Eve drove dangerously fast to the Sunset Diner. She liked to have meetings there because it was secluded from the city and, being such, her sources could feel safe. It also made her feel safe because police officers tended to eat meals there. Eve had never been in the diner when there was not a cop there as well. Sources often wanted to set their own meeting places, but part of her negotiation was that they had to meet her at the Sunset Diner. It kept her safer than she would be otherwise. Too many reporters before her had met on their sources’ terms and had paid the price because of it. It was rare that a source was actually helpful and reliable; more often than not they were being paid to silence the story from being published. This meant that if you met them on their turf, you might be attacked, threatened or killed.

Eve arrived before her source. She preferred this as it gave her another advantage over them. This was especially important because she did not know the identity of her source. She knew that she’d arrived first because there were only a couple other vehicles in the parking lot. One she recognized as belonging to a waitress who worked there and the other was a large eighteen-wheeler. Eve did not know her source’s identity, but she could deduce enough to know that he was most likely not a trucker by the eloquent way he spoke. Also, he had enough resources to call from a different number each time he reached out to her. Eve surmised that he must have at the very least a fair amount of money.

She set herself up in the booth farthest from the entrance, facing the door, with her back to the window.

Joe, the owner of the diner, greeted her warmly. “Back again, eh?” he said from behind the counter.

Eve nodded at the man. She liked Joe; he didn’t ask too many questions and he was a man of few words. Also, he didn’t seem to mind that Eve met people in his diner. She was certain that he thought she was into dubious and dangerous things based on the outward appearances of her meetings. Still, the man did not ask what she was doing or why.

Eve always sat in the same booth for her meetings. She liked the vantage point it gave her; she could easily see any danger that might be approaching. She also liked the privacy she got from sitting so far in the back. Pulling her laptop from her bag, she opened a blank document. She hadn’t expected to be meeting her source so early and with Alice’s badgering, she had been unable to create a list of questions to ask. Even if she had all the time in the world she still might not have been able to come up with any questions, as she knew so little about her source or the information he claimed to have.

It felt like a long time passed before the door to the diner opened again. It had an electronic jingle that rang every time someone walked through. Eve looked up expectantly and was shocked by the man coming in. He looked utterly out of place in such a classic Middle American diner. His gray suit was tailored perfectly and pressed without a single crease to his finely-tuned, muscular body. His hair was dark brown and stuck up in a stylishly spiked quaff. Eve recognized him immediately as Ethen James. Of all the people she’d imagined to be her source, he was not one of them.

She had seen his picture plastered on every newspaper in the country, on television commercials and doing radio spots. He was the youngest billionaire in America. Eve also noticed him for another reason, often times her own brother’s face had been plastered right next to his. They met in college and had been inseparable ever since. Every time Ethen’s face popped up partying in the Bahama’s or gambling in Las Vegas, sure enough, her brother, Charlie was with him. She felt a foul taste fill her mouth. She had not seen her brother since long before he left for college. He emancipated himself at the ripe age of sixteen and she hadn’t seen him since. Eve hated her brother for a long time after he had left, she became less bitter as time went on, but she had never truly forgiven him for leaving her to survive their family on her own. To add insult to injury he popped up a few years later as the best friend of a billionaire. Eve’s heart beat relentlessly against her chest as she braced herself against the sudden reminder of her brother.

“Are you Evelyn Bridgewater?” he asked with a charming smile and authoritative yet friendly tone. Eve didn’t know what she had expected, her mind had wandered so far that she almost expected to hear her brother’s voice when he opened his mouth. Instead, she had gotten something completely different. She couldn’t help but feel a little inferior looking up at him from the booth. At the same time, she was annoyed by two things: the fact that she instantly knew she could never use him as a source, and how insanely attractive he was to her. She was trying desperately to focus on her mouth moving and saying something but found herself lacking the ability to pull it off and instead just stared at him. It was as if he had stepped right off of a magazine cover and magically stood before her. Ethen had an almost annoying approachability despite his appearance, wealth and stature. His chiseled jaw was no doubt a preview of his equally chiseled abs. The thought caused more distracting responses from Eve’s mind and body. She had obviously seen him before, but not in person. He wasn’t the first quasi-celebrity she had met either and most of them looked little to nothing like their pictures – Ethen looked better.

