But without the stimulus of the outside human world, the words on my laptop began to swim. The winter hibernation instinct kicking in, threatening to pull me under.
Until, all of a sudden, I was being awakened by pings on the kludged GoNoTo phone the Shadow King had given us to use whilst in the Secret Kingdom.
I blinked with the bleary-eyed grogginess of incoming hibernation at a new series of texts from the Mountain King, appearing underneath the ones I’d been ignoring all day.
But unlike the messages I’d swiped away about falling for his honey trap of “just meeting” with The Potential he and the Shadow King had chosen and abducted without any weigh-in from me, this one started with a one-word text.
MK: Update.
MK: So, while you had your head all the way up your ass, she countered our Potential offer. She’s only giving you half the time to make up your mind.
SK: Deadline’s hardcoded for New Year’s Day now. No decision by then, and she’ll terminate the deal before you can.
MK: Since you weren’t there to do your job—by assignment and tradition—Shadow King and me had no choice but to agree to her terms.
SK: Suboptimal launch to our courtship protocol. Compatibility workflow would’ve deployed cleaner if you’d onboarded with The Potential as planned.
MK: Her name is Sadie, by the way.
SK: Though, Tadhg’s already rebranded her as Strawberry in his system files.
MK: Because she smells unbelievably delicious.
MK: Why aren’t you answering, then, lad? Too busy holed up in your room like a teenage girl upset about her favorite boy band breaking up?
So the real Mountain King was back. And baiting me.
Gritting my jaw, I closed my laptop and gave my full attention to answering his enraging message.
HK: After your betrayal, I’m drafting an email to my personal lawyer, actually. Seeing how much it’ll cost me to dissolve our business partnership.
SK: Solid threat. My predictive model still puts the probability of you pushing the kill button on this at 27.5%, rounding up.
MK: It was 98% within an hour of delivery. So, we were happy when you just walked away.
My bear growled low inside me.
Exactly what every CEO wanted to hear—that the numbers are already stacked against him.
I needed to end this fiasco. End it before the odds dropped even further out of my favor.
Instead, I typed…
HK: You’ll have your answer by the end of the year.
MK: I’ve a feeling it’ll come sooner.
SK: I as well.
It was only words on a screen, but I could feel both of them laughing at me. Not taking me seriously in a way they’d never dared before.
I glared at the phone, vowing to make them eat their words.
Possibly as early as tomorrow.
SADIE
I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep, not with the sun still hanging over the lake in its late-afternoon glow—at least, according to the scene playing on my wall.
