Of course, now I have to attend the meeting.
With this suitcase.
Shoot me now.
“Affirmative,” I reply belatedly and fight another urge to salute. “See you soon.”
Gracelessly, I spin around and head for the door, eager to escape the lair and its vampiric occupant.
His voice stops me as I’m reaching for the door handle. “By the way, Ms. Pack…” he says to my back, and for the first time, I detect a hint of emotion in his tone. “You should know something. I don’t impale my employees.”
Chapter Three
Suitcase in hand, I shoot out of the Impaler’s office to the bathroom as if the hounds of hell were on my heels. A single thought spins through my mind like a broken vinyl record.
He heard us at Starbucks.
At least the part about him impaling female employees.
What else did he hear?
How screwed am I?
“What the bejesus is that?” asks an attractive black-haired woman as I come out of my stall.
I dart an awkward glance at the suitcase I left by one of the sinks. “My niece’s school bag.”
I don’t have a niece, but if I did, and this were her school bag, she’d need serious therapy.
The stranger looks at me like I’m some exotic cricket in a terrarium. “I’m Britney Archibald.”
This day is getting worse and worse. Though I’ve never seen her in person or on video, we know each other—at least over instant messenger and email.
She’s one of the five women working in the development department, and I recently tested some code she wrote.
Unfortunately, unlike the rest of her department, she’s not a very good programmer—or at least, she’s a careless one—because I found a plethora of bugs in her app, much more than usual. She turned out to have a paper-thin skin when it came to my findings, and her correspondence with me took an adversarial turn. I’ve tried to patch things up, especially since I’m angling to be in her department, but she’s rebuffed my attempts to jump on a video call and clear the air.
The only reason I haven’t escalated this to our managers is that I’m not a snitch. Plus, rumor has it that Britney is a much better hacker than she is a developer. Apparently, after she broke up with one guy in the sales department, she hacked into his social media accounts and made his profile images a photo of him during some sort of pony play.
Just my luck to bump into her, of all people, with the genitalia-decorated atrocity in my possession.
I call forth all of my professionalism and extend my hand. “I’m Fanny Pack.”
She glares at my palm in disgust.
Oh, shit. I haven’t washed my hands yet—and I doubt she’ll accept “urine is sterile” as an excuse.
I also see her eyes narrow as she recalls why my name is familiar.
“Good to put a face to a name,” I blurt, and grabbing the suitcase, I sprint for the door. Over my shoulder, I add, “See you at the monthly meeting.”
I think she replies with something catty, but I don’t catch what it is.
I rush to the pantry and wash my hands in the sink there. Then I down a glass of water and sneak into the large conference room where the monthly meeting is going to take place.
Great.
I’m the first one here.
I take the chair in the farthest corner and stash the suitcase under the table.
There. No one should see it now, and the comfort of my knees is a small price to pay.
As I wait for the rest of the employees to file in, I get Precious off the company’s Wi-Fi and search the internet for information about the Impaler.
It’s eerie how little I find.
He’s obscenely rich—but I already knew that. He owns a successful software company—I work there, so duh.
There are no pictures of him online. Not on the Binary Birch website, nor in the newspapers, nor anywhere else I look. If I hadn’t snapped his pic with my app, I would’ve been sure he’s the type of vampire that doesn’t reflect in mirrors or appear in photos.
He also doesn’t have a social media profile of any kind, not even a professional one, like LinkedIn. My Starbucks idea to backward search him via that photo would’ve failed.
Of course, I don’t need to do that now. I know who he is, and any sort of romance is out of the question. He’s my boss’s boss—or boss squared—not to mention a notorious workaholic who doesn’t have time for anything else in his life.
Besides, I’m sure he wouldn’t be interested in someone who works for him—as that would involve impaling that someone, and he said he doesn’t do that to employees. And even if impaling were on the table, I’m sure he wouldn’t want to do it to me.
I shouldn’t even be thinking in this direction, not at such a pivotal moment in my career.
And yet, I create a Google alert for his name. This way, if something about him does show up online, I’ll be the first to know.
A door slams, making my head jerk up.
As I stash Precious in my pocket, I realize the room is now packed—and the man I was just cyberstalking is standing at the head of the table, his rich blue eyes gleaming intensely behind his glasses.
I gulp.
Usually, one of the project managers chairs this meeting, but right now, their whole team is cowering in the corner.
At least the men. The women in this room appear to be spontaneously ovulating.
Britney is practically choking on her drool, and even Sandra—who must be at least thirty years his senior—is nearly as red as I am.
“For the last few months, I’ve been working on Project Belka,” the Impaler says without so much as a “howdy y’all.” “It’s now in the testing stage.” He glances at me for a heartbeat, and Britney’s eyes turn my way, then narrow into slits.
I sink lower in my seat and do my best tortoise impersonation. For the love of C++, please don’t tell them about the suitcase full of sex toys. Pretty please, with a gallon of the juiciest blood on top.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he moves his gaze to where the accountants are sitting. “If the QA team files any expense reports tagged Belka, the paperwork is to be expedited. If you have any questions about the whys of the reports, direct those to me.”
The expressions on the faces of the accounting team imply there will be no questions. Ever.
This is actually great. I really wanted to expense the exuberant shipping costs I’m about to accrue, but without his executive order, I wouldn’t have bothered. The accounting team gave me a runaround when I ordered myself an ergonomic keyboard, and that’s as work-related as any expense can get.
But how did he know? Is he a precognitive vampire, a la Alice in Twilight?
“This goes for everything else.” His gaze sweeps the room, lingering on me for a second. “Project Belka is a priority.”
Wow.
No pressure or anything.
Did Sandra just sneak a guilty glance at me? She was the one who assigned me to this project, but then again, given how important this thing is turning out to be, she’d kind of paid me the compliment of “let’s throw the most likely to survive under that bus.”
Britney raises her hand with the excitement of a grade-schooler who knows the answer to something for the first time in her life.