The Damaged (The Insiders Trilogy 2)

She jumped, half screeching. She hadn’t known I was there. She’d been so focused on Kash. Whirling, a hand to her chest, she fell back a few steps. “Oh my God! What are you doing—” She saw my face, and got right. “No! I would never do that. Out you in a stupid email, yes. But not Calhoun Bastian. Jesus. How stupid do you think I am?”

“Are we talking on a scale from one to ten?”

Kash snorted.

I took a step forward. “Why the email? The university isn’t going to kick me out. They know who I am.”

Her eyes rolled to the ceiling and stayed there. She muttered, almost speaking to herself. “Because your dad is seriously powerful, and rich. And your boyfriend is even wealthier. And he’s got a huge, scary enemy. I wanted others to know you were there. I wanted them to either hate you or stalk you or try to use you. I didn’t care. I just want to make it such a hassle to have you be a student at Hawking University that they have to ask you to leave the premises.”

I waited, because there must’ve been a better reason.

She stopped talking. A calm settled over her, and I was guessing that was the reason.

“You’re an idiot.” I shook my head. “They’ll lock down the building. I’ll come in the back, stay in the building, and leave another way. More security guards will be there for me. That’s it. That’s all they’ll do. They’re getting a seventy-million-dollar donation from my father. You think they’re going to kick me out?”

She was, and she was seeing it. Her mouth slackened. “Oh.”

“Right.” Kash had had enough of this conversation. He tapped his phone. “Escort Miss Mansour from the premises and give her a list of buildings within the city she’s banned from.”

She gulped. “What?”

“It’s within our right to ban you from any premises and locations where we feel you are a threat, and unfortunately, that’s your apartment building. You have the weekend to vacate your place. You’re no longer in our employment, and I’m half considering encouraging Hawking University to expel you. Five of your graduate scholarships and two of your loans have been pulled. If you remain a student at Hawking, you’ll need to find other funding.”

She really hadn’t thought anything through.

She whispered, “Fuck.”

Kash didn’t care one bit. The door opened. Erik was there. He took her arm, and Kash said, “Walk her to her locker. Give her a box for her belongings. Once her locker is cleared, walk her to the street. Call her a car.”

Erik guided her out of Kash’s office.

The door closed, and I could only gape at Kash. Even I hadn’t thought about all of that. “Her apartment? Her scholarships? Shit, Kash.”

He spared me a look, but he wasn’t messing around. He tapped some buttons on his computer, picked up his phone, told them he needed an hour. Putting the phone back in the cradle, he walked around and took my hand. He was leading me to the back of the office. “The apartment was necessary. She knows now who owns her building. She could stage an accident, try to sue us, and most companies settle. I’m sure she’d get some money out of us. As for the scholarships, I was pissed off. Still am.”

He opened a door in the back and flipped the lights on.

Kash led me into a bathroom. He moved to the sink, turning the water on before coming back to me.

“Her life is not over.” His arms slid under my armpits and he lifted me up, sitting me on the counter. He moved between my legs again, his forehead coming back to mine as his hand slid down my chest, settling between my breasts and staying there. “But she has the means and capability to come back and hurt you. She can’t do what you can do, but she still has IT skills. The first blow I strike against her has to sting or I risk having her coming back and doing worse to you. I cannot risk that, not after what she’s already done.”

He stopped, staring at me, the wall gone, and I was seeing his heat, all of his heat. He whispered, bending to kiss the side of my mouth, “I have bigger and badder battles coming. The long-term war is my grandfather. I can’t get pulled away dealing with someone being petty and trying to hurt you because of whose sperm helped birth you.”

When he put it like that, okey dokey.

NINETEEN

Kash

“It’s nice to hear you’re alive after all.”

It was the twelfth call I’d taken over the past three weeks from business partners who had found out that Evelyn Colello’s son was alive after all. Business partners who had worked with my mother, half of whom had never sold her share, and it was mine to claim if I wanted in. The other six had been bought out, and a team of lawyers was accounting for the loss of those shares right now.