I had a hard time shaking my unease as I cleaned up after breakfast, shuffled the cars, locked up the house because I thought she would be more comfortable with that, then headed in to work in the backseat of a fucking hippie van.
“You’re even later than usual,” Jules murmured, back to me, as I came in the front door.
“I was here late. Trying to catch up on paperwork.”
To that, she turned, lips curving up. “How’d that go?”
“I’m sure you saw my office.”
“It doesn’t look like you made any progress.”
“Even after working on it for sixteen hours.”
“I’ll keep the coffee stocked,” she said by way of comfort.
“What’s all the noise?”
“What else? Nia and Quin butting heads.”
“I’ll go see if I can play the intermediary.”
“That’s what you’re paid the big bucks for.”
We were an office full of strong personalities with varying belief systems. We all went at it at times. It was part of working with people on the same cases. As a whole, though, most of us backed down from going toe-to-toe with Quin. Seeing as he was the check-signer and all. And his word was the final one.
That said, Nia was not the sort to easily take orders, to follow directions, to do something one way when she whole-heartedly believed it would be better done another way.
Hence the head-butting with Quin who liked to run a tight ship, who wanted things done his way.
She got away with it more often than he cared to admit. Because, much like each of us, there was simply no one in the business who could do our jobs quite as well as we could. Nia included.
Hackers were a dime a dozen. You brushed shoulders with them on the daily without even realizing it.
But their skills could vary vastly.
Some could only get into someone’s social media accounts, maybe screw with someone’s bank accounts or something.
Others, like Nia, there simply weren’t any limits. You needed to find something, she found it. Case fucking closed.
She was good.
So she got away with the raised voice I could hear as I made my way down the hall into Nia’s office that she shared with Miller, pushing the door open without knocking since, with their raised voices, they likely wouldn’t hear me anyway.
“I don’t have a problem with the results, Nia. I have a problem with the fucking way you got them,” Quin’s voice–rarely raised– nearly shouted at the woman who was behind her very neat desk, hands curled into fists, jaw tight.
“The only way to get the fucking results was to go about obtaining them exactly how I fucking did!”
“Piss off another client, babe?” I asked, watching as she slit her eyes at me as I held up my hands, palms out.
“That’s an understatement. He’s threatening to drop us. Half a million is on the line, and she refuses to apologize.”
“Because I’m not sorry. You wanted a job done. I got the job done. Case closed.”
Quin shot me a look, patience clearly running thin.
“We all have to bullshit the clients sometimes, babe,” I reminded her.
“I don’t have anything to do with the clients. I am a strictly behind-the-scenes part of this team.”
That was true enough. It was something she’d made clear when she had joined us. She wanted to be anonymous. I guess that was the point of learning a skill that kept you behind a computer screen.
“Did you tell the client that Nia was the hacker?” I asked, looking over at Quin.
“Not by name.”
“Did you say it was a woman?”
“Yeah.”
“Have Miller do the ass-kissing. She’s good at putting a fake face on when she needs to. And it only seems fair that she would get a cut of Nia’s check since she has to take the ass-chewing.”
Nia shot me a hard look, but kept her mouth shut.
Quin’s smile spread slow as he walked past me, clamping a hand on my shoulder. “And that’s why you’re the Middle Man,” he told me on his way out of the office.
“It’s bullshit that he gets on my case for doing my job.”
“And I’m sure he thinks it is bullshit that you won’t take the heat like all the rest of us have to do at times,” I reminded her, watching as she sighed out her breath.
“I’m not good at holding onto my temper,” Nia admitted.
“It’s a family trait,” another voice joined, making me turn to find Nia’s little sister, Bex, make her way in, dropping down in the chair between both Nia and Miller’s desks.
“There’s blood on your shirt,” Nia commented, not sounding surprised or overly concerned over its existence. “What guy’s face did you bash in this time?”
“This time I was actually just helping some kid with a bloody nose.”
It was no secret around Navesink Bank that Bex and her friend group were known for sort of being protectors of local women who found themselves street harassed or trying to escape bad Tinder dates or too drunk to make their own decisions.