He stood extending a hand, which was complemented by a watch that undoubtedly cost more than her car did. His smile faded slowly when she didn’t respond to his question. His face settled into a frown, small wrinkles popped up as creases in his forehead and around his eyes. This made him almost unspeakably attractive to her, the wrinkles made him look real, whereas before he did look like he stepped out of a magazine. They reminded her of his humanness, a quality far more attractive than any other. Eve looked at him incredulously from her seat and quickly forced herself out of it. She closed her laptop and stood, but did not take Ethen’s hand.

“You are not a reliable source,” she said in frustration. How he could have ever thought she could have used him was beyond her. “The Melcor Corporation is your biggest competition in the real estate market. I can’t trust anything you say about them.” Eve was already putting her laptop back into her bag, unhappy with the turn of events. Ethen James was one of the youngest billionaires in the country. He had made his fortune by starting a real estate empire when he was barely beyond his teens. His company, self-titled as the Ethen James Corporation, was the top real estate company in the country. Its greatest competitor was the Melcor Corporation. From Eve’s perspective, this was no more than corporate espionage. Ethen was using her to break a story about Melcor in order to knock them out of the competition. She was angry and disappointed with the man and didn’t like being used as a means to an end. Her time and energy had been wasted.

“Will you not even listen to what it is I have to say?” Ethen asked, his hand dropping from its outstretched position. His jaw set in a hard line of anger. She knew that expression all too well. Her childhood taught her to flinch when she saw a jawline set in anger, another thing that her brother had been able to escape when he left her. Eve shook the thought from her mind. She was unable to stop the intrusive thoughts about her brother from starting but would be damned if she let them consume her. She kept Charlie so deep in her mind it was odd to have him keep resurfacing.

“I can’t trust a thing you say to me,” Eve said, exasperated. She felt as though Ethen had wasted a lot of her time with their multiple rescheduling and speaking with her on the phone. He did not have a real story, not one that she could break without retaliation or questioning of the validity of it. Eve thought with disappointment that she might as well not return to her desk. Without this story, she had nothing that she could give to Mr. Hartley. She was working on the mob case, but she might as well have nothing.

“Will you at least hear me out?” he asked, sitting down in the booth stubbornly. He reminded her of a petulant child, his hair blew up from his forehead from sitting with so much force. “I have evidence that will back up everything I have to tell you.” He sounded more dignified than her imagined man-child version of him.

“What kind of evidence?” Eve asked, her curiosity piqued.

“Electronic. I have flash drives with proof that Melcor has been blackmailing high ranking officials to push tax breaks and get whatever else they want out of them. I also have evidence that proves they have been laundering money and have committed far worse crimes than just blackmail.”

Eve sat back down in her seat across from Ethen. She did not trust the man as far as she could throw him, but she couldn’t deny her interest in what he had to say. If he truly had hard evidence, it would not be a terribly difficult story to break, but it would be a huge one by the sound of it.

“How did you procure these flash drives?” Eve asked, knowing that he could not have done so legally. She observed his strong jawline move as he swallowed, a “tell” that he was not comfortable with her question.

“It was given to me,” he said, swallowing once more. Eve had been an avid poker player for years, and she was talented at figuring out what “tells” people had when they were lying. It appeared as though Ethen’s was that he swallowed unnecessarily when he lied.

“I can pretend that’s true,” Eve replied. She did not really care about how he got the information. She always tried to begin her interviews with a question she knew they would lie about. It gave her the opportunity to figure out what gave their lie away. “I am Evelyn Bridgewater, but I go by Eve,” she said, extending her hand. Ethen took it and shook twice before releasing it. She knew that Ethen would have no idea that she was related to his best friend. She had gone by a pseudonym for so long her real last name had been lost to time. Eve had always thought that maybe her brother would have had a photo of her to remember her by, but Ethen’s lack of recognition made her think that this wasn’t the case.

“Ethen James, though you seem to have already figured that out,” he replied with a grin. His attractiveness was not lost on Eve and she actually felt her stomach flutter when he smiled at her. She would not, however, let that affect her work in any way, nor would she show that she was nervous.

