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By the time I got back, she would have likely have let it go already.
Besides, this had to be done.
I knew she was forgiving by nature, always saw the good in people. It was sweet and rare and something I never wanted her to lose.
I, however, was a bit more of a realist. I had been in this shady underground of life for far too long to always think the best of people. More often than not, people were self-centered and shallow. They cared for themselves and their desires and they didn’t give a fuck who they hurt along the way.
Cynical? Probably.
But also true.
Maybe Gemma believed that Rylan was just trying to do good in the world. I even believed that his mission had likely started out that way.
But the man was losing it.
He called and texted her dozens of times a day, each message showing a shocking slip toward losing his sanity.
He’d gotten her package. From what she’d told me the drive and pages had contained, it was enough. Enough to blow a whistle, to expose them, to make sure the product never hit the market, affected thousands of lives, to make is so the EPA got on their asses in the future to make sure that what they were putting out was safe.
Hell, I was no lawyer, but I was pretty sure they even had enough to convict.
Yet he was ranting and raving about how there were no names on the documents, no proof that Phillip had seen and discarded the information. Despite said information being found on the man’s computer.
He wanted her to go back in.
While I knew she knew it wasn’t even a remote possibility to go, that I would literally make good on my threat to tie her down to keep her from doing it should it come to that, I could see the cracks forming with each increasingly aggressive text or voicemail.
Gemma had a soft heart that she didn’t know how to protect. Not even from those who meant to bruise it.
Rylan was bruising it.
I couldn’t stand by and let it keep happening.
Oh, and, well, on fucking principle, I could not let it slide that anyone thought they could call my woman a Selfish fucking bitch.
That wasn’t going to stand.
Sure, he didn’t know she was my woman.
But that shouldn’t have mattered.
You didn’t talk to women that way. Period. I’d been raised better. I would bet money that he had been raised better as well. I would just need to remind him of those early lessons.
After that, I would make it crystal fucking clear that he was done with Gemma. At least until he got his head together, until he thanked her for going undercover for him, for putting herself at risk for him, for getting hurt for him.
I knew this would hurt Gemma too. To have her connection so harshly severed. Maybe it wasn’t even my place to make sure it was done. I just figured this was the lesser of two evils. There would be hurt at his sudden absence from her life, but I thought it would be infinitely less painful than if she continued to be on the receiving end of his vitriol indefinitely.
Aside from not being able to leave the office, Rylan was the only dark cloud in our world at the moment.
We were dealing with the former problem with spending as much time as possible naked and wrapped up in each other. It was amazing how quickly time passed when you were exploring the body of someone you cared about. Hours passed in a blink. We both forgot in those hours that the outside world even existed.
It would get old eventually. Not the sex. I never saw that getting old. But being stuck, not being able to go out together.
We got to play house in a way. Jules or Finn or Bellamy would run out and fetch the list of things Gemma needed from the grocery store so that she could cook and bake. We got to eat and watch TV or movies.
It was nice.
But it wasn’t real life.
We needed to get back to that as soon as possible.
Step one in that plan was to get rid of Rylan.
From there, well, Nia was doing her best. Quin told us that she’d been working day and night, that she was constantly bitching about the level of security, about the paranoia of all the higher-ups in the company.
It was no wonder they were paranoid, though. They clearly had something to hide.
While I couldn’t pretend to fully understand everything that Gemma did about chemicals and they way they affected people and the environment, I knew her well enough to trust that if she said this shit could be the end of the corporation or the freedom of the owners of it, then I had to believe her.
