Hey, Daddy?”

I close my eyes momentarily. My nerves are frayed, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to hold back my irritation for all interruptions, but it’s not Maddie’s fault. I have to deal with this without involving her. I exhale. “Yes, honey?”

“How come I couldn’t stay home with Gwen tonight?”

“She had other plans,” I murmur, looking over the stack of notes I’ve spent the last several hours going through, to no avail, I might add. But there’s got to be something here. There’s just got to be. “She told us when she took the job, remember? That she had something to do tonight and couldn’t spend the evening with you, but she’s usually free whenever we need her.”

“But she’s free tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Tomorrow is the demonstration for the prototype, right Daddy?”

“That’s right.” Every time I think about tomorrow, my chest tightens. The thought of my little girl being without a parent is the only thing keeping me from letting the stress take over completely. I’ll end up giving myself a stroke if I’m not careful. Where would that leave her?

She’s sitting on a chair by the window, looking out, kicking her feet back and forth. Patient, for the most part.

I remind myself that she’s much more patient than I would have been in her situation. At her age, I was fucking bouncing off the walls. “I’m sorry to make you hang around the office with me,” I say, chastised in the face of her sweet complacency.

“It’s okay.” She smiles at her reflection in the window.

“It’s just tonight. Tomorrow, you’ll be with Gwen for most of the day, and then…” And then, I don’t know what will happen. If we go bust, I’ll have a lot more time to spend with her. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Not for her, anyway. Not in the immediate future. Long term, well, that’s another story. “We’ll be doing lots of things together.”

“Until it’s time for me to go back to school again and make new friends,” she says, in a happy voice.

“That’s right, honey.” I look away from her back and carry on pouring over Sam’s notes like the rest of like my life depends on it. Because it does. Mine, the company’s, my daughter’s. At the back of my mind is the fear that I never knew Sam, so I can’t trust my own judgement of her. What if she sabotaged the work in some small way? That is what I would have done if I were in her shoes.

“Is Sam working downstairs?”

An inexplicable hollow sense of sadness and loss fills my heart. I take a deep breath. If only my daughter knew what she’s doing to me by asking such innocent questions. “No, baby. She’s not.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

“Can we go and look?” she insists.

My head whirls around in the direction of my daughter. “Maddie, enough.”

I hate the look of surprise and guilt in her eyes when I glare at her, and instantly my anger dissipates. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be short with you. But you know how busy I am tonight. You’ll just have to take my word for it. Sam is not working downstairs.” Anymore. Not that her physical absence has done anything to remove her from my mind. She might as well be standing in front of me, right here and now. That’s how strongly I feel her presence.

She blinks hard. “Sorry, Daddy. I just wanted to say hello.”

“I’m sure she would like to see you too,” I say, swallowing back my disgust at myself. Why did I let my daughter meet her? No woman will ever get that opportunity again, until she has proven her worth. When I think of how Sam cozied up to my daughter, all in effort to get closer to me, it makes me rage all over again.

Then, I remember how gentle she was when she washed Maddie’s face and feet after we got back from the fair. How she held her hand throughout the day, how the two of them giggled over the clowns and the street artists. There was a naturalness to their interactions. Nothing forced, nothing over-the-top. Nothing done for my benefit.

All right, so she’s not a complete monster. The kid is charming and sweet, anybody with even a portion of a heart would fall for a kid like her. And that’s true. I believe it. Sam didn’t use Maddie to get to me.

Even so, that doesn’t erase the fact that she’s a thief. I lost millions because she stole our design and gave it to Weissman. And the fact that she is downright dangerous. She tried to blame the leak on Ryland. As if Ryland would ever do something like that to me. I’m sure she saw the opportunity to create even more chaos by splitting us up and pounced on it. It’s a Weissman move all the way.

Ryland seemed to be even more enraged than I was when I came clean about her. He stood so abruptly, his chair slammed against the wall behind him. “That bitch!” he’d shouted, face red as a lobster. “Who the hell does she think she is? And that bastard, Weissman. I could kill him for this.”

I almost forgot my own pain watching him go off like that. He then went on to trash talk Sam for at least another thirty minutes, ranting and raving about how she wasn’t even that strong as an engineer. That bothered me then and it bothers me now, though I kept my mouth shut. I’ve always been the type to go overboard, to get a little too intense, but him? He’s always so laid back he’s in danger of bedsores. All the time I’ve known him, he’s always been the one to pull me back, level me out, and when necessary, remind me I was acting like a jackass.

So what’s with the sudden change of heart? Why so vicious about Sam?

He can’t possible feel as betrayed as I do. Maybe because he put his ass on the line for her, fought for me to hire her, to keep her on even when she pissed me off. He’s done nothing but praise her since the moment she walked through the doors. Why else would he turn on her so quickly? That’s got to be it.

Unless…

I shake my head, running my hands through my hair and scrubbing them over my scalp in a confused daze.

No. There’s no way.

He’s my buddy.

I’ve known him since school days. He wouldn’t betray me like that. Why would he? What reason could there be? We’ve never been anything but best friends from the day we met. There’s never even been a hint of rivalry between us. I’ve treated him practically as a partner in the company, with a salary to match. When we were first starting up and money was tight, I took the pay cut and let him take home the bigger salary. His eleven percent of company shares mean he stands to make millions from this technology. There is no reason on earth for him to want this company to fail. It’s his hard work too.

