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She barely recognized Carlyle’s voice coming through the wall. He sounded panicked and strained.
“The SEC is going to be here in an hour! Even we can’t shred that fast!”
“Find. Someone. To. Blame,” Christo was saying.
“There’s nobody here to blame. There’s just us.”
“Really? Because I have the building’s automatic log file, and there’s a certain manager of boring things who never left this building last night. Where is she?”
“Sleeping, in my office,” Alex said.
Sophie pulled the blanket up to her face, her eyes wide. They were talking about her.
“Alex, you dog, I’m impressed!” Christo was laughing. “You never usually go for the fresh skirt.”
“I didn’t sleep with her, Christo. She was working late and she needed to sleep.”
“And you left her in your office? She’s barely worked here for a month and you leave her in your office, completely unattended. She could be doing anything in there. She could be defrauding the entire company…”
Okay. This had gone far enough. Sophie slipped off the couch, pulled her shoes back on, and made her way back into Carlyle’s office. Sophie didn’t know what was going on, but it didn’t sound good. The SEC was to be feared, one of the very few institutions capable of doing real damage to a behemoth like Apex.
“I’m not defrauding anybody,” Sophie made her entrance with that less-than-flattering introduction.
Alex palmed his face. “Sophie, stay out of this. Go back to my office. Now.”
“And let you blame me for things I haven’t done? No, thank you. I don’t plan to be Enron-ed.”
It was obvious that these men were about to throw her under an SEC-sized bus, and she wasn’t going to let that happen.
Christo looked at her mercilessly. “Sorry, kid, but better you take the fall for this than the entire company goes under.”
“So you don’t think I actually did something wrong, you just want me to take the blame for it?”
“Yes.”
How could someone be this honest, and this completely fucking broken at the same time? There was something wrong with Christo. He was a psychopath. There was no malice in what he was saying. It wasn’t that he was trying to hurt her, particularly. It was that he simply didn’t care if she got hurt. She didn’t matter to him. At all.
“You can’t do this,” she said, outraged and afraid.
“I can. You see, I’m the CEO, and you’re a manager nobody has ever heard of before. If Apex were an army, you’d be the tip of the spear. Designed to break off in the heat of battle.”
“But I haven’t done anything wrong…”
“My god!” he laughed. “Where did Carlyle hire you? You sound like you belong in a nursery. Haven’t done anything wrong. As if that has ever mattered.”
“That’s enough, Christo.”
It was Alex who intervened, though not with much. She waited to hear him tell the CEO that this couldn’t happen. The words did not come.
“Leave the girl out of this,” Carlyle said.
Sophie was so relieved she remembered to breathe properly for all of thirty seconds before Christo refused the request.
“I can’t. You brought her into it. You took her to all our meetings, Carlyle. Her name is on the minutes. And the cameras place her here. When they conduct their investigation, they’re going to find her all over it.”
“She doesn’t know anything.”
“She knows enough. And what she doesn’t know, they won’t believe she doesn’t know.” Christo had a very unpleasant smirk on his face. He knew damn well he was untouchable. Men in his position only ever needed to find a scapegoat, and Sophie was the perfect one.
“Look on the bright side," Christo told her. “You’re going to be famous.”
“I don’t want to be famous!”
“More infamous, really. But it’s sort of the same thing. Tell you what. Go down to the cafe, have a hot chocolate or something, and wait for the SEC inspectors. They won’t be long, and you can tell them all about how you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“That’s enough, Christo,” Alex snapped. “It is one thing to use her, but there’s no reason to taunt her.”
“You could try running,” Christo suggested. “It will make you look slightly more guilty, but you already look more than guilty enough, so I don’t think it will matter…”
“ENOUGH!” Alex thundered. “I’m taking her.”
He grabbed Sophie by the hand, and glared at the other two as if to dare them to try to stop him.
His touch made her feel safe, though she was still terrified. Everything was happening so quickly, but she knew that the danger was real. The SEC was no joke, and people went down as scapegoats all the time.
“Please,” she whimpered. “Help me.”
“You should have gone home when I told you,” Alex replied, conveniently forgetting that he was the one who had convinced her to stay and sleep on his couch. “Let’s go.”
He led her out of the offices, his grip strong on her hand as he took her down to the parking garage and put her into his Tesla. He got into the driver’s side without a word, started the engine and sent the car spinning out of the Apex building.
