“If I’d averaged your effort with Mr. Mendoza’s, you’d be walking out of here with a fifty.”
“You can’t give him a zero,” I answer in a small voice, feeling the heat rise in my cheeks.
“Would you like to test that theory?”
I give a quick shake of my head.
“Next time, ask to switch partners. Next time, smack him on the back of the head for freeloading off you. Next time…”
But he stops himself before he finishes, gives a slight shake of his head like he’s brushing away a thought, and turns abruptly from my desk.
Before he crosses the threshold, without looking back, he says,”Your mind is a privilege, Amalia. Stop carrying everyone on your back just to be considered a ‘nice’ classmate. At least in my class, I don’t need you to be nice. I need you to be smart.”
And with that, he walks out the door, leaving me open-mouthed and with something like a tornado trapped inside my chest. Because my whole life, I’ve been told to be good, and Silas Vaughn is the first person to tell me he doesn’t want that from me.
Ican feel my muscles screaming at me to stop, to take a breath, but Andreas seems to be carrying a rage that needs somewhere to go, and lucky me, I’m the outlet.
“What the hell is going on with you?” I ask, trying to block each hit as it comes.
Every weekend we meet at a boxing gym and burn through every last thing in our bodies until we can barely stand, but today it feels like I’m his actual enemy in this ring.
I barely duck his uppercut in time, and when he clocks how close he came to putting me on the floor with a possible internal bleed, he stops and drops his hands to his knees.
Andreas is the same age as me, and he’s the only friend I have who knows everything. He knows about Dean. He knows aboutmy decision to come here. He knows about Karina. The only thing he’s not aware of is a bun with a handful of loose strands escaping it.
“Lost him in Zagreb,” he says through his teeth, and he doesn’t need to tell me whohemeans.
For over seven years, Andreas has been helping me track down the man who killed my brother.
In the beginning, neither of us had much to work with. He came from an immigrant family out of Hong Kong, and I had just started figuring out what to do with the money coming in from my various extracurricular activities.
The moment we’d scraped together enough, we bought the equipment and an apartment. That’s how Triad Financial was born.
Any balance sheet, any unjustified expense, any liability that might draw the wrong kind of attention, we fix it with math and algorithms.
But the firm has always been a way to keep ourselves occupied until we findhim.
We’re both sharp with numbers, but where formulas and calculations pulled me in, programming pulled Andreas. So we built the perfect team.
These days Andreas is the face of the company while I work from the background, but the firm’s core mission has never changed: find the snake who decided spilling my brother’s blood was preferable to paying us a four-figure sum.
Because we needed capital to fund every piece of surveillance equipment, every trip across the world that almost —almost— ended with our hands on the bastard.
If he were an ordinary man, we’d have had him by now. But he has too much reach, and no matter how hard we push, we haven’t been able to find the opening that leads to him.
“We’ll find him, Andreas.”
The rage tries to consume everything inside me. I remember the promise I made to Dean, to myself, but I hold on to one thought: that fucking scumbag will pay for what he did. That’s the only thing keeping me from spiraling.
Unlike me, Andreas has always run on anger and nerve. He’s the blunt force. I’m the calm one, the brain.
I watch his eyes, brown, nearly as dark as mine, lift from the floor.
Almost smiling, he asks, “Something’s off about you, Si. Don’t tell me you’re finally taking advantage of that position of yours and bringing home a few students who want to learn all about, what do you call them, integrals?”
I walk over and smack him on the back of the head, because he knows exactly what I think of his jokes.
“Ohhh, so thereissomeone. Otherwise you wouldn’t be that easy to rattle. Brunette? Redhead? Purple?”
