“Daddy, please.” She didn’t have to fake the tears that brimmed in her eyes. “Please, don’t let them release it.”
He turned toward her, dumbstruck at her invocation of the moniker she hadn’t used since she was six. His eyes darted over her as though he was seeing her for the first time. They softened a little, like maybe he was seeing her at six years old with pig tails in her hair, begging him to let her stay up one more hour.
A muscle worked in his jaw. He scrubbed a hand over his mouth, letting out a harsh sigh. He muttered, “How do I know this isn’t all your mother’s doing?”
“If Mom were smart enough to scheme something like this up, she would have done it a long time ago,” Ophelia said softly—and it was true.
Her father knew it too. He huffed, crossing his arms over his chest. “This is a fucking mess, Ophelia. Let me call my lawyer. We can get the company’s cleaners involved, figure out the source of these threats.”
“No,” she said quickly, jumping to her feet. “God, please, Dad. It’s too embarrassing. Can’t this stay between us?”
She had her hands clasped together beneath her chin, leaning into her tactic of childlike begging. He cursed, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Things like this don’t end,” he said tightly. “Whatever they ask for, it won’t be the last we hear of them. The price will go up as soon as it runs out.”
“If they come back, you can call in the whole cavalry,” she said desperately. “Please, can’t we try to bury this first?”
He glared at her, but he crossed back to the desk and dropped into his office chair.
“What are they asking for?” he asked gruffly.
Premature relief surged through her.
“Um, they left this,” she said hurriedly, picking her purse up off the floor and fishing out a piece of paper she’d printed the night before.
It had a figure on it along with an untraceable routing number that would lead her father’s fixers on a merry chase through a litany of shell companies. She’d used her whole savings to hire someone off the web to set it up for her. Supposedly, it would be foolproof.
If her plan didn’t work, she was in very, very deep shit financially.
Her father dragged the paper toward him, snatching his reading glasses off the desk before straightening the page with a jerk of his hand.
A disbelieving breath huffed out of him.
He took the glasses off again and set them down gently, followed by the paper, and then he massaged his temples with his eyes closed.
“I’ll pay you back,” she said in a tiny voice. “Every penny, if that’s what it takes.”
He gave a bitter laugh. “Where do you intend to find that kind of money?”
“Wherever I have to,” she said, and she meant it.
She just needed to get through this moment in time, where she desperately needed his wealth to enact the next step of her plan. Then, she’d spend the rest of her life earning it all back if she had to—with Sam at her side, safe from the threat of being decommissioned.
“Two million,” he muttered, rapping his fingers against his desk. “That’s not something to scoff at.”
It wasn’t, but it also wasn’t a sum so big that he would miss it from his vast fortune. If she’d only needed a few hundred thousand, she thought he would have lent it to her outright—but two million? He would have refused, and he would have insisted on knowing why she needed it. If he knew she was trying to buy a corrupted Automata android, he would have helped her do it… and then he would have dragged Sam kicking and screaming into the Optima labs in the bowels of the building and dissected him to figure out how he ticked and how that information could be used to further his own ends.
No, this was the only way to get what she needed from him.
“I’ll pay it back,” she repeated.
He gave her a skeptical look.
She sat forward in her seat, reaching across the desk to grab his hand in her own. He started down at their joined hands as she squeezed, an unreadable expression on his face.
“I never ask you for anything, and I’ll never ask again. Just, please, this once… I’m begging you to help me, Dad.”
His resistance crumbled before her.
