeon working our frustrations out through sex. Not that I don't enjoy that, but it doesn't exactly solve problems."

Lance gave her a half grin. "I think you're wrong about sex not solving problems, but I get what you're saying."

"Do you?"

Marissa wasn't sure he got it at all, but she was going to do her best to give him the benefit of the doubt for now.

"I do, Riss. Our relationship was problematic before I fucked everything up. We have to address that. I'm just not sure why we have to address it right this moment."

She sighed. "It's OK. Just forget it."

Lance stood and gripped her wrists, pulling her to him. "No. It's not OK. Talk to me. Help me understand where your head is so I don't fuck up again. Do we need to stop having sex? Do we need to have more sex? Do we need to reintroduce a real D/s dynamic? Should we just stay vanilla? What do you need, Kitten? I just want to get this right."

She smiled and pulled one wrist free to lay her palm against his cheek.

"I appreciate it. I think I still need to figure all that out. Definitely more sex though," she teased. "I think it's the kink that I'm getting hung up on. I'm sitting here in a kink club, practically living here and it should be my wildest dream come true but it's not. I'm only pretending to be your sub, and last weekend I had to watch you Dom some other chick—who I wanted to punch in the vagina all night by the way."

Lance threw his head back and laughed. "Is that what this is about? You're jealous of my trainee? You know I'm not fucking her right?"

Marissa nodded, then shook her head. "I was hoping you weren't fucking her, but no, I didn't know that."

Lance smiled and pulled her into a hug. "I'm not fucking her, Riss. And if I had been, I would have told you and I would have put an end to it before I let you back into my bed. I'm an asshole for a lot of reasons but that's not one of them."

She nodded. "OK. I trust you. I still don't know what to do about us and kink, though. And I don't want to take anything away from you regarding that. So just give me some time to figure this shit out. Maybe if I work through my issues by Friday, I won't have to pretend to be your submissive anymore?" she questioned with a shy smile.

He dipped his head and gave her a tender kiss. "You amaze me, Riss. Take all the time you need. There are plenty more weekends ahead of us even if you don't sort yourself out by Friday."

She nodded and stepped away. "I guess we should get back to it if we want to unveil the new website by Friday and put everyone's minds at ease."

Lance kissed her one more time and together they walked back downstairs.

Sometime around midnight, Lance tapped out and tried to pull her to bed, but she waved him off and poured another cup of coffee. "I want to keep working. You go ahead. I'll meet you up there."

He sighed but kissed her deeply and went upstairs.

When he was gone, she put her headphones on and got back to work. At first, she focused on rebuilding the website, but she couldn't get Sebastian's words out of her head. "My part of the job is done."

What did he mean by that? Using what she knew of him, she began scrolling through forums on the dark web looking for any chatter among underground hackers that might give her clues, striking up conversations where she thought it felt safe.

At first, she came up empty and almost went back to her work on the website. As she was scrolling through one more list of search results, someone sent her a ping and opened a chat box, so she said hello.

"If you're asking about Sebastian, you might be interested in this."

She eyed the link suspiciously but after implementing a few safety measures, she clicked it.

When she did, her heart dropped. The entire forum was dedicated to the take down of Lance Moss. Hackers were working together to try and break his firewalls at Moss Tech.

All of it seemed to link back to the messages Sebastian liked to leave in his code. If a hacker could decipher one, they got brought into the fold and were able to work on the job. A lot of them were social justice warriors convinced that big tech needed to be broken up. A lot of hackers didn't like big tech companies like Moss Tech, or Facebook, or Google. Marissa once belonged to that category of hacker, but she'd since learned the value of big companies with a lot of capital. That didn't mean there weren't a lot of bad apples and greedy bastards at the top of these companies though. That's one thing Marissa wanted to battle with her own company.

Her heart hurt as she read the awful things they were saying about a man they'd never met. Granted she'd said a lot worse about him in the aftermath of their breakup.

Now she had to figure out how or if she wanted to bring this to his attention. Some of what they were saying was fairly generic threats they made to every big name in tech, but a few bits and pieces seemed personal. Definitely things only their hacker could have fed them. None of it seemed to be associated with Solitaire so she decided not to say anything to Lance until she'd done more digging to see just how much damage these people had done.

If what she was reading was right, though, this had been set into motion by Sebastian. Was it part of what Nicholas Sutton had asked him to do or was it something he'd done on his own as revenge on Lance for taking him down. He seemed like the type that would be after that extra bit of revenge, so he probably did it for no extra charge. She spent another hour reading through the forum and copying anything she thought could be useful into a document on her laptop.

When she saw what time it was, she willed herself to leave it behind for now. She saved the link and went back to work on the job she was being paid for. Two hours later, the sun was coming up and she went upstairs and crept into bed with Lance.

"Hey, Kitten. What time is it? he mumbled as he wrapped an arm around her and pulled her to his warm, naked chest.

"Just after six," she whispered, letting her eyes drift closed. In the moment, she made a decision that he was a risk she wanted to take. "I'll be yours this weekend, but not until then," she said, as she floated closer to sleep.

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