Even so…

Something niggles at the back of my brain. Why didn’t he at least try to defend her even a little? It’s not as though I had literal proof that she was the one and only mole in the company. He never once tried to get me to stand back and take another look, when he almost never misses an opportunity to suggest just that. No, instead, he derided her work. He all but erased the progress she made. And it was her progress, entirely. Her notes tell me so. She’s not a stupid girl, she’s not a poor engineer, but he was suspiciously quick to categorize her as such.

Why?

I drop my head in my hands. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She’s still in my head. Making me doubt Ryland, screwing with my sense of loyalty and justice.

“Daddy?”

I lift my head and look at Maddie. “Hmm?”

“Are you all right?” she asks worriedly.

“Yes, I’m just tired.

“I’m pretty tired. Can we go home now?”

At least, she trusts me enough now to admit when she’s tired, instead of crawling into a corner and falling asleep on her own. She knows it’s no crime to be sleepy, that I won’t be angry with her.

I nod, suddenly very tired myself. “Okay, honey. We’ll get going in just a minute. Let me check my email once more, and we’ll head out.”

She nods, and I turn my attention back to the computer.

One particular name in the list of senders stands out, and I have to grit my teeth against the gasp of surprise. She has balls…I’ll give her that. I’m surprised she contacted me tonight, but I can’t pretend I’m not eager to see what she has to say. I open Sam’s email and begin to read.

I’m sure you don’t want to hear from me—tonight of all nights. You must be working hard to get everything in place for tomorrow. I thought I would be there with you. It was my baby too.

But it’s okay. I understand your reaction, now that I’ve had time to think it over.

First and foremost, I should’ve been honest with you from the beginning. I should’ve told you Vince Weissman is my father.

“What?” I blurt out, reading the line again, my jaw hanging open.

“Huh?” Maddie asks.

“Nothing, darling.”

My father and I have never had a relationship, and he’s certainly never showed an interest in my work. I never thought he would have any sort of effect on my life, so I figured it wasn’t worth mentioning. Besides, would you have hired me if you knew who he was? I doubt it. I took my mother’s maiden name when I turned sixteen, determined to strike out on my own without the family name hanging over my head. I didn’t want any preferential treatment. You understand. Of all people, I feel like you would.

And I do. If what she’s saying is true, I now understand why she seemed to relate to my daughter’s pitiful childhood up to this point. I can’t imagine having a father like him, the slime.

When he asked me to lunch that day, I was sure there had to be some ulterior motive behind it. We’re not the daddy buying lunch for his darling daughter types. Sure enough, when he kept peppering me with questions about Excalibur—specifically how it was coming along, whether we were ready for the demo—I knew something was up. I’d heard rumors of him stealing the plans for the other drone, and I carried those rumors in my heart up until that lunch date. When I confronted him, he claimed you were the one who stole the plans from him.

“That bastard,” I mutter, then glance at my daughter.

She shakes her head, waving a finger back and forth in admonishment. “That’s a bad word, Daddy.”

“Sorry,” I whisper and go back to the email.

I know his version of the story can’t possibly be true, or else how is it possible that both companies are having the same problems with cooling? It was a bit too much of a coincidence for me. His engineers, if they really were working on the technology for months prior to your development of the drone, would have worked out such bugs before now. But I knew they hadn’t, because he kept alluding to the problem, and trying in a roundabout way to see whether I’d come up with a solution.

I knew then that only two people could’ve leaked the plans to him. It couldn’t be you, since that would mean sabotaging your own company. It had to be Ryland. He’s the only one working as close to the project as I am, and he would have easy access to all my files.

You don’t want to believe me. I get that. I do. I didn’t want to believe it at first, either. After all, he’s been my mentor. He insisted I work for your company. I know now that his advocacy was calculated. Not so great for my ego, to put it mildly, but I’ll get over it.

There’s one way for you to be sure that I’m telling the truth, however, and it also happens to be the way we can put an end to this madness. I only hope it works out the way I planned it.

I gave Ryland the wrong information on the changes we made to the body of the drone, specifically, the alterations to the fan vent. If he did indeed, give that information to my father, their version of the drone should still overheat.

Rest assured, the correct calculations are still in the files containing my notes and the plans. I can’t imagine Ryland changing them to reflect what I told him, since that would mean having the correct information on record. He would want the wrong measurements to be used, so your drone would crash and Arcane’s would fly.

I have to think this through. Is she truly onto something? What she’s saying makes sense, in that Ryland would want Arcane to have the correct numbers while leaving us with something which could sink the entire project.

Adrenaline races through my veins. I want her to be right. God, how I want her to be right, but being right would mean that Ryland is a traitor. All these years, I kept a viper close to my heart. If she is right, it means we would win out over Arcane. And it would mean that Sam was telling the truth all along.

I’m sorry for the way this worked out, Lincoln. I wish you nothing but luck tomorrow. Goodbye.

I close the email and flop backwards into my chair. Hope bubbles up like an underground spring. If she’s telling the truth and there is no reason for her to write this email tonight, then there’s still a chance for success. For tomorrow to be a success, tonight is crucial. I need evidence and I’m going to find it.

I shoot Maddie an apologetic look. “Sorry, kiddo. It’s going to be a slightly longer night than I’d anticipated. Tell you what, I’ll dig your Princess bed out and build it up for you. Then we can curl up together, and I’ll read you a bedtime story before you go to sleep?”

“My Princess bed?”

I grin at her. “Yup.”

“Yay, Daddy.”