“Why did you contact me?” Eve asked, beginning the interview without any more pleasantries. She opened her laptop and began typing her question, readying herself for the answer. Iris had also developed a program that scrambled her writing to make it unintelligible to anyone that did not have the cipher key to translate it. Eve was paranoid that someone might steal her work and this program made it nearly impossible.

“Melcor has always been a shady corporation and has been trying to merge with my company for a long time. I have refused for years, but with this last request they sent along blackmail they had concocted about me.” Ethen paused. “As soon as they tried to blackmail me, I knew I had to take action to bring them down once and for all. They threatened to expose the concocted blackmail if I did not agree to buy Melcor Corporation from them and at a great increase. I had some men working on the inside at Melcor.”

Eve glanced up from her laptop briefly. She was starting to think that maybe he was telling the truth after all. Ethen had admitted to committing corporate espionage on the record, so whatever it was that Melcor was up to had to be worse. “I told them to get the files we needed and to get out. As soon as they did, I went to you.”

“Why hasn’t Melcor released the information they have on you then?”

“Because as far as they are concerned I am in negotiations with my board to try and buy the company from them.” Eve nodded. It was a smart move to make them think that Ethen was going to do what they wanted. “That is why it has been so difficult to set up a meeting with you. I can’t let them know what is going on or they will tell the world what they have on me.”

“What do they have on you?” Eve asked, unsure if he would give her a straight answer.

“I can’t answer that and I won’t,” he responded. Eve sighed in disappointment, though she had expected as much. “It is not true, but I know they will make it appear so should they leak the story.” They have been trailing me for some time now. I had to cancel all those meetings because of it. That was also the reason for the different numbers,” Ethen continued. “I sent my driver on my normal route and took a car to drive out here so that they would not see where I was going.”

“Can I see the information you have on the flash drives?” Eve asked. The Melcor Corporation would certainly have the means to make something appear to have happened even if it did not. It was plausible that more than half the so-called blackmail they had on people was faked in some way.

“Of course. They are encrypted, though, so you will need a more powerful computer than that to open them,” Ethen said, pointing to Eve’s laptop. As he pointed towards her laptop, Eve caught his gaze lingering on her chest. She had to force herself not to cross her arms to cover up, her dress suddenly feeling too revealing. No matter how often she got attention from the opposite sex, she was never comfortable with it, always feeling like the gangly kid she was when she was younger. Normally this kind of attention went further than making her uncomfortable but actually angered her. She hated feeling like she was being reduced to her looks. Eve didn’t want to admit it, but she was almost flattered by the attention coming from someone like Ethen James.

She nodded clearing her mind and trying to remember what he had said. As soon as she gathered her thoughts, she immediately knew that she had the perfect contact to break into the drives. “I’ve got something I can use.”

Ethen went into more detail about what he had seen on the drives, but Eve would not believe anything he said until she saw it for herself. She also needed Iris to see if the information on the drives was even real. She knew very little about Ethen James, but she knew that he had the resources to concoct this entire story to bury Melcor. It was a dangerous world that Eve was entering. One where money was in such abundance it could literally buy anything, and that included false information. As the conversation dwindled down, Eve knew that the only way she could move forward with the story was to get into the flash drives. Eve was anxious for the conversation to end, desperate to see if any of the information Ethen had been giving her was even a shred true. Part of her was also anxious to get away from him, she was undeniably attracted to him and felt herself gravitating towards him more and more as time went on. She hated the feeling, this pull that she couldn’t control and even more she hated that he brought up so many memories of her brother that she had spent years forcing down.

“Can you get them open?” Eve asked impatiently. Iris had been working on the flash drives for hours. Instead of heading back to the office after her meeting, Eve had driven straight to Iris’s house. Iris often worked from home, claiming that her own system was more powerful than what the company she worked for could provide her with. Iris had been afraid that something terrible had happened when Eve arrived in the middle of the day. Iris constantly worried about Eve, though she didn’t always have to.

