Callum smiled, and this time it looked genuine. “Good lad. I always knew you had a bit of the devil in you.”
He stood, dropping a stack of bills on the table that would cover the meal three times over. Callum never left unnecessary paper trails. “I’ll be in touch. And Patrick? Be careful with this one. You’re not just protecting her company. You’re protecting her. That’s different.”
“I know.”
“Good.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “She must be very special.”
“She is.”
He was gone before I could respond further, moving through the restaurant with the calm confidence of a man who owned every room he walked into.
I sat alone for a moment, staring at the bay through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Somewhere out there, Arthur Vance was probably sitting in his own office, confident his plan was working. That Theresa would fail, the board would panic, and he’d emerge with control of CarideoTech.
He had no idea what was coming.
Neither did I, really.
Chapter
Twenty-Two
THERESA
I’d been holedup in Marco’s office—my office now, though I still couldn’t think of it that way—for nearly four hours. I’d traced Arthur’s sabotage to specific sections, identifying each false claim and misleading omission, but the question remained: how to fix it in time?
Six days. The board meeting was in six days.
I pushed back from the desk, my shoulders aching from hunching over paperwork.
From downstairs I could hear kids shouting, Michael’s deeper voice attempting to referee, and the back door slamming. The normal sounds of family life continuing while I hid upstairs, trying to keep the company from crashing and burning.
I stretched, feeling guilty. I’d promised to join them for dinner, to be present, to stop being the ghost who haunted the upper floor of the house. But every hour I spent with the kids felt like an hour stolen from my battle with Arthur. And every hourI spent dealing with Arthur felt like an hour stolen from my family.
“Fire in the hole!”
Rome’s voice. I smiled despite my exhaustion. Whatever contraption he’d convinced Michael to help build was apparently operational. Rome had been obsessed with siege weapons since our trip to the science museum last month, sketching catapults and trebuchets in his school notebooks.
I turned back to the report, searching for the paragraph where Arthur had inserted the problematic reference to the abandoned military research.
A sharp crack of splintering wood tore through the afternoon, followed instantly by a cry of pain.
Then Michael’s voice, tight with terror: “Theresa! THERESA!”
My body moved before I even understood why. I was down the stairs and through the kitchen in seconds, bursting onto the back porch.
Michael stood at the far end of the yard, looking down. Rome lay on the grass, curled on his side, cradling his right arm against his chest. He looked so small against the green lawn.
“What happened?” I was already running across the grass, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs.
“The catapult backfired,” Michael said, kneeling beside Rome. He hovered his hands over his nephew, afraid to touch him. “The tension was too high. When it released, the arm snapped back and hit him, and then he fell off the platform.”
I dropped to my knees in the dirt. Rome’s face was chalk white, his eyes wide and swimming with tears.
“Rome, sweetheart, where does it hurt?”
“My arm,” he whispered, his voice trembling. “And my head bounced.”
His right forearm was already swelling, an angry red mark visible just below his elbow where the wood had struck him. When I gently touched his head, he flinched away.
