“Yeah.” His sad smile broke her heart. “She wanted to be just like me. So we—I—trained her. She was good, proficient, but she was young and smart. Destined for better things than hacking.”
Taryn nodded and was grateful—again—when more orders appeared in the system for her to fill. If you didn’t come from money, it was so easy for this city to chew you up and spit you out. Hope, like so many other young girls, deserved more than what she’d gotten.
“You were hacking the Tremaine Corporation?”
He nodded. “Then, all sorts of firewalls popped up. We could stop some, but they were too fast. It was obvious that someone knew we were coming.”
He paused, swallowed hard. “I told Hope to pull out. She was right beside me on the net. When I came out of it, my chair was surrounded by Tremaine Security. Hope was next to me in her chair, but she... wasn’t there.”
“And that’s brain burn?” Taryn asked carefully.
“Nobody knows exactly,” Ash said, “but that’s my best guess. You get pulled out of a hack before fully disengaging your consciousness. You come out without actually coming out.”
“I’m sorry.” It sounded awful. Taryn placed her hand on his, a simple instinctive move that surprised her.
She pulled her hand away before he could react.Where the hell had that come from?
She wasn’t a toucher and the Jack certainly didn’t go around offering comfort. That could ruin the reputation she worked so hard to maintain.
Off balance, Taryn settled into her most comfortable role: the Jack. “We can discuss this further tomorrow.”
Tomorrow she’d be ready for him. She’d have her talking points and would let him down as gently as the Jack could. Going up against a corporation was the definition of insanity and would threaten everything she was working to build.
Chapter12
Crap.He’d been too eager.
Ash nursed his drink and watched the Jack move.
The Jack. He still didn’t know her name. But the title suited her. Purpose and efficiency radiated off her. She smiled at customers, bantered with her staff, but never lost that indefinable something that said she was in charge. There was nothing sexier than a woman who knew she was at the top of her game.
Looking back, Ash recognized that he had never understood exactly how Razor Jack’s worked. That the name was a title. He’d just assumed it was pretension on the part of the owner, calling himself “the.”
He’d been an idiot back then. Five years ago, he’d been on top of the world, no fear, all ego. And then he’d brought it all tumbling down on them.
Ash stared into his drink. He should have waited until their meeting tomorrow. But spending time with Hope always left him with a lingering sadness and need to burn it off. He’d been walking to Razor Jack’s before he’d consciously realized it.
The window to free Hope—and maybe himself—was closing. Working directly under Portia Tremaine to discover who had hacked the system for Leopold Brunswick—to uncover his own crimes—younger Ash would have laughed at the challenge.
Older and wiser Ash practically pissed himself when he thought about it too hard.
The Jack was the only contact from the old days who might be able to help him. Except the Jack he expected wasn’t the Jack he’d gotten. And now he had to convince her to help him.
But how?
Ash pondered the little he knew about the new Jack while he nursed the surprisingly tasty concoction she’d made for him. It looked—and tasted—like sunshine. She served much better liquor than the old Jack.
However, like the old Jack, she would solve problems for a price. And she didn’t appear to dabble in the less-savory businesses that the old Jack had. Last night while he’d waited for his meeting, not once had he seen any hint of the prostitution and drug deals that had usually occurred here.
That was the one slim hope that he clung to. If she’d gotten rid of the prostitution, maybe she’d have a softer heart for his sister.
Someone stepped up to the bar, jostling Ash in their attempt to get the Jack’s attention.
Ash flinched as the scent of sweat and days-old food assaulted him, throwing him into the past.
He knew that smell. Had worn it himself after a particularly long session ported into the computer.
Hand tightening around the glass, Ash fought the memories of Tremaine Security crashing into the hackers’ den. They’d destroyed thousands of credits worth of equipment as they rushed him and he hadn’t cared. Hadn’t even tried to escape. Cross-legged on the floor, cradling his baby sister and begging her to wake up, he’d expected them to kill him on the spot. And he hadn’t given a damn.
