Page 8 of Hero & Villain
“You can’t say villain in one sentence and hero the next. Pick your allegory and run with it. Loyalty to one side or the other.” I raised my spoon in a salute before digging into the ice cream.
She shrugged. “Meh. Legal has sides, but if you’re loyal to your group, wouldn’t that be a virtue? All virtues are equally distributed, but wrongfully applied. Like Satan. Who hustles more than the devil? But ambition is a virtue.”
“Is it really?” I held out a scoop of ice cream to her. “I mean, I don’t see how anything is a virtue. Everything has a dark side.”
She took a bite and then started talking all garbled. “Exactly. So, hero vs. villain isn’t a true dichotomy because you can have a hero who is a piece of work, but still saves more people than he messes up, while you can have a villain who destroys lives out of incompetence instead of intention. Right?”
I blinked at her, not one hundred percent sure I’d understood all her words correctly. I finally shrugged. “I’m not drunk enough for this conversation. What do you have?” The longer she delayed with irrationalities, the better it was. That meant it would actually probably be pretty good.
She pulled a manila folder out of her coat and tossed it to me. “I printed it all out old school.”
“You are my hero.” I took the folder and opened it. I leaned closer when I saw that she had all the shareholders of Geotech listed with names and addresses. She’d circled one of the names with a Las Vegas address. “You’re diabolical. How did you get this? The company is completely private other than the cover CEO.” I’d been checking and rechecking methodically. Also ineffectively.
She smiled smugly. “The guy I’m dating? He’s pretending to be this great hacker, but he’s just using FBI sources.”
“FBI? Your guy’s FBI?” I sat up at that. Did we need to run or just dig deeper? “You didn’t mention that at our last meeting.”
She shrugged. “I have to have some fun. Look at the name.”
I frowned. “James Russell Jefferson Dirk Prescott? So? There are some Boston Prescotts. Are they related to our scum? I’ll destroy them all!”
She pulled out a pair of handcuffs and started twirling them on her finger while she wiggled her eyebrows, glee and a hint of sadistic pleasure clear in her eyes.
My chest constricted while I shook my head. No. Absolutely not. “It’s not him.”
“Who?” she asked, batting her lashes at me.
She was going to milk the entertainment value of my ultimate shame to the hilt. Ever since the elevator of horror, she’d been swinging those handcuffs around, pushing me to talk about the one thing about my eighteenth birthday I’d done my absolute best to block out.
I stiffened my spine, straightening up from my messy sprawl on the couch. “Dirk Dagger isn’t James Russell Jefferson Dirk Prescott. Dirk’s a common enough name.” Was it, though? My chest was getting weird. Not just tight, but tingly. I shouldn’t say that name out loud. It did weird things to me.
She perched on the arm of the sofa and poked my shoulder with her bony finger, cuffs still dangling. “Dirk is not a common name. It’s about as rare as, I don’t know, you making out with some random stranger in public at the top of a building. For twenty minutes. Twenty-three minutes and twenty-six seconds. I timed you.”
I had the handcuffs out of her fingers and her foot cuffed to the base of the couch before she could blink, then I stood and started pacing.
“He wasn’t a random stranger. He was Nitro’s boss.”
She grinned, sliding down the couch arm to the seat so she could pick the cuffs without looking away from me. “Oh, that’s right. You had that photo as your screensaver for how long? Two years, or was it seven? I guess it’s not random so much as obsessive.”
I glowered at her. “It’s normal for people to have athletes as their screensavers. Super normal.”
“Yeah,” she said, batting her lashes at me. “Also normal to make out with them for…”
I shoved a huge bite of ice cream in her face before I sat down on the floor and started putting her papers in order. Right there, in the middle of the papers was a printed image of the pic I’d kept as my screen saver.
It took my breath away. He was just so beautiful, with his shirt burned off, leaving ashes smudged across his perfectly chiseled abs. It wasn’t the abs or the jawline that made me catch my breath, but the eyes, the ones that dared you to stop being afraid and just…live. He was dangling out of a helicopter, about to backflip onto a moving assault vehicle and beat the crap out of his opposition. On the roof of a moving vehicle in an off-road race. That was the first three hundred I’d ever watched. I’d been obsessive about watching it every year after that, theculmination of a season of MMRW, or Mixed Martial Race World. Or War. It was basically war, only with better lighting.
Toni grabbed the picture. “I mean…” She fanned herself with it, batting her lashes. “He was so hot. I don’t blame you for making him your screensaver for seven years.”
“Five,” I snapped, snatching it out of her hand and shuffling it behind the other papers. I didn’t need to be distracted at a time like this, and apparently that photo was still capable of short-circuiting my mental synapses. Toni introduced me to the sport, and she was only into it because her cousin, Nitro, was a driver for Dirk’s Blades, one of the top teams in the Las Vegas MMRW sport.
The next image was of a man in a tuxedo looking like a cardboard cutout. Bored. Boring. He belonged, but he didn’t stand out, not in any way. He blended in like he put effort into it, like my agents would blend when they were working an event. In the picture, I was in the background with my fiancé, and I also looked bored, but also sparkling with ice and disdain. I put effort into being visible. That’s what the job was. This Prescott, who couldn’t possibly be Dirk Dagger, did the opposite.
She’d given me a rundown of the Prescott family history. They were old money, respectability, with emerging business in the tech sector. Like Geocorp? Why have a private offshoot of the family business… unless he didn’t want the backlash when he went after the interests of a corporation like Haversham? Clever. But not clever enough. Because now I had him, and I was going to…
The next picture was a shot of Prescott coming out the doors of an event, stepping out into the night, and his expression was a ringer. Alive. Fearless. Focused. Deadly.
I dropped the sheet of paper out of nerveless fingers and watched it float down over the other two images.