The two were attached at the hip and had been through a lot of trauma together, some of which involved Eve’s brother leaving her. They observed certain rules, and not showing up in the middle of the day unannounced was one of them. Iris panicked whenever she thought that the two might have to return to hiding once more. After Eve apologized to her and explained what was actually going on, Iris was annoyed but offered to help anyway.

Eve struggled to not be jealous of Iris at times. She wasn’t more beautiful than Eve, but far more approachable and kind. When they went out together, people gravitated towards Iris’ spirit. Eve was convinced that if you put Iris in a room with even the Victoria’s Secret Angels, anyone in their right mind would go right to Iris. She was so much more magnetic than any other person Eve had ever met.

Pale as can be, with long, almost white-blond hair and hypnotizing blue eyes, she was made all the more attractive by her athletic body and the smattering of freckles across her nose. Though Iris was gorgeous, it was her personality and warmth that attracted people to her. The more you got to know Iris, the more you fell in love with her. Eve always felt that the opposite was true for her.

“It will be soon if you quit interrupting me,” Iris replied with her jaw clenched. Eve could not keep herself from asking Iris periodically if she would be able to open the flash drives and see if the information was real.

“Sorry, sorry,” Eve said putting her hands up in innocence. “I’ll go into the other room.”

Iris nodded thankfully. Eve pulled her phone out in a panic, realizing that she had forgotten to update Mr. Hartley on her whereabouts. She dialed the number quickly.

“Hi, Mr. Hartley, I am so sorry I forgot to call. I am safe and sound. I have a lead, will be back in the office tomorrow.” He did not answer so Eve just left a message and also sent a text message saying much the same thing. He would not be happy with her, but when she returned to the office, hopefully, she could show him something concrete and he would be satisfied.

“Eve! Get in here!” Iris shouted from the other room. Eve was about to ask her again if she had gotten into the drives, but her question was answered as soon as she entered the room. Iris’ computer monitors were covered in news articles, images, and financial documents. The images were of various high-powered politicians, CEOs of large companies and people that Eve did not recognize as important. The photos were surveillance, as though Melcor had been watching these people and keeping tabs on them. The news articles appeared to be random, but Eve was sure they had a pattern. A few videos had also popped onto one of the monitors, all incriminating in some way. The financial documents would need further analyzing, but at first glance did, in fact, appear to reflect tax evasion and money laundering.

“Holy shit,” Iris said with a low whistle. Eve made a noise in her throat in agreement.

“Can you prove that this came from the Melcor servers?” Eve asked. She hoped that they were real, but the story she could break if the flash drives were doctored was just as big. Iris nodded and began to type lightning fast. Eve settled in, knowing that it would not be a quick process to discover if the documents were real and could be traced to Melcor or not.

Eve dozed off on the couch while Iris worked hard analyzing the flash drives and the documents they contained. Eve never slept as well as she did when she knew Iris was around. It was an old habit that she knew she would be unable to break; they used to sleep in shifts when they were younger. One would be awake on watch while the other slept. It was because of this that Eve felt so secure in her rest.

“Wake up,” Iris whispered, poking Eve gently. Eve drowsily opened her eyes. The apartment was dark: apparently, Eve had slept for far longer than she’d intended. “Are you awake?” Iris asked, even though Eve had already sat up on the couch.

“I am awake,” Eve replied with a yawn. She stretched her arms and as she did so, her back cracked.

“I can confirm that these documents originated on the Melcor servers and that they are not doctored to look as though they came from there.” Eve could hardly believe Iris, although she knew she must be telling the truth. Eve hadn’t told Iris who her source was, for more than one reason. She tried to maintain her sources anonymity where she could, but she also knew that Iris would definitely have something to say to her about Ethen James. Iris was as close to Eve’s brother as she had been and just as devastated as she was when he left.

Both versions of the story seemed almost impossible to her. In one story, one of the biggest corporations in the United States was guilty of money laundering and tax fraud, and they had government officials and other businesses under their thumb due to falsified blackmail that appeared so legitimate no one would question its validity.

The other version was that Ethen James was smart enough to make it look like his biggest competition was guilty of all of this and more, all the while looking like a victim of the Melcor Corporation. For some reason, Eve found herself relieved that the latter was not the truth.