Whatever was going on with Val, it was clear Noelle hadn’t invited Dane to this meeting for any reasons that interested him. In fact, she’d probably only asked him there to put him in his place after his audacity the day before. It was a smart move, and ordinarily he might have counted it a setback, but he’d seen her flinch in the breakroom. This wouldn’t be like before when she’d shut him out and he’d gone down without a fight. He’d had years to up his game, and he meant to make her experience desire and hope, followed immediately by loss and despair.
Truth be told, Val deserved the same, but he was willing to bide his time.
He watched for another minute as Noelle spoke crisply into the conference microphone. “Who’s calling in? Is there anyone on the call?” She turned to Margo, “Are you sure it’s connected?”
He slid around the outer wall and reached the hall. Once in his office, he pulled up the latest patch file one of the developers had sent him for code review. This was the closest he came to coding these days. Product overviews, design meetings, scrums, code reviews, long drawn-out discussions debating the merits of agile over waterfall development—these tedious chores fell into his daily purview. But the glory days of building a system from the ground up were light years behind him. Hell, he didn’t even get to write the code for the solutions he designed.
The patch file looked clean, but Dane identified a small issue; the developer hadn’t indented properly. Not a huge deal, but they had coding standards for a reason. He wrote the note into the defect and sent it back to the developer. It hadn’t made him feel any better. The developer wasn’t his problem. It was the goddamn invisible handcuffs he wore.
As an added kick to the groin, his current lack of freedom came courtesy of Geraldo, thanks to the way he’d overthrown Dane, making everyone doubt his integrity.
He dropped his head back. Maybe heshouldtake Val up on her suggestion to ruin his daughter after all.
Maybe I should just take Val.
He packed up his computer and grabbed his gym bag. He took a quick tour of the floor to check in on his developers, then continued through the cubes to where the interns were stationed and stopped to learn their names.
Had he ever looked that optimistically hopeful?
That kid he’d seen outside yesterday morning stood and held out his hand. “Anthony Knight. Fourth year at Purdue. Pleased to finally make your acquaintance, Mr. Russ.”
Dane took the kid’s hand. “It’s Dane. No need to get so formal.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.” He shuffled his feet. Suddenly, as if he’d remembered something urgent, he swung around and said, “I brought a copy of theInterTechmagazine with you on the cover. I wondered if you’d sign it.”
The other kids found something else to do. A pretty brunette girl to his right had the presence of mind to look embarrassed for him. Dane picked up a pen. “Sure. What do you want it to say?To my biggest fan?”
One of the other boys snickered, and Dane felt bad. He’d once been socially inept, and he certainly understood what it was like to be ostracized from one’s peers. He signed the magazine and handed it back. “So what have you learned today?”
The question had been intended to give the guy some cool points back. A chance to have a conversation with his apparent hero and save face. Dane scratched his head and stifled the urge to narrow an eye. He knew one good glare from him could be blistering. And this poor soul hadn’t quite earned his scorn. Just his boredom.
“Mr. Russ. I mean, Dane.” He giggled. Dane squeezed his fists together and kept his face placid. It would be just great to come off as an asshole bully on the second day of their internship. “We’ve learned so much about the company. They’ve set us up on the system. It’s intimidating, but I think we’ve all just about gotten the hang of our first assignment.”
“Show me.” Dane pulled up a chair and watched the kid painstakingly enter a single mortgage-backed security, one Loan ID at a time. “Did they teach you about servicers?”
“I learned all about that at school. I’m getting a degree in Finance.”
Of course you are.
Dane stood and clapped Anthony’s back. “That’s great. I’m glad to see you all settling in. I trust Val’s taking good care of you?”
All the interns nodded. They might have come looking to work under his shadow, but Val would have them eating out of her hand in a week. If she hadn’t already. Putty.
His exit path took him along the corridor to Val’s office—his true destination. He could see her working through the rectangular glass pane. As if she sensed his presence, she glanced up from her desk. He swung his gym bag around as he passed. She gave no sign of understanding, but she’d know where he wanted to meet.
A movement outside the door caught Val’s eye. She glanced up from the mid-year reviews in time to catch Dane flashing his gym bag at her. She nodded one time, but as soon as he’d passed, the nod turned into a head shake with a roll of the eyes. She shouldn’t mock his paranoia since she’d been the one to plant his initial insecurities. But there was obviously no reason for anyone to be tailing him here in the sticks. She wasn’t about to give him hell about it; it served her purposes for him to mistrust everyone. Maybe she should hire someone to follow him for real to keep him on his toes. It made things more interesting.
Unlike Dane, she never left work before five, often working until late into the night. She knew all the unwritten corporate rules and followed them to the letter, at least as far as the eye could see.
She spent another ten minutes setting up appointments to meet with her subordinates the following day to discuss their performance. She’d assembled a top-notch team of traders, so the reviews were mere formality—paperwork to appease someone higher up the chain in some other city. Most of the goals were irrelevant in any case. She used the opportunity to make sure her team members were happy and unlikely to leave for a better position at a competing firm. In a way, this had becomeherperformance review. She wanted to find out what she could do better. Bringing in new talent always led to months of retraining.
Dane never understood why she bothered to actually do the job she’d been hired for. But he was a man, and he’d been born into money and privilege. She’d fought and scraped her entire life, and she’d learned the value of a good cover story. In her backwoods hometown, nobody had praised her for the power of her mind. She’d cultivated a reputation for proper behavior in order to survive as a pawn in someone else’s game. And she’d learned how to run the board without even looking like a player.
Dane could mock her for keeping up appearances. If he honestly believed she’d allowed him to see beyond her mask, he’d never figured out she simply had different masks for different suitors.
Or for different pawns.
Her mind returned to the interns. She’d left them alone for most of the afternoon to practice, but it was time to check on them and send them home. Maybe she should organize a socializing activity. She fished out her wallet and thumbed through the bills.Twenty, forty, sixty. . . She had less than one hundred, not enough to pay for a round of drinks for a dozen young interns, but the bar on Frederick had her card on file.
