Lauren (Silicon Valley Billionaires 1)

I swallowed hard, keeping the litany of curses I had in store for her down as if they were bile.

“It must have been hard for you to decide to walk away from your greatest ambition. It will be an irrevocable loss for you. But you’re doing the right thing, Lauren. Protecting the people you love. The technology will be there when you get back. But mine will be to market first. It’s a small price to pay for peace of mind, I’m sure.” She smiled at me without warmth. “I’ll leave you to it, then. But be quick. What little patience I have was used up by Clive Warren’s impotence. I’ve got a patch to launch.”

I just stared at the screen as she logged off. I do too, bitch.

But I kept that thought to myself and dutifully got back to work.

Two more days passed without incident. I noticed that both I and my clothes smelled, quite badly, but there was little I could do about it. I kept moving forward with the steps, silently praying that things were on target at Paragon.

And then, on the morning of the fifth day, the door to the office slammed open.

“What the fuck is this?” the guard roared. I jumped, knocking over my water. I still didn’t know his name, but I’d mentally started referring to him as Ken. He had striking similarities to Barbie’s counterpart with his bleached teeth and strategically mussed hair.

“What the fuck is what?” I yelled back, trying to clean up the water before it soaked my papers. I was right in the middle of a complicated theorem, and if my work got blurred, I’d have to start all over.

I looked briefly up at the guard. Ken’s face looked almost as white as his teeth, and he was breathing hard. He held up a tablet that showed a news site. Then he pulled out a gun and aimed it at my face. “It’s all over the news. Paragon just launched its patch.”

I smiled at him, abandoning my clean-up mission and letting the water seep into the papers. “You don’t say.”

That was when Timmy jumped him. He wrapped his powerful arms around the guard’s neck and immediately twisted it, hard.

I winced, covering my face as Timmy killed him. But I already knew I would hear the sound of Ken’s neck being broken, again and again, in my nightmares.

I watched through my fingers as Timmy laid the body down and held out his hand for me. “Ms. Taylor. Let’s go. Now.”

I saw the guard’s body on the ground, his head at an awkward angle in death. “Oh God,” I said. The world went fuzzy around me. I kneeled down and was noisily sick on the carpet.

“It’s okay, Ms. Taylor. Just close your eyes. I’m going to guide you, but we’ll have to stop at least a couple of times. There’s more of them.” He grabbed the gun from the dead guard’s hand, and I scrunched my eyes shut. I didn’t object when Timmy pulled me against his chest and hustled me down the staircase.

We could hear the footsteps of the other guards in the stairwell. Otherwise, it was eerily quiet as we made our way down the stairs. Timmy crushed me against him, as the guards made their way up.

And then they were close enough that Timmy took his first shot. There was no screaming. There was no begging. There were just the bullets as they ricocheted through the concrete stairwell. Timmy protected me, pushing me behind his big body as he took his mark. I shuddered as he fired, again and again, and I held my breath as I listened to the other men fall.

Relief flooded me as I realized Timmy was still standing, but my heart was still pounding in my chest. I thought about Ken on the floor upstairs, the dead guards that we stepped over, whose bodies I looked at in spite of myself. And I thought about Clive, dead and bleeding on his cell floor.

Timmy hustled me down another set of stairs.

“Wait, stop,” I begged. I kneeled down and got sick again. The sounds of my retching echoed in the stairwell. I was the loud one, the weak one. And I’d also been the one to cause all this trouble.

No. It was her. It was her, and I was going to make her pay.

Timmy carefully picked me up. “Ms. Taylor, we have to go. I need to get you home.”

But then there were more shots, and screams coming from down below. “Put your weapons down! And your hands up! FBI!”

Timmy put his big body in front of me again, shielding me as several sets of footsteps pounded up the stairs.

“I said, put your weapons down!” the agent shouted, aiming at Timmy.

I peeked over Timmy’s shoulder and recognized the man who’d sprinted up the stairs and now stood before us, gun blazing.

“Agent Marks,” I screamed, “stop!”

He shook his head as he recognized me, and lowered his weapon as several of his counterparts lined up behind him. “Ms. Taylor,” he said, breathing hard, “you are turning out to be more of a pain in the ass than I originally imagined.”

Chapter 29

“I had…my guard…I told him to do it. He did it to save my life…” The words came out in between deep, ragged breaths as I sat in the back of Agent Mark’s car, recounting the scene at Warren Technologies.