“Automata? What does the company have to do with you cheating on me?”
“Tell her,” Sam said. “I assure you, no corporate fixer is getting anywhere near her while I have anything to say about it.”
Logan studied Sam with a dark gaze. A muscle jumped in his jaw, but he obeyed his creation’s command.
“It was never about you,” Logan whispered. Those honeyed eyes she’d once been so enthralled by danced restlessly over her face as he spoke. “You have to understand. I come from nothing, Eff. Nothing. No dad. Deadbeat mom. No siblings or aunts or uncles to give a shit what became of me.”
“Spare us your sob story,” Sam interrupted. “You have no right to her good graces, no matter how pitiful your life is.”
“It’s okay,” she murmured, holding up a hand to gently shush the android. “Keep talking.”
“I killed it in college, but I had to take out a loan for every penny of the program. When I got out, I couldn’t find work. No one cared about how hard I had worked or how glowing my recommendations were. I had to take on more debt to eat, to pay rent, to go to the doctor when I was sick. Tens of thousands, and the APR... Then they took away the right to bankruptcy a few years later when the corpos finally got their hands on Congress. I was drowning before Automata stepped in.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, dropping his gaze to the floor. “Tiffany and I were dating before I got the job at their lab. She pushed hard for me to get in with them, and once I did, I thought it would be enough, but… the loans. The cost of rent. It wasn’t enough. I could barely tread water.”
Her heart twinged at the realization that, in a sick way,shewas the other woman. Tiffany had been with Logan before her.
“Then I had my accident,” he said bitterly, shifting his reconstructed leg. “And there was no treading water. I was drowning before I knew it, mired in medical debt that I would never climb my way out of with the new laws.” Anger flashed in his eyes. “Five seconds of someone else’s carelessness, one broken surveillance camera, and just like that, my life is ruined. I thought about killing myself, in the thick of it. Tiffany had to talk me down.”
She didn’t want to feel sorry for him after all that he’d done, but the sympathy welled in her regardless.
“She would have spared us all a lot of trouble if she hadn’t,” Sam muttered.
“Sam.”
He huffed disdainfully, shrugging off her reprimand. “He programmed me,” he said pointedly, gesturing toward Logan with his chin. “If I lack empathy for him, it’s technically his own fault.”
“You’remalfunctioning.It doesn’t matter how I programmed you when you’re letting a virus run wild in your system.” His eyes narrowed. “Where the hell did you pick up a virus strong enough to bust Automata’s firewall, anyway? Were you jacking into public terminals or something?”
“None of your business,” Sam said with a saccharine smile.
“Can we please stay on topic?” she snapped, at her limit with their stupid posturing. “I would like to know why my fucking life is ruined, if it’s alright with the two of you.”
They both had the grace to look cowed by her outburst.
“Automata stepped in,” Logan continued quickly, though he still darted a glare at Sam. “They took over everything—the loans, the debt, my rent. And they were willing to give me more, the kind of fortune that would have set me up for life. I wouldn’t have had to work again unless I wanted a hobby. But the money wasn’t charity. They wanted something in return.”
Dread coiled in her gut as she pursued what he was saying to its logical conclusion. Her blood cooled at the implication.
“My father,” she murmured, feeling oddly seasick. “It wasn’t about me because it was about my father, wasn’t it?”
He nodded, regret shining in his eyes. “They didn’t realize you were estranged from him. And once they did, it wasn’t enough to call it off. I was supposed to find some way to use your connection to him to get the drop on what Optima was doing. Ideally, you would have been able to get my foot in the door with them.”
“But I wouldn’t budge,” she said numbly. “I didn’t want you working under my father, because it would have meant being under his thumb for the rest of my life.”
He swallowed hard, nodding again. “And I understood why,” he said breathlessly. “God, even as it frustrated the hell out of me, I understood why. I respected you for that. You weren’t what they’d led me to believe you would be—some rich, spoiled brat who’d never had to struggle. Every day you got up just like the rest of us and went to work at your job that paid such an average wage, and you never complained.”
He sighed hard. “God, I wished so often that you’d just been the kind of stuck-up brat I’d been expecting. I had been… I had been excited, at first, to realize I could fuck with you. The princess of Optima’s profits. You were supposed to be more like…” He bit his bottom lip, cutting himself off.
“Like Tiffany?” Sam mused.
Logan winced.
“I’m sure you resent her, too,” Sam said, “given that it’s by the grace of her coat tails that you have your job to begin with.”
“I owe her a lot,” he agreed uncomfortably. “More than I’d like to owe anyone. It made everything harder. I think…” He met Ophelia’s gaze, leaning forward. “I think I would have called it off when I realized who you really were. But by then, I was in too deep.Tiffanywas in too deep. I was afraid of what would happen to her if I flaked. I didn’t know how to get out of it. I thought, maybe, if I could just get them what they wanted, I could wash my hands of all of it, and we could be real. With the money, I could have bought us a fucking castle to live in.”
The idea sickened her. To have spent her life with someone who had lied to her, manipulated her, used her in the worst way, and to have never been the wiser of it? She shuddered, casting a nervous glance toward Sam, seeking comfort. His eyes found hers instantly, and his face softened. One of his big hands slipped beneath her hair to rest at her nape, his thumb brushing a slow, soothing pattern over her skin.
