He wanted to keep looking at her.
He wondered how fast she was.
He wondered if he was faster.
Ramona raised her eyebrows slightly.
He had to say something or do something. He couldn’t just stand there, gawking like an idiot.
Matias took the closest chair and waved his hand. The ten guards positioned along the wall lowered their weapons and walked out. Solei lingered. Ramona looked at the CSO with her disturbing eyes and then looked back at Matias. He felt a sudden urge to do something dramatic and impressive.
He needed to get ahold of himself. She was in his territory, in the building he owned. He already had her undivided attention.
Matias dismissed Solei with a nod. The CSO withdrew, giving Ramona one last warning look. The door shut behind him.
Matias fixed her with his stare. “To what do I owe the horror?”
“I came to ask two questions.”
Her voice suited her, a rich, smooth contralto.
“Very well. I’m all ears.”
“Do you know where your wife is?”
His brain skipped a beat, then kicked into high gear. It wasn’t a threat. If the Adlers had kidnapped Cassida, the ransom demand would have been delivered via a message. There was no reason for Ramona to put herself in danger.
He accessed his implant. A translucent interface overlaid the vision in his left eye. He selected Cassida’s name from the contact list and waited.
A second passed.
Another.
A third.
She should have answered. Her implant would have recognized his call and linked with his even if she was unconscious. Either her implant was removed, which meant Cassida was dead, or she had deliberately blocked his calls.
“No answer?” Ramona asked. Her tone was perfectly neutral, but somehow, he felt mocked.
“Fine. I’ll play. Where is my wife?”
“I wish I knew.” She slowly reached into her jacket, withdrew a small tablet, and placed it on the table. “But I think he does.”
On the screen, Cassida ran across a small, paved lot, her bright golden dress flaring around her, her auburn hair flying, as she sped toward a blond man waiting by a late-model aerial. He opened his arms, and Cassida jumped onto him, wrapping her legs around his hips.
A wave of ice splashed Matias and evaporated into intense, furious heat. His left hand clenched into a fist under the table. His wife was cheating on him.
Their marriage wasn’t perfect. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t loving or passionate, but it was perfectly amiable. He had remained faithful to her since their wedding almost three years ago. It never crossed his mind that she wouldn’t do the same.
Ramona was looking at the screen with an odd expression. Not pain, but rather resignation. “The unbridled joy seems unfair.”
“What is the point of showing me this?”
“That’s the wrong question. The right question is, Who is the man she’s climbing?”
She zoomed the recording with a flick of her fingers, and he saw the man’s face—golden tan, square jaw, glowing with health and that particular polish that came with wealth and too much grooming. Recognition punched him.
“Your wife is having an affair with my husband,” Ramona said.
For a moment they shared a silence as he came to grips with Cassida licking the inside of Gabriel Adler’s mouth.
Ramona spoke first. “That brings me to my second question. Have you experienced any security or data breaches in the last few weeks? Go ahead. Check. I will wait.”
Matias surged off the chair and out the door. In the hallway, the guards saw his face and flattened themselves against the walls.
“She does not leave,” he growled. “Solei, with me.”
Thirty minutes later Matias marched back into the conference room, and this time he didn’t bother to sit down.
Ramona offered him a bitter smile. “She took everything?”
He didn’t answer. The humiliation was too deep, and his rage burned too hot.
For the last two weeks Cassida had used his credentials to log into their files from his home office. He had no idea how she’d obtained his password, but with the proposal deadline approaching, he had worked from home with increasing frequency, logging in after hours. Her activity hadn’t raised any alarms. She’d copied the entirety of their seco research.
“Gabriel has done the same,” Ramona said.
They were sharing a rapidly sinking boat.
Until three years ago the technology of the seco had been lost. The seco weapon was a marvel of bioengineering. In its initial form, it was a hair-thin glowing strand visible only under strong magnification. When examined through nanoscale imaging, the strand turned into an ethereal narrow ribbon knitted from a million nanobots. It floated in the buffer solution, undulating and shifting, waiting for its host. When the time came, it and its twin would be implanted into the forearms of a newborn from a secare bloodline.
If the baby didn’t inherit the secare ability, the ribbon would harmlessly dissolve within a year.
If the baby was born secare, the glittering constellation of nanobots would anchor itself and grow for another twenty-five months, forming a subcutaneous channel along the front of the arm until eventually the skin would split, allowing a microscopically narrow ridge to rise to the surface. It was invisible to the naked eye and too small to be felt by touch, but he knew exactly where it was. If he held his arms straight out, palms down, he could almost see the ridges running from his elbows to his wrists. When he wanted a blade, the seco burst forward over his wrist. When he wanted a shield, it fanned out from the entirety of his forearm, projecting into a shape he required.