Logan cleared his throat, and his expression was inscrutable when she looked back at him. “Are you…” His throat worked for a moment, soundless. “Are you in love with that thing?”
“He’s not athing,” Ophelia said, squirming under the scrutiny. “And we’re not talking about me right now.”
“Yes, we were talking about how completely amoral and mercenary you are,” Sam said in a pleasant tone. “Why don’t you pick up at the part of the story where you decided to film her in a compromising position?”
Fury glittered in Logan’s eyes, but he didn’t argue with the assessment of his character.
“The execs ran out of patience,” he said tightly. “I had hoped the engagement would cool them off, and it did, for a while. I’d been stringing them along for months, telling them the weddingwould sort it all out, to give me some space, but one of their corporate spies must have realized Optima was working on something big. I was out of time, just like that.”
“And if you didn’t deliver?” she prompted, leaning back into the reassuring weight of Sam’s hand.
He wrung his hands together. “The deal would be off the table, and they’d ‘review my performance’ until they found a reason to let me go. I’d be right back where I started, only with a bad performance review from the biggest titan in the industry and their fixers breathing down my neck in case I got desperate enough to roll over on them.”
“How was the video supposed to help?”
Just mentioning it, acknowledging the existence of footage of her at her most raw and vulnerable out there in the world, made her want to be sick.
“We were going to take it to your father,” he said, unable to meet her gaze. “Edit it so it looked like you were cheating, and hope to God we’d be able to extort him for something useful. He might be distant, but he cares about appearances. I thought it would be enough to get something they could use.”
Before she could say anything, he sucked in a sharp breath and began to rant.
“I’m so sorry, Effie. For all of it, every second. And I know I lied, I know I fucked up, and I hurt you worse than I can even fucking imagine, but I do love you. That’s real, and it doesn’t have to be over. We can figure this out. Now that everything’s on the table, we can?—”
“No,” she said, her whole chest behind the word. “No, we can’t. Not ever, Logan. I don’t want that anymore.”
He fell silent, nodding in resignation as though he hadn’t expected anything different. Sam tensed as he reached into the pocket of his jacket, but he only pulled out a tiny SD card. Heleaned forward to set it on the glass coffee table, sliding it toward her.
“This is the only other copy of the vid,” he said somberly.
She sat forward to pluck it off the table, turning it over between her fingers.
“Two years of my life set on fire for this?” she mused, running her thumb over the shiny label and the smooth, black plastic.
“If you’re lying, I’ll kill you very slowly.” Sam licked his teeth and smiled. “I really hope you’re lying.”
Logan shuddered, avoiding eye contact with the rogue android. “They’ll come looking for him, Ophelia. And as subtle as he is about it, he’ll probably last two minutes before they figure out he’s corrupted and they put him down manually.”
“They can try,” Sam said.
“What if I could afford him?” she asked, tucking the disk into her palm and curling her fingers around it protectively. “Would they let me buy him out?”
Sam looked at her curiously. “You cannot afford me.”
She ignored him. “Would they?”
Logan gave her a sad smile. “His auction starts at a quarter mil, Eff.”
“Would they let me buy him?”
He made a sound of frustration, throwing up his hands. “I guess so,” he gruffed. “If you were there for the auction after the demo, then I guess… yes.”
She stood, clutching the disk to her chest as she paced back and forth across the living room, a plan unfurling in her mind. Desperate, reckless, probably doomed… but a plan, nonetheless.
She stopped, pivoting to pin her full, frenzied focus on Logan. “You really want to make all this up to me?”
He nodded warily.
“Good,” she said, looking down at the disk in her hand. “Let’s talk logistics.”
