37. Jackson

Ishould've been happy. The grand opening was a success, the press was eating it up left, right, and center. Infinius was nearly finished. We were fully moved into the campus, leaving behind that shitty space I'd rented for the meantime. Morale was up. Even Angela was happy.

Yet after a week, my head was still clouded with thoughts about Mandy. How horrifically I'd fucked up, how I'd lost her again. Ten years later and I was still making the same mistakes by not being honest with her and letting my pride damage the people she cared about.

She'd mailed back the ring. Sent it straight to my office, wrapped in bubble wrap, and placed in a box with packing peanuts. My PR team was preparing a joint statement for us to release in the next few days. She was blanking my calls and texts.

It was enough to drive me permanently insane.

My phone rang on the table beside the treadmill. Wade's name and face popped up on the screen, and in my haste to turn off the machine and towel off the sweat, I nearly fell face-first into the mechanics.

"Hey, what's up?" I answered, doing my absolute best to hide the sheer sense of defeat in my voice.

"Hey man," Wade said. The huff and puff of his breath and the wind whipping into the speaker told me he was heading in from the slopes. "How are you? I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to text you back yesterday."

I grunted as I wiped the sweat from my face. I'd almost forgotten the string of half-asleep texts I'd sent him the day before, just one random text after another about how I should be happy but I couldn't be, how I wanted Mandy and I'd lost her. "Uh, yeah, I'm okay. Better than yesterday. Sorry about that."

"It's okay. You know you can always just call me, right? Like, whenever."

"I know."

"Are you holding up okay?"

"Yeah," I sighed. I threw my towel down on the floor, needing to let out at least a little bit of the pent-up rage that still sat heavy in my stomach after my exercise. "I just don't know where to fucking go from here. She's done. She told me that. And believe me, I get it, but at the same time, I was just trying to protect her."

"I'm not sure beating up her friend counts as protecting her, man," Wade laughed. In the background, someone called his name, the voice high and shrill. I rolled my eyes.

"I know that. I fucked up. I get it."

"Not sure how she'll forgive you for that one. But…you said something about an email?" He asked, the sound of a door clicking shut behind him.

"A threat. We traced it back to a public library, but the gears of government grind so goddamn slowly that we still haven't gotten the CCTV back. It's torture."

"Was it real?"

"We think so. But considering it was from the library… I don't know." I held the phone against my ear with my shoulder as I left my home gym, navigating my way to the bathroom. I turned on the shower, letting the steam fill the room as I explained. "Whoever it was knew about my past. So that's credible enough on its own for me to take it seriously."

"Fuck," he grunted, another door shutting behind him. I could hear the creak of some kind of furniture as he sat down. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Not unless you want to use your skis to stab whoever it is to death."

Wade laughed, his deep chuckle the only thing making my lips twitch up into a smile. "You know I would. But I don't think that'll help with winning her back."

————

The hot shower was enough to make me feel slightly human again, even if I spent the majority of it thinking about ways I could try to fix things between me and Mandy. I wasn't sure if there was one, I'd come up empty every time.

The least I could do if things were truly over between us was get to the bottom of the threat and squash it. If Mandy genuinely didn't want me in her life, and it was looking more and more like that was the case, I could at least get whoever this was off of her back. That way I could scale back my security and she could really be done, even if the thought of it made my skin crawl. I could accept it. I would have to. But the idea of never seeing her again made me want to find the nearest bridge.

If I could just talk to her… I didn't expect her to forgive me, not after what I'd done. But every part of me couldn't begin to cope without knowing she'd heard me out in my entirety, heard every angle, heard how much I loved her.

My phone lit up with a text as I toweled myself off. Samantha from PR. Meeting in ten with security.

My muscles stiffened as my eyes scanned it over and over again. They found something. They had to. Every part of my mind was screaming at me to just call them now, but clearly, they had to pull some things together first if they needed me to wait ten minutes.

I didn't know if I was patient enough for that.

I pulled on a pair of shorts and a plain white shirt as I stumbled down my hallway, toward my home office. I sat down in my chair, eyes fixed on the computer screen, anxiously waiting for the video call.

Ten minutes felt like a lifetime, long enough for me to dive far too deep into my own thoughts. Things could have gotten worse, we could have received another threat, we still had no information and they were trying to find a gentle way to tell me. It was possible—if whoever it was knew their way around a computer like I did, they could disappear without a trace. They could have masked their IP to look like the library but could've actually been somewhere else. They could be anywhere in the world by now, but something in my gut told me they were still in Boulder, still too close to Mandy.

