But this is an impossible choice. If I tell her, I risk losing her violently, like I lost the others. If I don’t tell her, I risk losing her heart.
What is the point of a life that she’s not part of? What am I protecting if I can’t have her at the end of all this? Only one of those outcomes means losing her forever—the secret can only hurt her if she were to tell anyone, and if I were ever going to trust someone to keep my secrets, it would be her.
With a deep sigh, I stand, move to the door, and click the lock into place. If I’m going to do this, I can’t risk an interruption. She frowns at me, suspicious of the ominous sound.
“All right, Madison,” I say, going to lean against the desk in the spot Dimitri usually occupies. I’m only a few feet away, but no doubt she’ll be happy for the distance when she learns the truth. “I’ll tell you everything. It can’t leave this room.”
Her expression irons out, and she sits back, nodding to me to proceed.
“In my early 20s, I was recruited to a project. It was top secret—government, I assumed. We were a team of five, held to a very high standard of confidentiality. We worked independently—everyone completed a different piece of the project—andwere monitored to ensure we didn’t accidentally reveal anything to outsiders or each other.”
“That sounds like government work,” she agrees.
I inhale shakily. “That was what we all believed. I was recruited for my bit, based on my dissertation—”
“Wait, are you a doctor?” she pipes in, a grin forming at the corners of her mouth. God, it feels like it’s been ages since I saw a smile from her.
“PhD, yes.”
“Doctor Nerd. Nice.” She fishes her phone out of her pocket. I see out of the corner of my eye as she calls up my contact on her phone and changes the title name from Sir to Dr. “Go on. I’m listening.”
“Essentially, I created software for data mining and pattern recognition. Very powerful—capable of taking most inputs, sorting massive amounts of information, and producing results that were very easy to refine. That was my part of the project.”
She nods, understanding how impressive a tool like that would be—even more so a decade ago.
“Matilda was from the banking industry. She was an expert in cryptocurrency and was writing her second dissertation on identifying patterns for money laundering and illegal transfers. Derrick and Fiona, working together, had created an anonymous messaging platform and a third-party vouching system that created a foundation for trust between participants. They’d intended for it to become a service exchange platform, mostly between neighbors. I’ll wash your windows if you’ll watch my dog—that kind of thing.
“Xavier—or X as he preferred to be called—was our criminal element. We weren’t privy to the details, and he never would have told us himself, but after…” I trail off, my voice breaking. I don’t want to get ahead of myself. “I hacked the system and found him. He was… a hitman. I believe they must have used him for his contacts.”
All lightheartedness Madison had infused into the room dims suddenly at the mention of hitmen.
I watch as my brilliant mermaid starts piecing it together on her own. I watch her eyes work back and forth, seeing nothing, and a frown line appear betweenher brows. “So… You’re saying you worked on a project that was assembling a database of hitmen and other seasoned criminals, giving them a trusted platform to communicate anonymously, finding dirty money to pay them without being caught, and…” she swallows, making eye contact at last, “had a way to process huge amounts of data to find exactly who you wanted dead.”
I nod.
“Whoa.” She sits back, shock and horror written in the lines of her face. I nearly wince. I deserve her horror. God knows I’ve spent these last years regretting every moment I spent on that project.
“None of us put it together quite so succinctly, but then again we all believed—apart from Xavier, I suppose—that we were working on a project for the government. We thought we were doing something for the greater good. Derrick used to make jokes about chiseling it on his gravestone because it was sure to be his greatest accomplishment.”
“What happened to him?” Madison asks softly, eyebrows slashed up in the middle in concern. I assume she’s picked up on the use of the past tense.
“I was late to work that day,” I say, rubbing at my bottom lip, locked in a memory I haven’t willingly relived in a long time. “I remember being so upset that the tube was late, because it was the day we were turning in our projects. We were going to get lunch to celebrate. Sushi, because Fiona had never had it before. Odd, the things you remember…
“I was in a hurry, so it didn’t occur to me that the building was oddly quiet. When I got to the second floor… The carpet squished under my foot—that was what alerted me. I thought I’d stepped in spilled water or something but… It was blood.”
“They killed everyone on the project?” she asks.
“They killed everyone,” I correct. “The janitor. The receptionist. The security guards.”
Her lower lip wobbles. “How did you escape?”
“Luck,” I laugh bitterly, hating the word almost as much as I hate the memory. “The janitor had similar tattoos. I think they must have assumed he was me.”
“You must have been so scared,” she whispers.
I nod vaguely, still locked in the awful memory. “I got out. Changed the coroner’s records, so it appeared I had died with everyone else. I started digging and found out more about the company that commissioned the project. I found a few of the stakeholders—asked my questions; had my revenge. One of the idiots told me the plan—I was too blindsided by rage to even figure it out on my own, then. He’s the one who connected the dots for me, told me the grand idea of a private hitman for hire platform. Turned out they’d sold our work to the highest bidder, and neither party wanted any loose ends or witnesses or possibility for replication.”
“Who was the buyer?” She swallows. “SmarTech?”
