Cats probably didn’t have to deal with being kidnapped from outside a Starbucks, though.
He sat down on the end of the bed, felt the base shift under his weight, and tried to think of the right thing to say. It was usually easy, but the thugs who’d grabbed him seemed to have rattled the smooth right out of him.
“I think my hand’s broken,” he said.
“It’s not,” Simon said flatly without looking around.
Jacob wriggled his fingers and flinched at the hot ache of pain that started in his knuckles and ground up into the bones of his wrist.
“It hurts.”
“Good. It still isn’t broken.” Simon finally dropped the curtains closed, sealing off the view, and turned around to look at Jacob. His eyes were flat and cold, and the slant of his mouth was somewhere between contemptuous and impassive. The anger made Jacob feel weirdly closer to him. He could see the flaws, the bony callus of an old break making a bump on Simon’s Greek-straight nose, the divot of a small scar that nicked the corner of that irritated mouth. It probably said something about Jacob that he preferred the flaws to the perfection. “What I want to know is why Harry Clayton hired you? He runs a social-media platform. There’s no overlap with an eco-engineering firm.”
Apparently he was more interested in what Jacob had told him on the way there than in Jacob’s battered fingers—which was probably fair enough.
Jacob supposed he was violating some sort of implied confidentiality. Except it wasn’t like he’d added a chapter on professional ethics to his imaginary rule book, and who would he have been trying to kid if he had?
“He thought that Porter had stolen the code for an operating system he wrote,” Jacob said. He shrugged one shoulder and regretted it as his skin grated over his aching ribs. “He might have been right.”
Simon narrowed his dark eyes. “He wasn’t. Dev’s not a thief.”
“Not what his juvie record says.”
“That’s sealed.”
“Kind of my job,” Jacob pointed out. “Look, it didn’t matter to me—I got paid either way—but I found the code in the information I—”
He hesitated, and Simon finished the sentence for him. “Stole. The information you stole, Jacob.”
The contempt in his voice was dry as dust. It would have stung, if Jacob hadanyshame in his body.
“Clients usually prefer information acquisition,” he said. “But yeah, stole works. Like I told you, Simon, it was a clean job. All Clayton wanted was information related to his code—no industrial secrets, market information, or dirty pictures. I handed it over—”
“I thought you still had it.”
Jacob flexed his hand again, like it might have stopped hurting in the last few minutes. It hadn’t. “I do,” he said. “Getting kidnapped interrupted the process.”
He stopped and cleared a throat that had suddenly filled with sand. In the back of his nose, he could still smell the sweat and gun-oil reek in the car, and when he swallowed, he could feel the hard muzzle of the gun shoved into the small of his back. It hadn’t been cold—just hard. The red-haired gunman had been so close that Jacob could feel the stale heat of his breath on his ear as the guy threatened him with a disturbing lack of passion. Jacob had been scared, but notreally. That came later, when the gun went off.
“Gonna puke,” he announced abruptly and jolted to his feet. He lurched into the bathroom and hunched over the too-low toilet. Bleach fumes stung the inside of his nostrils as he coughed up the dregs of coffee and the stale sandwich he’d been tossed to shut him up earlier. Somewhere outside his sweaty misery, he heard the door open and shut.
It would have been a good time to make a run for it, but Jacob’s stomach responded to that thought by trying to turn itself inside out again. Every retch made his ribs burn and cramp, and the pain made him dizzy and hot. He leaned his forehead on the cold rim of the toilet, not caring about the multitude of asses that had farted there previously, and tried to think about nothing.
The sound of the door interrupted him again, and he lifted his head just as Simon stepped into the bathroom.
“Here.” He crouched down and held out an open can of Pepsi. “Drink it.”
“Did they not have Sprite?”
The stern line of Simon’s mouth twitched with… maybe humor, probably irritation. “Drink. It.”
Jacob took a sip, grimaced at the hit of sugar and flat caramel taste, and rubbed the can over his forehead. The frosted metal spiked a headache through his skull bones and cooled his bruises.
“Thanks,” he said and reached out to slap Simon’s knee with his hand.
It was a casual gesture, unthinking contact. Not even intimate—not to anyone healthy. Itfeltintimate, though, and the tension suddenly thickened like resin between them. Simon pulled away first, rocked back on his heels, and stood up with easy grace.
“We aren’t done yet,” he said flatly as he turned his back and walked out the room. “And I need you talking, not puking.”
