His stomach was in a knot of closely collared rage, and the familiar itch of frustrated self-loathing crawled down his back. He should have known better. The minute he risked trusting someone—something—outside of the few family and friends he still had, it was just a matter of time until they let him down, or he let them down.
The anger slipped his leash, and he turned around, kicked the chair, and sent it spinning over the office. It hit the wall, bounced, and landed on its side. Still fuming he sent the bin flying after it. The thin metal canister buckled against the wall and spilled out crumpled paper and a Red Bull can.
It didn’t really help. He wanted the solid pain of broken bones and split knuckles, the satisfaction of turning his feelings into blood and bruises. Not Jacob. The fucker might deserve it, but Simon couldn’t bring himself to imagine it. Just a nonspecific face and nonspecific fists—the sort he never had trouble finding.
“I didn’t know you were seeing anyone,” Devon said from the door. He’d been polite enough to wait for the tantrum to be over, even though, as CEO of Syntech and Simon’s brother-in-law—or whatever you called someone after their wife, your sister, died—he had grounds to interrupt.
Simon gave Dev an impatient look. “That’s your takeaway? We’ve either had a thief with free rein of your office, or your security consultant locked a cleaner in the janitor’s closet. And you want to ask about my dating life?”
Dev shrugged, straightened a chair, and spun it around so he could straddle it backward. His heavy shoulders bulked under his shabby band shirt as he crossed his arms over the back of the chair. The watch on his wrist was classy. The scars on his knuckles weren’t.
“One is related to the next, isn’t it?” he said. “According to Dyno-clean, Jacob Archer has been working with them the last seven months. Five months ago one of their cleaners quit, and they moved him onto our rotation. He passed their background checks, never raised a flag until tonight. Maybe he just didn’t want to tell you he scrubbed our toilets for a living?”
“You think that’s something I’d care about?”
“Not the right question. Do you think he cared about it?”
Simon made himself slouch and tried to fool his wire-twitching nerves into thinking he was relaxed. Despite his best efforts, his fingers drummed nervously against the desk.
“I don’t think Jacob would know shame if someone express shipped him a packet of it,” he said. An odd pop of inappropriate fondness made its way into his voice. He swallowed it and shook his head. “Under the circumstances I know it’s a lot to ask. But trust me, we need to find out what he’s done.”
Devon waved his hand. “Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “Of course I trust you. I’ve already got people stripping my computer, and I assume you’ve got a team on Jacob?”
A bit of the raw tension in Simon’s spine eased. After he came back from Afghanistan the last time, he was a mess. He wouldn’t have taken a risk on himself if he’d been Devon, and with Becca a year dead, Devon didn’t owe him anything. The last thing he wanted to do was let the man down.
It was a weird thought, considering how much they’d hated each other back in their hometown.
“Did he ever ask you anything that seemed suspicious?” Dev asked. “Even if only in hindsight.”
Simon snorted and pushed himself up out of the chair. Energy itched under his skin. His body was convinced that beingthisangry meant a fight.
“I know how not to talk about my work,” he said. “And he never asked me anything about here, not even if I’d be leaving for the night. He was in my house, though. I’ll need to sterilize, see if there was anything he could have accessed.”
Dev scratched his jaw and rasped his nails through dirty-blond stubble. “Okay,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do until we find out what he actually did. Go home, check the house, let me know if you findanything. And get some sleep.”
The suggestion riled Simon’s temper and dragged a snarl out of him. “I’m fine.”
“Well, I’m your employer,” Dev said as he stood up. He wasn’t short—although the seventeen-year-old prick Simon had been insisted on snarking that he was shorter—but the muscle made him look it. “And when there’s something we can do, I want you in a state to do it.”
It went against the grain to admit it, but that made some sense. Simon pinched his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He could feel the tug of the whiskey in the drawer. It promised a dreamless sleep if he just took a swig. Or two. Or more, since he’d never been a quitter.
“Fine,” he said flatly. “I do need to strip the house down, anyhow. Make sure he didn’t plant anything. What about you?”
Dev gave a tight grin that crinkled the corners of his eyes. “Like I tell Callie, do as I say not as I do. And you’re not my kid, so you don’t even get to argue with me for three hours and call me a hypocrite.”
“She could be worse,” Simon defended his niece out of habit. He was the uncle she’d seen at Christmas every other year before her mother died. So he curried favor by always being on Callie’s side. “My sister would have just climbed out a window and gone to do whatever it was anyhow.”
“Callie wouldn’t let me off that easy. She wants me to admit I’m wrong,” Dev said. The digression was a welcome distraction, but it couldn’t last long. The smile faded from Dev’s face, and he glanced down at himself. There was a smear of something tomato based on his T-shirt, and he picked at it with his thumbnail. “Speaking of Callie, could you sort out an Uber to go and pick up one of my shirts from her? I’m going to need to call the board.”
Dev never sounded enthusiastic about talking to the board, and he sounded less enthusiastic than usual. Guilt hooked its claws into Simon’s gut and shredded what should have been numb scar tissue by then if the world were just. He jerked his chin down in a short, hard acknowledgment of the request and pulled the door open.
“I am sorry.” He ground the word out past a clenched jaw as Dev crossed the threshold. “If you want to me to resign….”
Dev thumped him in the arm with a loosely closed fist. “Shut up, Saint Simon,” he said. The decades-old nickname—it predated Dev dating Becca, back when they’d been allowed to hate each other—made Simon scowl, despite his best efforts to look repentant. “Look, I’m not the security expert, and if they tell me different, I’ll be happy to string you up like a piñata, but from what I can tell, theonlything that Archer could have gotten from you was dick and your schedule. Neither of those seems vital to his infiltration. So no throwing yourself on your sword. Okay? Not until I tell you to.”
It was sort of a “get out of jail free” card, but it sat uneasily on Simon. He shifted his shoulders and leaned into it like forgiveness had a physical weight he could stop in its tracks. “I still fucked up. I should have known better.”
Dev shoved his hand through his hair. “Yeah, you did. Maybe you should. So?”
