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He checked the market and winced. Already, PIB was suffering its worst losses ever and it was barely noon.
Soon alarmed accountants would be calling, then lower management then upper management. By the end of the day, he would be a man brought so low he would never recover in this lifetime.
Poor.
Poor, poor, poor. Forever.
He remembered how to insert the magazine, which was fully loaded. He remembered that all you had to do was pull the trigger. Four pounds of pressure. And the pain would be gone.
Wherever he was going, surely he wouldn’t be poor?
He put the muzzle in his mouth and exerted the four pounds of pressure just as his phone bank lit up.
ASI
Portland, Oregon
Two months later
“Hey,you up for lunch at that new Vietnamese place?” Raul shivered as he entered ASI’s IT center. Damn it was cold.
Emma had been staring at her screens with that cute little scrunched up frown between her eyebrows that she got when she was concentrating. She shook her head, blinked, and smiled up at him.
His heart gave a huge thump in his chest. It did that often when he was around her. He’d been hoping that seeing a lot of her would dial that right down, but it hadn’t. He was hooked. It was nice that she was hooked, too. She was fiercely focused at work, but her face softened when she saw him. He wasn’t alone in this.
They made an effort to be professional at work, but he simply couldn’t help stroking a finger down her soft cheek. So amazingly soft. Outside work, they didn’t have to rein themselves in. He slept most nights at the little studio apartment ASI gave new recruits, but he was working up the nerve to ask her to move in with him.
His abuela, who’d met her two weeks ago when the entire clan came up in a convoy to Portland to meet her, called him every other day to find out how things stood. Everyone understood that this was important to him, though he’d tried to play it cool. But there was no playing it cool around Emma.
His whole family adored her and far from being uncomfortable at being the center of attention of curious and nosy Martinez family members, she loved it. She grew all rosy when they were around. His sisters loved her and his brothers and male cousins were jealous as hell.
Damn right. Emma was a real catch. And he’d caught her and wasn’t letting her go.
“So – Vietnamese? Can you leave what you’re doing?”
Emma had arrived just in time. There was a ton of work, and Felicity was in the last few weeks of her pregnancy and confined to her home. Metal made sure she rested. He was a real hard ass about that.
Hope couldn’t keep up and was really happy Emma joined them. They both thrived at ASI. They did excellent work and were super appreciated, treated like goddesses. Though Luke and he made sure the operators were all hands off. Two beautiful, smart women – it was catnip to the testosterone-fuelled operators. They mostly behaved, though.
Emma was talking to Pierce, on one of the wall screens. He was in Washington, DC, negotiating a contract for the company. Raul suspected he’d insisted on travelling to DC because he was working up the courage to ask Emma and Hope’s friend, Riley, out to dinner. Tough badass SEAL, scared of a beautiful computer scientist.
“Not doing anything urgent,” Emma said. “I’m following the China crisis. It’s scary.”
It was. If Raul and his teammates had been in the Teams, they’d be gearing up to be deployed. Chinese commandos had attacked a group of American surveyors and geologists in Congo and tensions were high and ratcheting higher. A Chinese destroyer had shot across the bow of the USS Ronald Reagan in the Taiwan Strait and the president had sent four elements of the Seventh Fleet to China’s southern coast.
The situation was heating up fast.
Pierce was frowning down from his screen. “Word here is that the People’s Liberation Army has just received orders to mobilize.”
“What?” Emma switched screens and read quickly. “Oh my God. The president will put us on a war footing, too.”
There was a peculiar noise and then the monstrous Goblin King appeared, shouting “Bring up the Bonebreaker!”The HER room. Three members of the HER room were in Portland, so it could only be Riley. Up on the wall screen, Pierce put down his tablet and leaned on his fists.
“You guys use the HER room only for emergencies, right, Emma?”
She nodded. “Riley must be in trouble.”
The Goblin King dissolved and Riley Robinson’s pretty face appeared. She was walking fast, disheveled, glancing behind her. “Emma, I need help.”