The video call rang out from my speakers. I answered it in less than a millisecond.

The camera was stationed at the end of a circular table, four people in suits sitting around it and two more behind them, standing up. "What's happened?" I asked, glancing between them, looking for a familiar face.

"We've received the CCTV footage," one of them said.

The breath I took was shaky. "Okay."

"We've sent it to you. We're working on facial ID, but please let us know if you recognize anyone. They've sent us the entire days' worth of video but we've timestamped the period of time the email could have been sent in."

"Okay," I repeated, my thoughts too jumbled to make a coherent sentence.

"Let us know if you need anything."

I ended the call with my trembling hand as I pulled up the video.

————

Three hours later, I'd seen absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. I'd gone to the campus, half of my shit not even moved in yet, but I needed a change of scenery. There was only an hour left of the footage, and I was rapidly approaching the end of the timestamp. My eyes were tired, but I couldn't look away. Not when we had it. Not when I could fix everything with this one video, not when I could at least protect Mandy.

I took a short break to grab myself a coffee from the cart downstairs. Gears turned as I walked, ordered, and carried two cups back toward the elevator. I hadto figure this out but literally nothing had stood out the entirety of the three hours of video so far, and it was almost over.

Angela sat behind her brand-new, state-of-the-art circular desk. She hated it, hated that she was more available than ever now, hated that she couldn't hide behind the counter like she had at the old office.

I set down her cup in front of her.

She looked from me to the cup before her face scrunched up. "What the hell is this?"

"A drink," I deadpanned.

"It says tea. Is this supposed to be for me?"

"I thought maybe you were onto tea now," I shrugged, the idea suddenly striking me as absolutely ludicrous instead of another nice gesture.

"Do I look like a sad, tired, old British woman?" She hissed. She lifted the lid, recoiling when her eyes caught the bag floating at the top of it. "You didn't even put milk in it. I'm positive milk is supposed to go in tea, Jack."

"I put sugar in it," I sighed.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I must have missed the memo that milk is now sugar."

"Jesus, Angela, just say thank you," I bit out, the frustration of the lack of anything worthwhile in the video beginning to hit. "Do you want mine instead?"

"What did you get?" She asked, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms. She spun gently back and forth.

"Black Americano."

"Absolutely fucking not." She made a fake gagging noise as she pushed the tea away from her with one finger, almost as if she was disgusted to even have to touch it. "Thanks but no thanks. What's gotten into you, anyway? This wasn't even you assuming I still liked an old order, Jack. This is, like, ten levels worse than that."

I set my coffee down in front of her and leaned onto her circular desk. She was right. It sucked. I'd buy her a new one. "I'm sorry. I'm just… I've been pouring over this goddamn video footage from the security team for hours, and I still haven't seen anything that's piqued my interest. Nothing. It's driving me insane."

"Do you want some help? Maybe a second set of eyes?"

My brows creased as I looked down at her. "That might be the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

"Yeah, well, I'm bored. And you're not exactly solving that." She shrugged as she leaned forward, picking herself up out of her chair. "Do you want my help?"

"Yes," I sighed, standing straight and grabbing our drinks. "Please. That would be amazing."

"Sure. Just let me crawl out from under this stupid desk you insisted on."

I rolled my eyes, motioning for her to follow me. "I'll get you a new one."

————

I paused the video for a second to rub my eyes before hitting play again. Angela hummed something from beside me, her eyes trained on the screen.

"What is your coffee order nowadays?" I asked, needing a small break from the monotonous job of just staring.

"Matcha latte," she answered.

My eye twitched. "You know that's a type of tea, right?"

"Shut up." She leaned across me, hitting the play button. Seconds ticked by. Minutes. Almost at the end?—

There.

In the far back of the screen, a man with ashy blonde hair sat behind one of the computers, the monitor obscuring half of his face. I scrubbed forward a couple of minutes, waiting for him to get up, waiting for him to move farther into view, and the second he did, I screen-grabbed it.

I zoomed in.

Closer.

Closer.

Sharpened the image.

Nearly fell off my fucking chair.

Harry Voss looked dead-eyed into the camera, the smallest smirk on his face, laptop clutched in his hand.