KATE
Aweek of living in my crappy motel room.
I eat three meals a day, basic food picked up at the run-down grocery store half a mile away. I can’t take chances with my health; the last thing I need now is to end up in the emergency room after I faint from feckin’ hunger. So it’s back to the way Granny and I used to eat in Ireland—fresh fruit and lots of veg, tins of tuna and sardines, taken like medicine.
Every day, I long to ring Granny. I ache to hear Breagha’s voice. I consider what I could say to Mam or to Da, how I could make them take my side.
But I don’t dial one familiar number. I won’t give Wolf that weapon to use against me.
Instead, I fill my spare time writing code.
I start with the simplest programs I can think of: Designing a basic calculator, creating and updating a to-do list, building a scraper to extract information from online websites. I forcemyself to take each project step by step, laying a solid foundation before I layer on lines of crisp, clear code.
There’s nothing flashy. Nothing fancy. None of the flourishes I’ve added for years, to make my projects beautiful.
If the programs I make were buildings, they’d look like Fort Knox carved out of a glacier. Sturdy. Square. Ugly. But no one can break in. No one can get past my defenses.
I’m obsessed. I start sleeping only six hours a night, then five, then four—and even then, I’m dreaming lines of code. Night after night, I’m a perfect little machine, alone in my tiny room, back braced against flat pillows as I sit on my lumpy bed and squint at my computer screen beneath the dim bulb of the lamp on my nightstand.
I only turn the light off in the morning, once the sun has risen. Once it’s time to start the whole long day all over again.
51
COLE
Megan doesn’t show up.
I’m not surprised. Nothing my sister does surprises me anymore.
I wonder if she ever actually met Pyotr Tarasov. If she ever ran the lonely-hearts scam. If she ever feared for her safety, or if she just wanted to con me out of a hundred grand and another stay at the Four Seasons.
Grifters grift.
The first of May dawns. It’s a cold and rainy morning, all the spring colors blurred to gray. I stare at the date on my computer, and I know it’s important, but it takes me nearly an hour to remember why.
The press has the attached document.
One hundred mill by May 1, noon, or I send again, all redactions cleared.
Today is the deadline for me to keep the world from discovering I was convicted for fraud.
Part of me wants to sit on the sidelines, waiting to see if my blackmailer actually follows through. They haven’t been in touch since they released the redacted document. Maybe they’ve decided I’m not worth their time.
And maybe the sun rose in the west this morning.
I can sit here and do nothing. Let the criminal document hit the press. Accept that my career is over, that I’ll never find a new Lone Wolf client again.
Or I can pay up. Sign over one hundred million dollars.
Even to a billionaire like me, one hundred mill isn’t a trivial amount of money. But I’ve lost more than that on business deals gone bad. On real estate that went down in value. On start-up tech companies that never started up.
One hundred million dollars preserves the status quo—no one learns about my fraudulent past. I don’t have to worry that I’m making a bad decision because I’m distracted by Kate’s absence. That I’m ruining Lone Wolf because I deserve to be punished. I pay, and everything stays the same.
Not everything.
If I pay today, the blackmailer will come back with another demand. That’s how the con works—pressure, pressure, pressure, until the mark drains dry.
Fuck it.
